Somebody once said that the bassoon is the clown of the orchestra. Therefore the double bassoon should be twice as funny—perhaps even a Shakespearean clown. And simply because somebody gave the poor bassoon this name, it must be regarded as funny per se. “Funny”? The bassoon is lugubrious, ghostly, spectral, weird, unearthly, demoniacal. It smells of mortality. It suggests the glow-worm and the grave. The wicked nuns in Robert le Diable heard it and obeyed the spell, for corruption called to corruption. It lends a flavor of the charnal house to Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. It pictures the mood of Leonora without Di Luna’s tower. It chatters and gibbers as the murderous artist in the Symphonie fantastique goes his wretched way to the scaffold. It is the instrument dear to all that inhabit the night air, the cemetery, the diseased mind.
But these bassoons appear in Brahms’ overture “etwas plötzlich”—a phrase I once heard used in a Berlin beer hall by a dapper and corseted and monocled officer, who was extremely thirsty and thus addressed the waiter. And I defy any sober-minded person who has not the fear of Brahms before his eyes to find the introduction or the treatment of the song spontaneously gay or humorous. The song itself is a good freshman hazing song.
Some of the books—and books of authority—say that the Academic was written for performance at Breslau on the occasion of Brahms’ receiving the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. He did receive the degree, but it was on March 11, 1879, and if anyone doubts this I shall be happy to quote to him the degree in the original Latin—which I cannot construe, except as regards the date. I like to think of Brahms as a doctor of philosophy. The degree goes so well with the man. It also explains some—not all—of his music. Let the overture be considered and weighed as the night work of a Doctor of Philosophy.
Brahms wrote two overtures in the summer of 1880 at Ischl—the Academic and the Tragic. They come between the Symphony in D major and that in F major in the list of his orchestral works. It is said by Heuberger that Brahms wrote two “Academic Festival overtures”; so he must have destroyed one of them. When the Academic was first played at Breslau, the rector and Senate and members of the Philosophical faculty sat in the front seats at the performance, and the composer conducted his work. Brahms was not a university man, but he had known with Joachim the joyous life of students at Göttingen—at the university made famous by Canning’s poem:
Whene’er with haggard eyes I view
This dungeon that I’m rotting in,
I think of those companions true
who studied with me at the U-
niversity of Göttingen—