Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [374]
The first one returns to the bardic Brahmsian minor, his Dies Irae that in the Requiem set “For all flesh, it is as grass.” Here in quiet phrases is another stark and relentless funeral dirge like those from his youth. In a larger sense it may be said to stand for the past:
For it goes with man as with the beast;
as that dies, so dies he also;
and they have all the same breath;
and man has nothing more than the beast;
for all is vanity.
Then, allegro in a swirling of dust, death overtakes mankind and there is no reassurance:
All are taken to the same place;
it is all made of dust
and goes back to dust.
Who knows if the spirit of man ascends upward,
and that of the beast descends into the earth?
Brahms had said to Richard Heuberger that the only real immortality is in one’s children. His works were his children, and he despaired for them. Yet his work had been all he truly possessed.
Therefore I saw, that there is nothing better,
than that man should be happy in his work;
for that is his lot.
For who shall bring him to that place
where he may see what shall come after him?
Call the second song the present. What Brahms saw in the present, for himself, for Vienna, for humanity, was terrifying. Austria was succumbing to a ferocious mythology of blood and authoritarianism under the cloak of populism, all of it fed by an evil wellspring of hatred. Antisemitism is madness! Brahms had cried. From all the madness, he could not know when or how, rivers of blood would flow. For all its gentleness, his second Serious Song is suffused with that prophecy, and with compassion for the victims to come.
I turned and looked on all who suffer oppression under the sun:
and behold, there were tears from those
who suffered oppression, and had no savior;
and those who oppressed them were so mighty,
that they could find no savior.
Then I praised the dead …
more than the living,
who still have life.
Years before, when Amalie and Joseph Joachim had a son, Brahms had written them before he could stop his pen: “One can hardly in the event wish for him the best of all wishes, not to be born at all.”
And he who has never been …
(There is a terrifying silence, then a single low tone in the bass:)
is better off than both,
and is not conscious of the evil
that happens under the sun.
The third song is in a stark E minor, the key and the very pitches of the chain of thirds that begin the Fourth Symphony. Technically the music is a distillation of minute thematic relationships in three dimensions: melody becoming counterpoint and harmony and form, and so erasing the divisions between them.
Call this song the future: what happens to all, what is about to happen to Clara Schumann to end her years of suffering.
O Death,
O Death how bitter art thou
when on thee thinks the man
who has good days and wherewithal,
and lives without sorrow …
Into the accompaniment comes the pattern C-B-A-G#-A, Robert Schumann’s Clara theme, the musical cabala that Brahms had inherited and used in the days when he loved Clara as a young man loves. At the same time the descending thirds of the beginning are turned upward to rising sixths in a hopeful E major. With Clara’s name in the accompaniment, these words:
O Death, how well you comfort the needy one
who is feeble and old,
and mired in trouble,
and has nothing better to hope, or to expect!
O Death, how well you comfort!
In the last song we find Brahms’s final word—if not quite that in tones, his final message to the world and to himself. We have heard songs of past, present, and future. He concludes as one speaking to all time a consolation to the bereaved—as in the Requiem, without illusions of eternal life. Antonin Dvořák said Brahms believed in nothing. Speaking in a later and more skeptical age, conductor Wilhelm Furtw