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.

IV

Brahms’ pianoforte works are with comparatively few exceptions in small forms. There are rhapsodies and ballades and many intermezzi and capriccios. Unlike Schumann he never gives these pieces a poetic title to suggest the mood in which they are steeped, though sometimes, rarely indeed, he prefixes a motto, a stanza from a poem, as in the andante of the F-minor sonata, or the title of a poem, as in the ballade that is called ‘Edward,’ or the intermezzo in E-flat major, both suggested by Scotch poems. The pieces are almost without exception difficult. The ordinary technique of the pianist is hardly serviceable, for common formulas of accompaniment he seldom uses, but rather unusual and wide groupings of notes which call for the greatest and most rapid freedom of the arm and a largeness of hand. Mixed rhythms abound, and difficult cross-accents. For one even who has mastered the technical difficulties of Chopin and Liszt new difficulties appear. He seems to stand out of the beaten path of virtuosity. His aversion to display has carefully stripped all his music of conventional flourish and adornment, and his pianoforte music is seldom brilliant never showy, but rather sombre. What it lacks in brilliance, on the other hand, it makes up in richness and sonority; and when mastered will prove, though ungrateful for the hand, adapted to the most intimate spirit of the instrument. The two sets of variations on a theme of Paganini make the utmost demands upon hand and head of the player. It may be questioned if any music for the piano is technically more difficult. One has only to compare them with the Liszt-Paganini studies to realize how extraordinarily new Brahms’ attitude toward the piano was. In Liszt transcendent, blinding virtuosity; in Brahms inexhaustible richness.

The songs, too, are not less difficult and not more brilliant. The breadth of phrases and melodies require of the singer a tremendous power to sustain, and yet they are so essentially lyrical that the finest shading is necessary fully to bring out the depth of the feeling in them. The accompaniments are complicated by the same idiosyncrasies of rhythm and spacing which are met with in the piano music, yet they are so contrived that the melodies are not taken and woven into them as in so many of the exquisite songs of Schumann, but that the melodies are set off by them. In writing for choruses or for groups of voices, he manifested a skill well-nigh equal to that of Bach and Handel. He seems often to have gone back to the part-songs of the sixteenth century for his models.

Compared with the scores of Wagner his orchestral works are sombre and gray. The comparison has led many to the conclusion that Brahms had no command of orchestral color. This is hardly true. Vivid coloring is for the most part lacking, but such coloring would be wholly out of place in the expression of the emotion which gives his symphonies their grandeur. His art of orchestration, like his art of writing for the pianoforte, is peculiarly his own, and again is the most fitting imaginable to the quality of his inspiration. It is often striking. The introduction to the last movement of the first symphony, the coda of the first movement of the second symphony, the adagio of the fourth symphony are all points of color which as color cannot be forgotten; and in all his works for orchestra this is what Hugo Riemann calls a ‘gothic’ interweaving of parts, which, if it be not a subtle coloration, is at any rate most beautiful shading. On the whole, it is inconceivable that Brahms should have scored his symphonies otherwise than he has scored them. As they stand they are representative of the nature of the man, to whom brilliance and sensuousness were perhaps too often to be distrusted. Much has been made of the well-known fact that not a few of his works, and among them one of his greatest, the quintet in F minor for pianoforte and strings, were slow to take their final color in his mind. The D minor concerto for piano and orchestra was at one time to have been a symphony, the great quintet was originally a sonata for two pianos, the orchestral variations on a theme of Haydn, too, were first thought of for two pianos, and the waltzes for pianoforte, four hands, were partially scored for orchestra. But this may be as well accounted for by his evident and self-confessed hesitation in approaching the orchestra as by insensitiveness to tone color. The concerto in D minor is opus 15, the quintet opus 34, the Haydn variations opus 56. The first symphony, on the other hand, is opus 68. After this all doubt of color seems to have disappeared.