Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [85]
Each of the Opus 10 Ballades tells its own “story,” concrete or abstract, each a striking piece, each something of a stylistic experiment. The allegro in no. 2 perhaps recalls the dancing course of some Schubert impromptus, no. 3 the earlier Brahmsian scherzos. No. 4 is the most expressively intricate, beginning with an almost Chopinesque grace but contrasting that with a brooding middle section, a quiet lento marked “with intimate sentiment.” This music babbles on as if the fingers were drifting into its subtle tonal colors, the veiled murmuring melodic line at moments pulling yearningly away from the harmony.
IN THEIR STYLE, and in being short, separate character pieces, the Four Ballades set Brahms’s future course as a piano composer. But he did not know that in 1854. Then, as far as he could see, he was drifting, overwhelmed with feelings for Clara and with the burden of Schumann’s prophecy. The situation would drag on for years, Brahms remaining laconic unto silent as a composer while the world waited for him to fulfill the prophecy, or to make a fool of himself.
At the same time, a mainspring of his maturity began to manifest in 1854, in the intricate canons found in several of the Schumann Variations. In fact, the most elaborate of the canonic episodes is in the lyrical, Clara-dominated tenth variation, which begins with a melody taken from the bass line of the main theme. That melody appears in the treble while its mirror image (called inversion) forms the bass, and the lilting voices in between are a speeded-up rendering of Schumann’s theme (called diminution of the theme, in contrapuntal technique). Then the opening soprano and bass become a canon by inversion at the distance of a measure. When Clara “speaks” at the end, Brahms works in her melody as counterpoint to his own—the former bass line. Thus he fashions a contrapuntal tour de force: the theme he extracted from the original bass line works as counterpoint to a diminution of the main Schumann theme, works both in simultaneous mirror with itself and also as a canon in inversion, and can be superimposed on Clara’s melody. All of that must be made to work by strenuous thought and patient craft.
The tenth variation and the other canons in the set reveal that however overgrown his creative path at the end of 1854, Brahms had begun to show a regard for counterpoint that would preoccupy him for years. On September 26, his third letter of that month, Robert Schumann wrote Clara from Endenich, “I am surprised that Brahms is working at counterpoint, which does not seem like him.”74 Plunging into dry technical study did not match what Schumann expected from his protégé—but that shows again how little Schumann really understood him. Johannes had begun a slow metamorphosis, during which he would grow out of the rhapsodic Kreisler and emerge from the chrysalis as Herr Doktor Brahms, who preached that craft counted more than inspiration.
As the winter of 1854 approached, Brahms sat with Clara and told her of his childhood, its joys and its shadows, the labyrinthine streets and canals of old Hamburg, the months in the Animierlokale. She wrote in her journal, “He told me much about himself, which half fills me with admiration for him, half troubles me.… Will not those who understand him be few in number? I believe it will be so, but the few will understand and love him, as my dear Robert did at once. Brahms has had a splendid idea, a surprise for you, my Robert. He has interwoven my old theme with yours—already I can see you smile.”75
Robert did smile, it seems, when he received Brahms’s variations on his theme at Endenich. At first, Schumann wrote a letter responding to each variation in detail, and with pleasure. But for some reason he discarded that draft