I
In the lifetime of Beethoven tendencies became evident in music which during the nineteenth century developed extraordinarily both rapidly and far, and brought about new forms and an almost wholly new art of orchestration. Music underwent transformations parallel to those which altered the face of all the arts and even of philosophy, and which were closely dependent on the general political, social, and æsthetic forces set loose throughout Europe by the French Revolution. In the music of Beethoven himself many of these alterations are suggested, foreshadowed, actually anticipated. The last pianoforte sonatas, the Mass in D, the Ninth Symphony and the last string quartets were all colored by an intense subjectivity. The form was free and strange. They were and are to-day incomprehensible without deep study, they are not objectively evident. They are dim and trackless realms of music, hinting at infinite discoveries and possibilities. They were not models, not types for his successors to imitate, but gospels of freedom and messages from remote valleys and mountains. They cast a light over distances yet to be attained. At the same time they were the expression of his own soul, profoundly personal and mystical. We need not, however, look here for traces of the French Revolution nor signs of the times. This is not proud and conscious glorification of the individual, nor the confident expression of a mood, at once relaxed and self-assertive. This is the music of a man who was first cut off from the world, who was forced within himself, so to speak, by illness, by loneliness, by complete deafness, whose heart and soul were imprisoned in an aloofness, who could find inspiration but in the mystery and power of his own being. What he brought forth from such heights and depths was to be infinitely suggestive to musicians of a later age.
During the last half dozen years of Beethoven’s life, two younger men, strongly affected by the new era of freedom, were molding and coloring music in other ways. Schubert, fired by the poetry of the German romanticists, was pouring out songs full of freshness and the new spirit, expressing in music the wildness of storm and night, the gruesome forest-rider, the fairy whisperings of the brook, the still sadness of frosty winter. Under his hands the symphony became fanciful, soft, and poetical. He filled it with enchanting melody, with the warm-blooded life of folk-songs and native rhythm, veiled it in shifting harmonies. Beside him reckless Weber, full of German fairy tales, of legends of chivalry, sensitive to tone-color, was writing operas dear to the people, part-songs for men loyal to Germany, adorning legend and ballad with splendid colors of sound. Schubert had little grasp of form, which is order in music; Weber had hardly to concern himself with it, since his music was, so to speak, the draperies of a form, of the drama. For each, poetry and legend was the inspiration, romantic poetry and wild legend, essentially Teutonic; for each, rapture and color was the ideal. So it was at the death of Beethoven. Weber was already dead, Schubert had but a year to live. On the one hand, Beethoven the mystic, unfathomed, infinitely suggestive; on the other, Schubert and Weber, the inspired rhapsodist, the genial colorist, prototypes of much to come. On every hand were imminent needs, unexplored possibilities.
In the amazingly short space of twenty-five years there grew up from these seeds a new music, most firmly rooted in Schubert and Weber, at times fed by the spirit of Beethoven. The rhapsodist gloried in his mood, the colorist painted gorgeous panoramas; there were poets in music, on the one hand, and painters in music, on the other. The question of form and design, the most vital for music if not for all the arts, has been met in many ways. The poets have limited themselves, or at any rate have found their best and most characteristic expression, in small forms. They publish long cycles made up of short pieces. Often, as in the case of Schumann’s Papillons, Carnaval, or Kreisleriana, the short pieces are more or less closely held together in their relationship to one fanciful central idea. They are scenes at a dress ball, comments and impressions of two or three individualities at a fête, various expressions in music of different aspects of a man’s character. Or they may have no unity as in the case of Chopin’s preludes, studies, sets of mazurkas, or Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs Without Words,’ or Schumann’s Bunte Blätter. The painters in music have devised new forms. They prefer to paint pictures of action, they become narrative painters in music. The mighty Berlioz paints progressive scenes from a man’s life; Liszt gives us the battle between Paganism and Christianity in a series of pictures, the whole of life in its progress toward death, the dreams, the torture and the ultimate triumph of Mazeppa, of Tasso. They have acquired overpowering skill with the brush and palette, they write for tremendous orchestras, their scores are brilliant, often blinding. Their narratives move on with great rush. We are familiar with the story, follow it in the music. We know the guise in music of the characters which enact it, they are constantly before us, moving on, rarely reminiscent. The bands of strict form break before the armies of characters, of ideas, of events, and we need no balance, for the story holds us and we are not upset. But these painters, and we in their suite, are less thrilled by the freedom of their poem and by the stride of their narrative than bewitched and fired by the gorgeousness of the colors which they employ with bold and masterly hand.
We shall look relatively in vain for such colors in the music of the ‘poets.’ They are lyricists, they express moods in music and each little piece partakes of the color of the mood which it enfolds—is in general delicate and monochrome. The poets are essentially composers for the pianoforte. They have chosen the instrument suitable for the home and for intimate surroundings, and their choice bars the brilliancy of color from their now exquisite now passionate and profoundly moving art. They are musicians of the spirit and the mood, meditative, genuine, passionate, tearful and gay by turn. The others are musicians of the senses and the act, dramatists, tawdry charlatans or magnificently glorious spokesmen, leaders, challengers, who speak with the resonance of trumpets and seduce with the honey of soft music.
