Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [388]
It is easier to talk about Beethoven’s music, because of his quality of talking to us directly—as he did in life, his art speaks “dramatically,” “angrily,” “tenderly,” with “naked anguish.” Like the gods on Olympus, Brahms is fully and tenderly and lustily human yet unsearchable, in his art as in his life. After twenty-five years Clara Schumann declared him still a stranger, and she knew him better than anybody else. When we speak about Brahms’s music, as when he did, most often we are forced to resort to abstractions: this theme, this rhythm, this design. Meanwhile, in contrast to Wagner and perhaps to Beethoven, Brahms was too realistic to imagine that music could save the world, no matter how much the world needed saving.
“It simply won’t flow from my heart,” Brahms confessed to Clara at the outset, about his composing. Surely in the end it did come from his heart, but because of who he was and where he came from and what was expected of him, his music had to take a circuitous route from his heart to the page. The reason he still reaches our hearts so persuasively is perhaps more than the warmth and lyricism and boldness, or the nearperfection of his craftsmanship. It is the underlying mystery of his voice, like that of his person. No one can say what lay behind the masks. His elusiveness of person and voice and “meaning” is close to the essential mystery of music itself. In that Brahms the “Beethovener” is nearer Mozart than Beethoven. Thus the familiar term: absolute music.
The musical progressives of his time, their ears and minds full of Wagner’s epochal agenda for opera and art and humanity, condemned Brahms’s art as “the private thoughts of a clever man,” writing only for the private thoughts of his listeners. But after the betrayals of this century by one epochal agenda after another, the private thoughts of a private craftsman may be the best thing we have left.
As we approach the millennium, who better a model for the art of the next century than the survivor Brahms, and the inspiration of his craft? Not his fears of the end of art, not his conservatism, not his musical language, but his craft and his lonely courage, and the still enormous audience for classical music, an audience he has helped sustain.
Much has been lost since Brahms’s time, but not everything. If we in the West do not have the nurturing milieu and the continuity of tradition Brahms relied on, we still have history and its gods and demigods. We have been enriched by Modernism’s explorations and virtuosity of imagination, enriched by creative languages from the world over, the great universal chorus of human music. It is a chorus wild, confusing, dissonant, yet ultimately material to be shaped and made coherent and compelling by artists as individuals, working in their craft for individuals to hear.
For our time, a hundred years after Brahms left us, what better model than he? He gave us skills and inspirations: a private man speaking to each listener in our private selves, an eclectic of incomparable integrity. Perhaps beyond that we need only genius, a quality the fates have always parceled out in short, but steady, supply.
On March 31, 1913, Vienna heard a historic program at the Musikverein. It included Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), Alban Berg’s Altenberg Lieder, Six Pieces for Orchestra by Anton Webern, songs by Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Arnold Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony. The music competed with furious hissing and whistling from the audience, and also violent bravos and applause. Finally fistfights broke out around the Golden Hall, some patrons climbing over rows of seats to assault a stranger. Even after the police arrived, members of the audience stormed the stage, where the orchestra sat ashen with fear. Today all