Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [383]
Modernism, founded in some degree on the Wagnerian conception of the artist whose relation to the public is imperial, may be called Romanticism without brakes. In practice, during the twentieth century Wagner’s conception of the artist was played out not at the head of, but in opposition to, the bourgeois public. In the nineteenth century that public had lavishly financed art and artists at the same time as its tastes grew steadily more conservative. The kind of audience for whom Brahms composed, while its general musical knowledge and sophistication declined after his death, maintained the pattern Brahms had helped create: by the later nineteenth century the concert hall existed primarily as a museum of the past. Yet in today’s concert hall relatively few concertgoers can follow the course of any traditional musical form. The mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering—wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion—is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.
Brahms prophesied this, but there was one more element of the decline that he experienced but whose threat he did not foresee—the phonograph. He may have hoped that recordings would spread classical music among the masses. So they did, but in the long run they also hastened the deterioration of the audience. In the Modern era the presence of easily available music on radio and television and discs, ubiquitous but rarely intensely listened to, only dilutes the kind of pleasure music lovers experienced in Brahms’s day. In the era of electronic media, few people learn the musical literature in four-hand piano arrangements. In Brahms’s time many learned it that way through their fingers, or sang in choirs, and waited eagerly to hear the rare performances of a familiar masterpiece. In other words, music was by and large available only to those who took pains, who went out of their way for it. Inevitably that made music more precious.
So because of intricate artistic and social developments including two World Wars, but also to a great extent because of new media, the devotion music enjoyed in the nineteenth century trickled away. It is unlikely to return. In the museums of modern concert halls and opera houses, Brahms piano trios, Bruckner symphonies, Wagnerian operas have melted together into the history of Western masterpieces, issued on little discs that all look the same, which pile up over the years in living rooms and their contents in an overcrowded collective memory. And as the educated audience for which Brahms composed faded, a prime goal of the Wagner/Liszt agenda—to keep the living composer in the center of musical life—broke down completely. The modern “standard repertoire” is not so far from the repertoire Brahms featured as director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in the 1870s.
Yet paradoxically, the attitude behind Brahms’s conservatism, his knowledge of history and his awe before it, became another signature of Modernism. “Modern” music, Peter Burkholder has said, is “written by composers obsessed with the musical past and with their place in music history, who seek to emulate the music of those we call the ‘classical masters.’ ”4 The paradoxical ambition of most artistic revolutionaries in the twentieth century became this: to create museum pieces. Naturally, there came at the same time an avant-garde that attempted, without success, to raze the museums entirely.
AFTER BRAHMS, the next great names in the city would appear under the rubric of the Second Viennese School, with Gustav Mahler as patron, Arnold Schoenberg as headmaster. For another paradox, most of the revolutionary artists of Schoenberg’s day in Vienna rose from the same liberal Grossbürgertum, still prosperous but essentially disenfranchised, that had formed Brahms’s main public.
For the older generation of the Grossbürgertum, art had been an