Arts
Resistances to Brahms
Hans Keller
Brahms's 'A German Requiem' will be broadcast on Saturday 7 October at 7.40, simultaneously on BBC-2 and Radio 3, in a recording of Giulini's Edinburgh Festival performance.
Geoffrey Skelton's translation of the first volume of Cosima Wagner's 'Diaries' will be Published by Collins on Monday: the excerpts below are Hans Keller's own translation.
:The other day, Richard said rather nicely: "Brahms composes the way Bach might have composed." 'Thus Cosima Wagner on 14 December 1874 — in what is the most important biographical work I know, of Which no musician can afford to remain ignorant. So far as Wagner's attitude to Brahms is concerned, Cosima does not, admittedly, distinguish sufficiently between his view and hers. Nevertheless, the difference between the two emerges pretty clearly — on the basis of the sheer facts she reports. Cosima just hates Brahms, but Richard, the official enemy, is profoundly ambivalent, respectful, admiring even. 19 June 1875: 'Richard sent me the strangest letter from Mr Brahms, which is as artificial and unedifying as are his compositions.' Brahms had sent Wagner a manuscript; unfortunately, Cosima does not seem to think it worthwhile to identify it. What she does tell us is that Wagner responded by sending Brahms the score of Rhinegoid; no mean expression of gratitude! All Cosima is worried about, however, is the letter that accompanied Brahms's score— which, eight days later, she again describes as 'artificial and-tortuous in style'. But when Brahms thanks Wagner for the autograph of Rhinegold and Wagner reads her his letter, she describes it as strangely wise and discerning' — which, no doubt, is Wagner's own reaction, except, Perhaps, for the 'strangely'. For her own psyche, things come to a head on 18 November: 'Quartet evening at Hellmesberger's [the distinguished quartet leaders's]. Met Mr Brahms for the first time: he played a piano quartet of his own making. [Could it have been the C minor, completed in 1874 or 1875?1 A red-faced and coarse-looking man, and his opus is very dry and stilted.' Cosima's reactions, in short, are of psychological interest, whereas Richard's own produce shafts of artistic insight. Since the present essay is about the Psychology of our artistic response to Brahms, both sets of reactions are equally welcome.
From the late 1850s onwards, the Bach entatas were being published for the first time — in the Bach-Gesellschaft's collected edition. There seems little doubt about Brahms's intense interest in them. Like Bach, and unlike anybody else in whom Wagner himself was interested (though not unlike Mendelssohn), Brahms decided to integrate a basic chorale melody into an extended structure — the second movement of his Requiem, Denn alles Fleisch es ist wte Gras (`Behold, all flesh is as the grass'). After the orchestral introduction of this B flat minor march in, yes, 3/4-time, it is the choral entry that makes use of the chorale, `Wer nur den lieben Gott lasst walten' ('He who lets only the good Lord rule'). By the end of 1874, when Wagner made his remark about the Bachian Brahms or the Brahmsian Bach, he must have been familiar with Brahms's Requiem, whose first three movements were first performed in 1867, the first four in 1868, and all of them in 1869. At the same time, Wagner did not need such overt evidence of Brahms's involvement with Bach in order to arrive at his penetrating piece of insight: his observation shows how deeply he, as opposed to his wife, grasped what, conceivably, was the most complicated personality in the history of musical genuis. Had Bach been complicated, rather than straightforwardly complex, he would have composed like Brahms: this is my translation of Wagner's observation.
Bach's extreme complexity was altogether musical; Brahms's extreme complications, reflected in the less successful parts of his music, were psychological, and produced musical inhibitions which made him the only great composer whose music can, at times, be neurotic, in that it is temporarily unable to face up to psychic reality — very much unlike Tchaikovsky or Mahler, the so-miscalled, official neurotics amongst the great. We remember that Brahms envied Johann Strauss his uninhibited melodic invention, and we remain constantly aware of his lifelong, unhappy love affair with the gipsy idiom — unhappy, that is, except for one single, protracted moment of ecstatic consummation, the slow movement from the Clarinet Quintet, where Brahms is at one with the realities it was his task to discover, and where he definitely doesn't 'compose the way Bach might have composed'.
