Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music - J. Peter Burkholder (1984)
Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music - J. Peter Burkholder (1984)
Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music - J. Peter Burkholder (1984)
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Brahms and Twentieth-CenturyClassicalMusic
J.PETERBURKHOLDER
JohannesBrahmsis a modemof themoderns,andhis CMinorSymphonyis a remarkable
over-earnest
age.... Weventure
expressionof the innerlife of this anxious,introverted,
its author'srightto a placebesideornear
to expressa doubtthatthis workdemonstrates
Beethoven.
Boston Daily Advertiser, 18 January1878.'
how composers think about it, how music behaves, why it is written, and how composers
measure their success.
Histories of the music of the later nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries have almost universally explained the stylistic changes which
characterize this period as the results of stresses
within the musical language itself. Harmony
and melody, which had traditionally both depended upon and helped to create the feeling of
being "in a key," were often used in the later
nineteenth century to undermine that feeling
for emotional or dramatic effect, and standard
histories have viewed this development as decisive, speaking of the "breakdown"or "demise"
of tonality as if tonal music suddenly ceased to
be composed, played, or understood.
This so-called "breakdown" is described as
"inevitable." According to this view, composers in the generation which included Mahler,
Schoenberg, and Scriabin had no choice but to
proceed toward total chromaticism, along a
path mapped out for them in tonal music as far
back as Bach and Mozart.3 Among late nineteenth-century figures, Wagner is preeminent
in such histories, which view the prolongeddis75
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enduring; its beauties are revealed best by familiarity and close study; and its personality is
distinctive. It seems at once traditional and
fresh, ancient and forward-looking. Written to
continue the musical values of Schumann,
Beethoven, and Bach, its aspiration to the label
"classic" is unmistakable.
Other examples of Brahms's synthesis of two
beat.12
But there is a second model for this movement, less obvious though certainly as important: Beethoven's Eroica,the first and one of the
few other symphonies whose finale is a set of
variations. The bass line of both variationsets is
first presented in the middle and upper registers, only later being placed in the bass; both
movements are in three sections, including a
suggestion of a sonata-form development and
recapitulation; within each section, the rhythm
gradually intensifies; and both movements
close with a faster symphonic coda, which begins with a recall of the movement's opening,
then develops the thematic material in a new
way, divorced from the rigidity of the theme's
recurringeight-measure phrases.
In a more general way, Brahmsborrows melodic grace, ornament, and chromaticism from
Mozart and Chopin, orchestrational ideas from
Schumann, and part of his conception of the
chaconne from Couperin. The result is pure
Brahms. By choosing two strong but very distinct and unusual works from different eras of
music as his principal models, Brahms avoids
mere imitation; his own voice is recognizable,
even when his debt is most obvious. This movement is a prime example of a piece written for
the concert hall museum: modelled on the important classical composers, it visibly participated in the tradition they represent;its value is
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80
Brahms's fundamental importance for the music of the past one hundred years is this: he has
provided the model for future generations of
what a composer is, what a composer does, why
a composer does it, what is of value in music,
and how a composer is to succeed. For composers as diverse as Debussy and Ives, Bart6k and
Boulez, Britten and Crumb, Stockhausen and
Shostakovich, it has proven impossible to escape from the idea of composition incarnatedby
Brahms.
In this respect, the "music of the future" has
belonged not to Wagnerbut to Brahms.It is the
change in the orientation of serious music, the
change in the purpose of composition, which
of Brahms as they have understood it, composers from Reger to Wuorinen have measured
their success in terms of the absolute quality of
their music, not in terms of its immediate or
wide appeal. Like Brahms's music, also, their
music is self-consciously "modern," reflecting
on the tradition of art music and seeking continuously to renew it.
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NOTES
'Quoted from Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective: CriticalAssaults on ComposersSince Beethoven's
Time, 2nd edn. (Seattleand London, 1965),p. 68.
2SeeArnold Schoenberg,"Brahmsthe Progressive,"in Style
and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed.
