III
Brahms is to be ranked among the romantic composers in that all his work is distinctly a reflection of his own personality, in that every emotion, mood, dream, or whatever may be the cause and inspiration of his music is invariably tinged with the nature through which it passed. The lovable, boisterous frankness which was characteristic of him as a young man was little by little curbed, subdued, levelled, so to speak. He cultivated an austere intellectual grasp of himself, tending to crush all sentimentality and often all sentiment. We may not hesitate to believe his own word that Clara Schumann was dearer to him than anyone else upon the earth, nor yet can we fail to read in her diary that she suffered more than anyone else from his uncompromising intellectuality. If she attempted to praise or encourage him she met with a heartless intellectual rebuke. Not long after Schumann died, he wrote a letter to reprimand her for taking his own cause too much to heart. ‘You demand too rapid and enthusiastic recognition of talent which you happen to like. Art is a republic. You should take that as a motto. You are far too aristocratic.... Do not place one artist in a higher rank and expect the others to regard him as their superior, as dictator. His gifts will make him a beloved and respected citizen of this republic, but will not make him consul or emperor.’ To which she replied: ‘It is true that I am often greatly struck by the richness of your genius, that you always seem to me one on whom heaven has poured out its best gifts, that I love and honor you for the sake of many glorious works. All this has fastened its roots deep down in my heart, so, dearest Johannes, do not trouble to kill it all by your cold philosophizing.’ Clara exerted herself to bring his compositions before the public. A short extract from her diary will show how Brahms rewarded her efforts. ‘I was in agonies of nervousness but I played them [variations on a theme of Schumann’s] well all the same, and they were much applauded. Johannes, however, hurt me very much by his indifference. He declared that he could no longer bear to hear the variations, it was altogether dreadful to him to listen to anything of his own and to have to sit by and do nothing. Although I can well understand this feeling I cannot help finding it hard when one has devoted all one’s powers to a work, and the composer himself has not a kind word for it.’ The tenderness which would have meant much to her he failed to show. He made himself rough and harsh, stern and severe. That a man could write of him as ‘a steadfast, strong, manly nature, self-contained and independent, striving ever for the highest, an uncompromisingly true and unbending artistic conscience, strict even to harshness, rigidly exacting,’ wins the adherent, wins loyalty and admiration, hides but does not fill the lack.
Undoubtedly, as a son of a gloomy northern land, the tendency to self-restraint was a racial heritage. Outward facts of his life show that he was himself conscious of it and that he tried in a measure to escape from it. His love of gay Vienna, his journeys into Switzerland, his oft-repeated search for color and spontaneous emotion in Italy, are all signs of a man trying to be free from his own nature. ‘But that, in spite of Vienna,’ writes Walter Niemann, ‘he remained a true son of the sea-girt province, we know from all accounts of his life. Melancholy, deep, powerful and earnest feeling, uncommunicativeness, a noble restraint of emotion, meditativeness, even morbidness, the inclination to be alone with himself, the inability both as man and as artist to get away from himself, are characteristics which must be ever assigned to him.’[119]
There is something heroic in this, a grim strength, the chill of northern forests and northern seas, loneliness and the power to endure suffering in silence. It is an old ideal. The thane, were he wanderer or seafarer, never forgot it was his duty to lock his sorrow within his breast. That it might lead and has led to morbidness, to taciturnity, on the one hand, is no less evident than that, on the other, it may lead to splendid fortitude and nobility. This old ideal has found its first full expression in music through Brahms. We come upon a paradox, the man who would express nothing, who has in music expressed all.