When inhibitions intervene, we invariably get interruptions or even total repression of melodic invention (hear the opening of the B flat Quartet!), a developmental porridge (pardon my technical language), and contrapuntal complications which are diagnosably different from the contrapuntal complexity of Bach and indeed of Brahms at his most realistic. It is, in fact, his sim plicity which Brahms found difficult to convey without complications, not his com plexity. Beethoven didn't, and Brahms tried to meet his responsibilities towards Beethoven with the help, or the hindrance, of Bach. Wagner, with his own all-out commitment to Beethoven, understood only too well what was going on. Cosima only got the symptoms — in and outside music: 'As artificial and unedifying as are his compositions' is not the only example; her remark about Brahms's 'artificial and tortuous' verbal style, too, can be transferred to his music — its few least successful bits. But so gravely did these upset her (as distinct from her husband) that she projected what could have remained a truthful piece of criticism on to his entire output, which thus became 'dry and stilted' all the way.
The moral, I hope, is obvious. Inasmuch as we still resist Brahms's music (albeit, nowadays, in private), we are behaving like Cosima, incapable of the insight which Brahms's celebrated antagonist was able to attain. Resistances to Wagner's own music continue to be dramatic: those affected cannot tolerate his invitation to identify with the unconscious contents he brings to the surface. Those who do identify are proportionately enthusiastic, and indeed passionate 'Wagnerians'. Resistances to Brahms's music are of a far subtler, more unobtrusive kind: those affected, having perceived his neuroticisms, recognise their own in them, and while it is bad enough to have one's own unconscious exposed by Wagner, the dirtiest trick of them all is to have one's unsuccessful attempts to deal with it exposed to the naked ear.
Since, at the same time, the sensitiVe, but resistant listener or player is aware not only of Brahms's identification with Beethoven, but of his self-therapeutic identification with Bach, he proceeds to blame Brahms for both not being a Beethoven and not being a Bach. The fact is that Bach and Beethoven apart, there are very few composers around who are either — few, at the same time, who get anywhere near Brahms's monumental genius. It follows that it is Brahms's genius he is reproached with, and nothing else.
Now, why am I fussing? Brahms is a popular composer, and the undemonstrative resistances to his music are, on the whole, confined to confidential communications between music lovers and musicians. This is the truth but not the whole truth: those resistances become public property, if only as stolen goods, as soon as they are expressed in the concert hall — by people, often outstanding performers, who cannot play Brahms without resisting him and, inevitably, 'improving' him. I am not arguing against an interpreter's realistic repairs — such as happened, on the highest level of inspiration, in Furtwangler's Bruckner performances (and probably in Mahler's Schumann performances). But the players I am talking about are little Cosimas: they treat the greatest, healthiest Brahms the way individual, neurotic passages can profitably be treated, and thereby reduce. him to the level of their own neuroses. What is worse, they are bound to be successful, because there will always be a public eagerly absorbing any reduction to its own neuroses.
In this sense, Brahms is the most difficult great composer in the wide-ranging development of Western composition — difficult to understand, and to play, without well-meaning ill will. In order to appreciate the manhandling of Brahms's greatest masterpieces, we only have to stop and think how many truly and consistently great performances of, say, his fiddle Concerto we remember. With genuine respect for the galaxy of current Brahms players, I can only find one amongst them who is without a trace of resistances and their interpretative consequences — Ida Haendel, whose Brahms Concerto, therefore, is an historic event. And before the current generation of virtuosos, the only great Brahms Concerto was Bronislav Huberman's (of whom recordings are extant); he, significantly in our context, was half-saint, half-gipsy, and gipsyfied the finale which, itself, had of course been composed in respectful admiration of the distant beloved, the gipsy style. At the age of twelve, Huberman played the Concerto to Brahms, who broke into tears and promised the young fiddler a Rhapsody (!) for violin and orchestra, but died before he could fulfil his promise.
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