• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1387 0

in his art no composer ever had a more consistent and audible stylistic signature than Johannes Brahms, and he had it in some degree from the first works he allowed to survive. From early on he knew where he was going, and stayed on his path with an unrelenting discipline, day after day, year after year. Elsewhere in Germany in the same period, these games of identity, equally Hoffmann-inspired, perhaps contributed to Robert Schumann’s ruin, overwhelmed by divine and demonic music roaring in his mind. Brahms, more stable as man and artist, would survive in his hall of mirrors and prosper. The game of identities would help make his mature music possible; it equipped him for a time in history where one could not work in a natural style, without a lacerating self-consciousness, without the looming presence of history. At the same time, his game of identities could not make Brahms happy, nor help in his always problematical dealings with the concrete and social world. He was all too adept at escape.

Brahms maintained his alter ego for a decade or more. A few of the pieces written in his first flush of public creative activity he actually signed “Johannes Kreisler, Junior.” Amid the frustration and exaltation of love, he would start and abandon a piano quartet in C# minor, just as in a story Kapellmeister Kreisler starts and abandons a trio in that key. (Kreisler speaks of the trio in the context of a night on which “I was given a different name.”24) In the 1870s, when Brahms proposed the Italian fantasist Gozzi’s plays for opera librettos, he echoed Hoffmann/Kreisler’s love of Gozzi.25 In other words Brahms never left Kreisler Junior entirely behind him. His Doppelgänger, and Hoffmann’s extravagant conception of music, only retired underground, singing in the lyrical transports of his grown-up music, emerging in his grown-up tears.

Yet for all his Romantic Bildung, in the end Brahms did not turn out a high-Romantic composer in the image, say, of Robert Schumann, even though Schumann himself was to help complete Brahms’s Bildung. Brahms was too much an individualist to fall totally under the sway of any time, any personality. Besides, his musical loyalties stretched backward far beyond the Romantic age.

Romanticism remained a galvanizing force in Brahms’s personal and creative consciousness, but not the boundless, infinite, form-shattering side of it. In his maturity he would put away that part. Against the chaos of life, especially the chaos of emotional life, Brahms would create something as classically perfect as humanly conceivable, that both captured and restrained the chaos of emotion. By that means, he erected walls around darkness and imperfection, contained the minotaur in a labyrinth of exquisite form. Work at it over and over again, ran his famous formula, until “there is not a note too much or too little, not a bar you could improve on. Whether it is also beautiful is an entirely different matter, but perfect it must be.”26 That must was the essence of Brahms as man and artist, the unforgiving credo of his religion.

JOHANNES RETURNED HOME from Winsen in autumn 1847 tanned and hale. Perhaps he still had to put in time in Hamburg Lokale, but now he began to acquire his own piano students to bring in money, and to find jobs in respectable restaurants and theaters. So far his teacher Eduard Marxsen, cautious as always in managing this talent, had not encouraged Johannes to play in public even though the boy was ready for it. Other prodigies of the era—Franz Liszt, Clara Wieck, violinist Josef Joachim—had been famous by age fourteen. As of autumn 1847, though, Marxsen agreed to his charge’s making an official debut (his concert at age ten had been by invitation). So Brahms’s introduction to the public as a soloist fell on November 20, 1847, in Hamburg’s Apollo Concert Room.

This was not the modern notion of a “recital,” involving a single artist and a single medium for a whole concert. That kind of program was still novel. Franz Liszt had introduced the idea and the poetic term recital in 1840. Chamber-music programs