Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [8]
MY OWN CONNECTION to Brahms has much to do with my having stumbled into music in the first place. Perhaps the story is worth telling, because it could stand for the way many innocents around the world come to love a figure from another time and another country. It begins when I was a teenager in Chattanooga, Tennessee, playing trombone in the junior high band and having as my main ambition in life: to get on the football team.
The first thing I ever did of any account came that year, when I won first chair in an all-district band. Among the pieces we played was a number with a vaguely uplifting title, something like “The Song of Freedom.” As I listened to the piece during rehearsals (trombones have interminable rests), its theme filled my heart as no music ever had. As usual, I paid no attention to the composer; it appeared to be the sort of generic school-band piece we always played. Yet for months afterward I’d run through the melody in my mind because it gave me a piercing sensation in the pit of my stomach, an unfamiliar yearning poised somewhere between happy and sad. (This time was, of course, coincident with puberty.) Then, one day, I discovered that “The Song of Freedom” had vanished from my head. Losing that bittersweet feeling was a little like losing a girlfriend, or a familiar consolation. Over the next months I kept thinking about the tune, struggling to find it again.
One night, as part of her ongoing attempts to inject some culture into her son, my mother took me to a concert unusual for Chattanooga: the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein, somebody you actually saw on television from New York, unutterably glamorous. I had rarely heard classical music outside of Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts on TV, and never a full program by a big-city orchestra. The concert began with Bernstein’s own overture to Candide, which seemed marvelous, then Aaron Copland’s El Salón México, even more so.
The second half of the concert was taken up by another work and composer I’d never heard before: the First Symphony of Brahms. As the music unfolded, I experienced what many listeners did in the nineteenth century on hearing Brahms for the first time—transported by the mingled warmth and boldness of his voice, at the same time befuddled by the complexities of his melodic and tonal language. I sat in the balcony of the cavernous hall straining to keep my mind on the music but mainly waiting for Bernstein to jump up in the air again.
Finally, in the last movement came something to get hold of, a soaring theme for French horn. A flute picked up the tune while strings shimmered beneath. After a solemn chorale for trombones—at last, trombones—from out of nowhere the violins took up a full-throated melody that made my jaw drop and brought tears to my eyes. Of all things, it was “The Song of Freedom,” the tune I’d played in the band months before, that I’d lost and now found again. The piece had been a band arrangement of the main theme from Brahms’s finale.
After that concert I became not only a devotee of Bernstein and Copland and Brahms, I also discovered what it means to be in love with music. Music and I have had a stormy and frustrating union since, but the love endures. From that night I became a musician, and before long a composer. The wistful, piercing melancholy that overwhelmed me when I listened to Brahms and a good deal of other classical music—a depth of feeling pop music has never approached—only abated a little when I began writing music. In part, that feeling had been a longing to plunge deeper into music than listening and playing could take me, to create it for myself. The essence of that revelation I owe to Johannes Brahms. I count the night when Leonard Bernstein led the orchestra into the main theme of the First Symphony as my initiation into the most magnificent, demanding, absurd, and hopeless endeavor on this earth. Brahms, I’m convinced, felt much the same way about it.