It is striking how the man reveals himself in his music. The rigorous self-discipline and restraint find their counterpart in the absolute perfection of the structure, the polyphonic skill, the intellectual poise and certainty. There is a resultant lack of obvious color, a deliberate suppression of sensuousness, so marked that Rubinstein could call him, with Joachim, the high-priest of virtue, a remark which carries the antidote to its own sting, if one will be serious. And the music of Brahms is essentially serious. In general it lacks appealing charm and humor. Its beauties yield only to thoughtful study, but the harvest is rich, though often sombre. He belongs to the poets, not the painters, in that his short pieces are saturated with mood, even and rather monochrome. The mood, too, is prevailingly dark, not light. That he could at times rise out of it and give way to light-heartedness and frank humor no one can deny who will recall, for instance, the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ where the mood is boisterous and full of fun, student fun. The Passacaglia in the Fourth Symphony hints at it as well, and some of the songs, and the last movement of the violin concerto. But these are in strong contrast to the general spirit of his music. His happier moods are ever touched with wistfulness or with sadness. In such vein he is often at his best, as, for example, in the allegretto of the first and of the second symphonies. Such a mischievous humor as Beethoven expressed in the scherzo of the Eroica Symphony, such peasant joviality as rollicks through the scherzo of the Pastoral, such wit as glances through the eighth symphony, were, if he had them at all within him, too oppressed to find utterance and excite laughter or even smiles. As a boy, it will be remembered, he was often overbrimming with good spirits, full of freakish sport. The first three sonatas reflect this. Then came the illness of Schumann, his adored friend, and, knowing what grief and suffering were, he fortified himself against them. He took a wound to heart and never after was off his guard.
It cannot be said that his music is wholly lacking in humor. Reckless, ‘unbuttoned’ humor is indeed rarely if ever evident; but the broader humor, the sense of balance and proportion, strengthens his works almost without exception. If it can be said that he was never able to free himself from a mood of twilight and the northern sea, it cannot be said that he was so sunk in this mood as to lose himself in unhealthy morbidness, to lose perspective and the power of wide vision. Above all else his music is broadly planned. It is wide and spacious, not to say vast. There is enormous force in it, vigor of mind and of spirit, too. Surcharged it may not be with heat and color, but great winds blow through it, it is expansive, it lifts the listener to towering heights, never drags him to ecstatic torture in the fiery lake of distressed passion and hysterical grief. For this reason Liszt could say of some of it that it was ‘sanitary,’ and here again we must be serious not to smart with the sting.
No musician ever devoted himself more wholeheartedly to the study of folk-music, but he failed to imbue his works with the spirit of it. One has but to contrast him with Haydn or with Schubert to be convinced. The Liebeslieder waltzes, and the set of waltzes arranged for four hands, charming as they are, lack the true folk-spirit of spontaneity and warmth. For all their seeming simplicity they hold back something; they are veiled and therefore suggestive, not immediate. They breathe of the ever-changing sea, not of the warm and stable earth. His admiration for Johann Strauss is well known. That he himself could not write waltzes of the same mad, irresistible swing was to him a source of conscious regret. Yet the accompaniments which he wrote for series of German folk-songs are ineffably beautiful. In them, he interprets the spirit of the northern races to which by birth and character he belonged. That which would have made him the interpreter of all mankind, that quick emotion which is the essence of the human race, the current of warm blood which flows through us all and makes us all as one, he bound and concealed within himself. He cannot speak the common idiom.
Hence his music will impress the listener upon the first hearing as intellectual, and, as a rule, study and familiarity alone reveal the depth of genuine emotional feeling from which it sprang. Therefore it is true of him in the same measure as it is true of Bach and Beethoven that the beauty of his music grows ever richer with repeated hearings, and does not fade nor become stale. It is not, however, intellectual in the sense that it is always deliberately contrived, but only in so far as it reflects the austere control of mind over emotion which was characteristic of him as a man. One is conscious always of control and a consequent power to sustain. In rhythm, in melody and in harmony this control has left its mark. It is to be doubted if the music of any other composer is so full of idiosyncrasies of expression. Strangely enough these are not limitations. They are not mannerisms in the sense that they are habits, mere formulas of expression, unconsciously affected and riding the composer to death. They are subtly connected with and suitable to the quality of emotion which they serve to express, that emotion which, as we have seen, is always under control. They are signs of strength, not of weakness.
