Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [41]
In some elements of musical craft, Marxsen skimped Johannes, or his pupil concluded he did. Brahms reached adulthood so inexperienced at handling instruments that in his first attempts with the orchestra he was practically at a loss. With the help of friends, over a period of years, he would have to teach himself orchestration. It would be some time, however, in larger works, before he could break entirely from his own instrument, the piano. In maturity, his handling of instrumentation, though hardly weak, was all the same his weakest suit, the one matter of craftsmanship in which he felt chronically unsure of himself. That recalls the more conservative, characteristically North German attitudes of the time. Walter Niemann writes of “the austere North German conception of … music, a conception concerned with form rather than color, contrapuntal … rather than homophonic.36 In the 1870s, British composition student Ethel Smyth found the circle of composers around Brahms largely indifferent to the coloristic use of instruments, the stunning new art of orchestration developed by Berlioz and Wagner.37 They seemed to look at scoring as merely the efficient presentation of ideas. To Smyth’s taste the results were gray and awkward.
Brahms did not assume that conservative posture in practice; eventually he developed a distinctive voice with the orchestra. Yet something in his artistic conscience seemed to whisper that instrumental color, the mere sensuous clothing of an idea, was suspicious, beside the point. In the history of music, Germany had long been associated more with counterpoint and form than with color, lightness, charm, melodiousness—the latter, traditionally, were the provenance of the French and the Italians. (Mozart specialized in unifying German and Italian qualities.) Brahms grew up believing that the point of composition was the perfection and expressiveness of the notes, of the organic logic, counterpoint, and form: the high-German qualities that Marxsen and his culture taught him.
As Luise Japha recalled, with his teacher Brahms studied the intricate craft of interweaving melodic lines that is called counterpoint. J. S. Bach, who called music “an art and a science,” had been the consummate master of counterpoint and its complex exigencies of craft and taste. Counterpoint is the joining of disciplined science with expressive art: to superimpose beautiful and logical melodies whose combination also, magically, creates beautiful and logical harmonic progressions. With that, as musicians put it, a composer unifies the “horizontal”/melodic dimension of music with the “vertical”/harmonic. Yet for all his studies with Marxsen, at a time when he had already become famous Brahms concluded that he had not yet mastered counterpoint. He would spend years making up the deficiency, or what he perceived as one.
If Marxsen fell short in teaching Brahms some things, to his glory he did give his student free rein to develop his own voice, and that rein was all Brahms needed. From his time with Marxsen onward, he relied on others for ideas, stimulation, criticism. Yet he was never compromised by anyone or anything, was never other than his own man.
In practice, Brahms would honor his teacher, for decades sending him work for comment. Yet in adulthood he once growled to a friend about Marxsen’s lessons that “I faithfully attended, but I learned absolutely nothing.”38 He was lying then, either to his listener or to himself. He liked to portray himself as entirely his own creation. Besides that, though, for all his gratitude Brahms could never entirely forgive his teacher for what he had failed to teach, and the years it cost to make that up.
JOHANNES SPENT 1849 with little to mark his doings. He studied