Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [32]
The age’s interpretation and interpenetration of history and poetry and music and myth and philosophy evidenced an unprecedented self-consciousness. The Romantic era was the first to name itself. Obsessed by the past, the age obsessively attempted to define its own zeitgeist. “Romanticism,” wrote Jean Paul, “is beauty without bounds—the beautiful infinite.”7 Walter Pater wrote that the essence of Romanticism is “the addition of strangeness to beauty.” Every artist painted himself into history, amid the intimidating company of pedestaled Geniuses. Brahms became an archetype of this pattern, in thrall to the past and what he called “the tramp of giants” behind him.
The literary-based creed of Liszt and Wagner was in part a revolt against earlier Romanticism, which upheld the primacy of instrumental music over vocal. (That would remain Brahms’s Romanticism, despite all his vocal music.) In that aesthetic, music without words was called superior because it has no defined subject but is rather absolute form, expressive in the abstract, pure suggestion. Possessed by history, nineteenth-century theorists codified and deified the “abstract” instrumental forms perfected by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—above all the principal named “sonata form.”
If Classical-era grammar and syntax brought nonreferential instrumental music, and its abstract formal devices such as sonata form, to a point of superiority over vocal music and word-setting, it was exactly that achievement that Liszt and Wagner were accused of betraying: music, having divested itself of subservience to the word, was once again to be harnessed to words even when the orchestra played alone. Wagner rejoined: Music, in whatever partnership, will always be the superior art. In the 1840s, when Brahms was receiving his education in Romanticism, a historic battle loomed around these questions.
Inevitably in an age when artists exulted in the unattainable and irrational, there was inherent in Romanticism a neurotic frustration and a taste for the bizarre. In his fatal passion for a friend’s betrothed, Goethe’s Young Werther suffers not only literally but symbolically from what he cannot attain; he leaves himself with nowhere to go but the dark portal of death. Artists and thinkers and aesthetes of the early nineteenth century took up Werther as a symbol of the age. In midcentury, Wagner revived the old romance of Tristan and Isolde as another image of the zeitgeist: a love-death is the only transcendence possible for his lovers. Which is to say, a tendency to despair—whether interpreted negatively by Goethe or positively by Schopenhauer and Wagner—was inherent in Romanticism’s yearning for the infinite. Over time, that despair infected both individuals and the spirit of the age.
Meanwhile the novelist Jean Paul established the literary motif of the Doppelgänger, the terrifying mirror of oneself walking in the world. Franz Schubert caught the weirdness of that image in setting verses of Heinrich Heine: the poet sees a figure standing in despair before the house of an old love, discovers it is his double, and cries out: “Pale companion, why do you ape the torments of love I suffered in this place, so many nights, so long ago?” Ludwig Tieck wrote a play called Puss in Boots that satirized philistines and Enlightenment rationality. The main character is a tomcat, and the piece constantly comments on its own existence as a play, breaking out of the dramatic frame like a series of mirrors. In literature, Doppelgängers and mirrors proliferated, representing the endless mystery of reality and identity.
These were the kind of intoxicating intimations