Now the poets are descended from Schubert and the painters from Weber. Both are unwavering in their allegiance to Beethoven, but the spirit of Beethoven has touched them little. The poets more than the painters are akin to him, but they lack his breadth and power. The painters have something of his daring strength, but they stand over against him, are not in line with him. Such is the condition of music only twenty-five years after the death of him whom all, save Chopin, who worshipped Mozart, hailed as supreme master.
In September, 1853, Brahms came to Schumann, then conductor at Düsseldorf on the Rhine, provided with a letter of introduction from Joseph Joachim, the renowned violinist, but two years his senior. Brahms was at that time just over twenty years of age. He brought with him manuscripts of his own composing and played for Schumann. A short while before he had played the same things for Liszt at Weimar. Of his three weeks’ stay as Liszt’s guest very bitter accounts have been written. If Brahms was tired and fell asleep while Liszt was playing to him, if Liszt was merely seeking to impose himself upon the young musician when he played that young man’s scherzo at sight from manuscript, and altered it, well and good. Brahms was, at any rate—thanks in this case, too, to Joachim—received in the throne-room of the painters in music, and nothing came of it. He departed the richer by an elegant cigar-case, gift from his host; and in later years still spoke of Liszt’s unique, incomparable and inimitable playing. But in the throne-room of the poets he was hailed with unbounded rejoicing. Schumann took again in his gifted hand the pen so long idle and wrote the article for the New Journal of Music, which proclaimed the advent of the true successor of Beethoven. It was a daring prophecy and it had a tremendous effect upon Brahms and upon his career; for it was a gage thrown to him he could not neglect and though it at once created an opposition, vehement and longstanding, it screwed his best and most genuine efforts to the sticking place. Never through the rest of his life did he relax the self-imposed struggle to make himself worthy of Schumann’s confidence and hope.
Meanwhile, among the painters, directly in the line from Weber, another man had come to the fore, a colossal genius such as perhaps the world had never seen before nor is like to see again. Richard Wagner, at that time just twice the age of Brahms, was in exile at Zürich. He had written Rienzi, ‘The Flying Dutchman,’ Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin. All had been performed. The libretto of the Ring was done and the music to Rheingold composed and orchestrated. Schumann disapproved. It is hard to understand why he, so recklessly generous, so willing to see the best in the music of all the younger school, the ardent supporter of Berlioz, should have turned away from Wagner. One must suspect a touch of personal aversion. He was not alone. No man ever had fiercer battle to wage than Wagner, nor did any man ever bring to battle a more indomitable courage and will. Liszt was his staunch supporter; and to Liszt, too, both Schumann and his wife had aversion, easier to understand than their aversion to Wagner. For Liszt, the virtuoso, was made of gold and tinsel. Liszt, the composer, was made so in part. But Wagner, the musician, was incomparably great, that is to say, his powers were colossal and unlike those of any other, and therefore not to be compared. That Schumann failed to recognize this comes with something of a shock to those who have been amazed at the keenness of his perception, and yet more to those who have rejoiced to find in the musician the nobility and generosity of a great-hearted man. It is obvious that the divergence between poets and painters had by this time become too wide for his unselfish, sympathetic nature to bridge; and thus when Brahms, a young man of twenty, was launched into the world of music he found musicians divided into two camps between which the hostility was to grow ever more bitter. Liszt at Weimar, Schumann at Düsseldorf, were the rallying points for the opposing sides, but within a year Schumann’s mind failed. The standard was forced upon Brahms, and Liszt gave himself up to Wagner.
It was almost inevitable that the great part of the world of music should be won over by Wagner. One by one the poets seceded, gave way to the influence of Wagner’s marvellous power, an influence which Clara Schumann never ceased to deplore. The result was that Brahms was regarded, outside the circle of a few powerful friends, as reactionary. He led, so to speak, a negative existence in music. He was cried down for what he was not, not for what he was. There is no reason to suppose that Brahms suffered thereby. The sale of his compositions constantly increased and after the first few probationary years he never lacked a good income from them. Still, perhaps the majority of musicians were blinded by the controversy to the positive, assertive, progressive elements in Brahms’ music. On the other hand, the adherents of Brahms, the ‘Brahmins,’ as they have been not inaptly called, retaliated by more or less shameful attacks upon Wagner, which later quite justly fell back upon their own heads, to their merited humiliation. They failed to see in him anything but a smasher of tradition, they closed their eyes to his mighty power of construction. In the course of time Wagner’s triumph was overwhelming. He remained the successful innovator, and Brahms the follower of ancient tradition.