His rhythm is varied by devices of syncopation which are not to be found used to such an extent in the works of any other of the great composers. Especially frequent is the alteration of two beats of three values into three beats of two, an alteration practised by the early polyphonic writers and called the hemiola. Brahms employed it not only with various beats of the measure but with the measures themselves. Thus two measures of 3/4 time often become in value three measures of 2/4 time. Notice, for instance in the sonata for piano in F-minor the part for the left hand in measures seven to sixteen of the first movement. In this passage the left hand is clearly playing in 2/4 time, the right in 3/4; yet the sum of rhythmical values for each at the end of the passage is the same. It is to be noted that, whereas Schumann frequently lost himself in syncopation, or, in other words, overstepped the mark so that the original beat was wholly lost and with it the effect of syncopation, at any rate to the listener, Brahms always contrived that the original beat should be suggested if not emphasized, and his employment of syncopation, therefore, is always effective as such. He acquired extraordinary skill in the combination of different rhythms at the same time, and in the modification of tempo by modification of the actual value of the notes. The variety and complexity of the rhythm of his music are rarely lost on a listener, though often they serve only to bewilder him until the secret becomes clear. Within the somewhat rigid bounds of form and counterpoint his music is made wonderfully flexible, while by syncopation he actually makes the natural beat more relentless. Mystery, rebellion, divergence, the world-old struggle between law and chaos he could express either in fine suggestions or in strong contradictions by his power over rhythm in music. In the broader rhythm of structure, too, he was free. Phrases of five bars are constantly met with in his music.
His melodies are indescribably large. They have the poise of great and far-reaching thought and yet rarely lack spontaneity. Indeed, as a song writer he is unexcelled. In his instrumental music there is often a predominance of lyricism. Though he was eminently skillful in the treatment of melodic motifs, of small sections of melody, though his mastery of polyphonic writing is second to none, except Bach, parts of the symphonies seem to be carried by broad, flowing melodies, which in their largeness and sweep have the power to take the listener soaring into vast expanses. To cite but one instance, the melodies of the first movement of the D-major symphony are truly lyrical. In them alone there is wonderful beauty, wonderful power. They are not meaningless. Of that movement it is not to be said what a marvellous structure has Brahms been able to build out of motives in themselves meaningless, in the hands of another insignificant. The beauty of the movement is largely in the materials out of which it is built. Of the melodies of Beethoven it may be said they have infinite depth, of those of Schubert that they have perennial freshness, of those of Schumann romance and tenderness, but of Brahms that they have power, the power of the eagle to soar. They are frequently composed of the tones of a chord, sometimes of the simple tonic triad. Notice in this regard the first melodies of all the symphonies, the songs ‘Sapphic Ode,’ Die Mainacht, Wiegenlied, and countless others.
His harmonies are, as would be expected from one to whom softness was a stranger, for the most part diatonic. They are virile, almost never sensuous. Sharp dissonances are frequent, augmented intervals rare, and often his harmonies are made ‘thick’ by doubling the third even in very low registers. There is at times a strong suggestion of the old modal harmony, especially in works written for chorus without accompaniment. Major and minor alternate unexpectedly, the two modes seeming in his music interchangeable. He is fond of extremely wide intervals, very low and very high tones at once, and the empty places without sound between call forth the spirit of barren moorland, the mystery of dreary places, of the deserted sea.
In all Brahms’ music, whether for piano, for voices, combinations of instruments, or for orchestra, these idiosyncrasies are present. They are easily recognized, easily seized upon by the critic; but taken together they do not constitute the sum of Brahms’ genius. They are expressive of his broad intellectual grasp; but the essence of his genius consists far rather in a powerful, deep, and genuine emotional feeling which is seldom lacking in all that he composed. It is hard to get at, hard for the player, the singer, and the leader to reveal, but the fact none the less remains that Brahms is one of the very great composers, one who truly had something to say. One may feel at times that he set himself deliberately to say it in a manner new and strange; but it is none the less evident to one who has given thought to the interpretation of what lies behind his music, that the form of his utterance, though at first seemingly awkward and willful, is perfectly and marvellously fitting.