Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [387]
Yet really not, because Schoenberg was in some degree wrong. He declared Brahms “progressive” mainly because of the more advanced bits and pieces of his language, the relatively rare pages when Brahms approached something like Schoenbergian harmonic freedom. Schoenberg was disposed to label as “progressive” anything that inspired his own work. Brahms was progressive, in short, because he inspired Schoenberg—just as Wagner had once declared Beethoven prophetic because he led to Wagner. At the same time, as Burkholder notes: in calling Brahms progressive, Schoenberg was also calling himself a traditionalist.
And so the label of progressive that Schoenberg put on Brahms, with whatever justification, would not stick. He did not succeed in making Brahms relevant to the aesthetic debates of the century, or to concertgoers’ perceptions of Schoenberg. Dissonance and harmonic ambiguity do not, as Schoenberg presumed, define this century’s tonal art. “Modernism in music,” Peter Burkholder notes, “is not identical with progress in musical techniques.” (He might have added: nor do musical techniques really “progress.”) Rather Modernism—vast, complex, and self-contradictory as it may have been—was predicated on historical self-consciousness and on a particular sense of the artist as priest/revolutionary: the Wagnerian branch of Romanticism, without brakes. It is significant that for all his exalting of Brahms, after Schoenberg had created the twelve-tone technique he announced to his disciples in Messianic and high-Wagnerian terms: “I have invented a system that will insure the superiority of German music for a hundred years to come.”
Contrary to what Schoenberg believed, the essential Brahms is the Janus-headed: Classical and Romantic, conservative and progressive, looking backward and forward at once. In the extraordinary power and integrity he achieved from that position, he is unique—which is to say, both singular and alone. In that position he remained standing to the side of Modernism as it played out its creative and destructive, magnificent and terrible course in all the arts, to the last decades of the twentieth century and Modernism’s collapse in fragments, jumbled up with popular culture, in a climate of anarchy, rage, and paralysis of imagination.
Every creative era contains the seeds of its own destruction; each plays out its decadence in its own way. Modernism expired over the last decades of the twentieth century, lost in the wilderness it had thrashed into but turned out to be incapable of settling. In the process its supply line, the thread of Western artistic tradition, frayed and arguably snapped, leaving artists like so many explorers stranded in a wilderness of their own discovery. Today it appears that after the interregnum of postmodernism, Modernism gave way to chaos, to nothing: exactly what Brahms feared, only taking a century—a dazzling, unprecedented, creative and destructive century—to run its course.
As that century reels to its close, it may be argued that Brahms has become more relevant to the future than he has been in a hundred years. As the Western world approaches the millennium, the great tradition on which he founded his personal and innovative art has faded, and likewise the sophisticated audience he composed for. The nineteenth-century cartoonist drew Hanslick the acolyte waving his censer at Brahms standing on a cracked pedestal. The pedestal is dust now, yet Brahms stands unbowed and unassailed. He is still vital, as is Wagner. One must add: Brahms lives on in something like his own terms, while Wagner, with his portentous sociopolitical baggage, must be reimagined and bent and constrained so we can bear to contemplate the extraordinary edifice of his art at all.
As long as the West wants to uphold the deepest, broadest, and finest part of its musical tradition, Brahms will be with us. For that long, we will know the Brahms Effect: music at once warmly, lyrically, Romantically expressive, and at the same time remote, Olympian. Only in a few moments does his work have that miraculous