Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [40]
From Marxsen, Johannes seems to have learned to derive the melodic material of a piece from pregnant short patterns called motives, the germs of melody. This was a relatively new technique. Where earlier Classical composers tended to base their work on clear-cut melodic themes, reworked and disassembled and reassembled in the course of a movement, Beethoven in his later music sank the basic material of a piece deep in the texture, until the discourse was carried on less in the overt themes than in the subthemes: the subliminal logic of forging melodic germs into melodies.34 Brahms would carry that motivic technique further; he began doing it in his earliest surviving works.
Marxsen also taught his pupil to revere and exploit the musical forms that theorists had abstracted and codified from the music of the masters. These went under such names as sonata form, theme-and-variations, rondo, fugue, and canon. In previous centuries such formal designs had guided much of the music written, and in the process had brought Western music to its highest development.
By the nineteenth century, these patterns had taken on the aura of the geniuses who had used them. To honor Beethoven and Bach and Mozart, Johannes was taught, one must honor their designs. In the first movement of a sonata or symphony, for example, one presents a first theme, a transition, and a second theme in a related key, and then repeats that exposition; then comes the development, a play of keys and thematic fragmentation and dramatic contrast, which leads back to the recapitulation that revisits the exposition but resolves the harmonic tensions into a single key. On that basic “sonata form” (as it was dubbed in the mid-nineteenth century) one can develop many variants under the influence of the material at hand, but the essential design must remain as a foundation or the music falls into confusion.
Marxsen called the procedures of the masters “eternally incorruptible.” He infused Brahms with that sense of traditional form, part technique and part religion. Brahms never strayed from that spirit, no matter how creatively he varied the details of the old designs. From his apprenticeship on, all else but allegiance to the past and its procedures appeared to him as chaos. There was a danger lurking in this faith, which Brahms also understood and escaped, but which snared many composers: these formal abstractions tended to harden into dogma, time-hallowed patterns into which composers poured notes (which is exactly what Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven did not do). As time would prove, more than any other composer of his time, Brahms demonstrated that it remained possible for a true creator to revitalize the old forms. Even Richard Wagner would have to concede that.
Meanwhile, it would be exactly those forms that Liszt, Wagner, and their New German School rejected—or rather, the aura of dogma and phony holiness the forms had acquired. Dahlhaus writes that in the Romantic period, form “as a rough categorization, either … was schematic or it was disintegrated.”35 In other words, the central musical debate of the later nineteenth century would line up in terms of traditional form versus free, which usually meant “absolute music” versus “program music.” Eventually, all these abstractions would be contained in tangible dichotomies: Leipzig versus Weimar, Brahms versus Liszt and Wagner.
That Brahms lined up on the conservative half of this divide was clearly a matter of temperament and aesthetics as much as training. In his first pieces, we can see that Marxsen taught his student melodic development and a traditional approach to form remarkably thoroughly. Probably he kept Johannes at writing theme-and-variations pieces as well. The idea of theme-and-variations is to present a musical