Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [84]
So Schumann and Brahms, each on his own track, used symbolism to shadow forth his life and feelings in “abstract” music, and sometimes used music to help put those feelings to rest. Through such cabala, instrumental music can tell stories, manifest or implied, public or private, and among those can be the story of the composer’s life. And for both men, music could be “poetic” because spoken and musical languages overlap. (More than either of them would have admitted, these intuitions brought them close to the New German School.)
At the same time, Schumann and Brahms aspired to telling their stories in tight-knit forms, as in traditional absolute music, whether or not a given piece used one of the traditional formal patterns like sonata or variations. Often the personal and the formal sat uncomfortably together. In relation to Schumann’s Carnaval, which is pervaded by such symbolism, Charles Rosen writes of “eccentricity … tempered in the large-scale harmony by a conservative classicism often at odds with the small details.”71
Yet for both Schumann and Brahms, the personal implications buried in their work did not govern its logic. There lies the divide between Schumann and Brahms on one hand, and on the other the New Germans, who expected their literary models to create novel patterns and perhaps to exonerate wandering forms. Still, while Brahms embraced traditional patterns in theory, in his early music—especially the D minor sonata/symphony/concerto—he would find great difficulty reconciling the demands of personal expression and absolute form. It would be some time before Brahms resolved that dilemma. George S. Bozarth writes, “To the degree that these works lack subtlety because of too direct … a reliance upon their poetic models, they must be considered immature.”72
Besides the Schumann Variations, Brahmsian symbolism can be seen in the first number of his other important work of 1854, the Four Ballades, published two years later as Opus 10 and dedicated to Julius Otto Grimm. From now on his published piano music would mainly be in the form of variations, popularistic items, or freestanding Romantic character pieces with names like intermezzo, capriccio, romance, rhapsody, and ballade.
The name ballade implies a story, like a sung ballad, the music free of traditional formal patterns (though in such pieces Brahms tends to some kind of A B A outline). The first of the four Opus 10 pieces is a brooding song without words in D minor, the melody implying the first two verses of the Scottish ballad “Edward.” Brahms had read the ballad, in German translation, in Herder’s Stimmen der Völker that Julius Allgeyer had recommended to him:
Why does your sword so drip with blood, Edward, Edward?
And why so sad are ye?
“Oh, I have killed my hawk so fine …”
But it is his father Edward has killed, not his hawk. In the first ballade the symbolism is not contained in the names of the notes; instead, the music sets the text of the ballad, like the implied songs of Brahms’s sonata slow movements (Or might there be in “Edward” an ominous personal resonance? Johannes is responding to a story of a son killing his father at the urging of his mother.73)
In any case, with the “Edward” ballade Brahms once more wrote music implying something beyond the notes. This piece is as close to Lisztean program music as he would ever approach. We sense that not only in the implied text, but in the sound of the music that seems to conjure a darkling landscape, returning over and over to primeval open fifths and octaves—as striking a piece of musical scene-painting as, say, Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave. Through the years Brahms would