Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [386]
The part of Modernism that flowed so powerfully from Vienna ranged from a fin-de-siècle irony to a sense of rootlessness and prophetic alarm, expressed unforgettably in the early atonal-Expressionist works of Schoenberg and Webern and the nightmare parables of Franz Kafka. From his psychiatric office in Vienna, Sigmund Freud created a picture of consciousness and will and civilization floating like a fragile crust on a sliding, slipping morass of primal drives and nursery tragicomedies. If once Galileo had knocked earth and humanity out of its central place in the cosmos, Freud threatened Enlightenment illusions of the triumph of order, reason, craft, and scientific progress. Surely the anguished and dissonant language of Expressionism, a movement that Schoenberg in his first fame embodied as both composer and painter, is a reflection of the fearful turmoil not only of fin-de-siècle Vienna, but of the Freudian unconscious—a territory that could have been imagined, perhaps, only in the social and spiritual chaos of Vienna in that era. That world, even as it overlapped Brahms’s world, is a leap over an enormous divide away from the nineteenth-century rationalistic, humanistic, pre-Freudian skepticism that Brahms embodied.
In short, the catastrophes that Brahms and others prophesied came to pass, in and out of two world wars, in and out of art. After Austria touched off the first Great War in the wake of Sarajevo, the rehearsal for world destruction was over and the real thing took the stage. At its beginning, the house of cards called the Austrian Empire collapsed almost unnoticed and nearly unmourned.
Yet in music none of Brahms’s desperate prophecies (“After me, music is done for!”) quite came to pass. The music of the great masters that he loved did not die but prospered, even if more and more as exhibits in a museum. That museum’s collection of masterpieces came above all from the work composed in Vienna during the 125 years before Brahms died—the most extraordinary concentration of genius in one medium in one place since the Florentine Renaissance. In the twentieth century, vital composers turned up across Europe and America in perhaps unprecedented numbers, but the divide between them and the bourgeois audience, and the time lag between the appearance of their work and public acceptance of it, yawned greater and greater. In the case of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and other historic figures, it is only as the millennium approaches that the audience has, possibly, begun to catch up.
THROUGH ALL OF IT, Brahms endured. He did not become what he had feared, a footnote in history like Cherubini. Peter Gay has noted the way in which Brahms, in his own time the “frigid intellectual,” was transformed immediately after his death into the “sultry sentimentalist.”12 What other part could he play, alongside Schoenberg the terrifying, alongside Stravinsky the Primitivist in one incarnation, the chilly Neo-classic in another? Through the Modernist century Brahms’s voice continued to sing in the museums of concert halls, and to win countless ovations.
At the same time he remained irrelevant to the historical dialogue, which Wagner had a large hand in laying out. In 1947 Arnold Schoenberg, who insisted he had learned the essentials of his craft from Brahms more than (as everyone assumed) from Wagner, set out to redeem his mentor with his article “Brahms the Progressive.” In this and other writings Schoenberg explicated one of the essential things about Brahms: the depth and novelty of his motivic technique, which Schoenberg named “developing variation.” That technique, with its corollaries—applied in the three-dimensional space that in Brahms unites the once-separate domains of melody, harmony, and form—is one of the seminal developments in all music, gold to the twelve-tonist and traditionalist alike. With the embrace of Schoenberg the most notorious of Modernists, Brahms apparently re-entered