LeonardStein, (New York, 1975), pp. 398-441. This essay
first appearedin the first edn. of Style and Idea, pub. 1950,
and is basedin parton a radiobroadcastSchoenbergmadein
1933 on the occasion of the anniversaryof Brahms'sbirth.
See also Peter Gay, "Aimez-VousBrahms?:On Polaritiesin
Modernism,"in his Freud,Jews, and Other Germans(New
York, 1978),pp. 231-56.
3Seefor instance Eric Salzman, Twentieth-CenturyMusic:
An Introduction, 2nd edn. (EnglewoodCliffs, 1974), p. 32:
"The growth of equal temperament, chromaticism, and
modulation had made possible the historical rise of functional tonality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
and destroyed it in the twentieth; thus tonality contained
within itself from the start the seed of its own destruction."
This presumption of the development of total chromaticism as an inevitable result of what had come beforecan be
tracedto the self-justificationsof Schoenbergandhis circle,
if not earlier,reflectingboth a sense of crisis andan attitude
of personalmartyrdomin pursuinga path againstone's own
will. Compare Anton Webern's discussion of the "paths
that led unavoidably to twelve-note composition" (p. 43)
and his claim that Bach's music "sowed the fatal seeds" of
tonality's ultimate dissolution, that in "Bach'schoraleharmonizations tonality was dealt a severe blow" (pp.36-37),
in "The Path to Twelve-Note Composition"and "The Path
to New Music," pub. togetheras ThePath to the NewMusic
fed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black [BrynMawr, 19631),or
82
sion of Brahmsin "Brahmsthe Progressive"with Berg'sdiscussion of Schoenberg'sFirst String Quartet in his article,
"Why is Schoenberg's Music So Hard to Understand?",
trans. Anton Swarowsky and JosephH. Lederer,Music Review 13 (1952), 187-96; this originally appearedin 1924,
nine years beforethe first broadcastversion of Schoenberg's
article.
7Gay,"Brahms,"p. 254. The currentreputationGay attributes to Brahmsmay be the popularone; it is certainly not
the reputation Brahmsenjoys among musicians, who have
had time to absorbSchoenberg'sview.
8Examplesof such a treatment are not hard to find. Recent
texts on music since 1945 by Reginald Smith Brindle(The
New Music: The Avant-Garde Since 1945 [London,1975])
and Paul Griffiths (ModernMusic: The Avant-GardeSince
1945 [New York, 1981]) concentrate solely on the avantgarde,as their titles indicate. Peter Yates, author of one of
the freshest looks at modem music (Twentieth Century
Music: Its Evolution from the Endof the HarmonicErainto
the PresentEraof Sound [New York,1967]),deliberatelyexcludes from his study composers "whose compositions,
however valuable, did not contributeto musical evolution"
(p. xiii).
Even the best generalhistories of twentieth-centurymusic, those by Eric Salzman and by H. H. Stuckenschmidt
(Twentieth Century Music, trans. RichardDeveson [New
York and Toronto, 1969]),devote space almost exclusively
to the new musical styles and approaches developed by
composers from Schoenbergand Bart6kto Cage and Stockhausen, while the twentieth-century music that is heard
most often in the concert hall-including Sibelius, Rachmaninov, Ravel, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Gershwin, Copland, Britten, and others-is treatedonly briefly,if at all.
9The process by which this took place, briefly summarized
here, is documented by William Weber,"MassCultureand
the Reshapingof EuropeanMusical Taste, 1770-1870," International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 8 (1977), 5-21.
10Iborrow this definition from a more general overview of
the role of the concert hall in relation to the modernhistoricist mainstream in my essay "MuseumPieces: The Historicist Mainstreamin Music of the LastHundredYears,"Journal of Musicology 2 (1983), 115-34. The definition appears
on p. 119.
"While the Bach Chaconne for solo violin is the apparent
model for a great many details of structure and motive,
Brahms's chaconne bass itself has a different source. According to Richard Specht, Brahms adapted his bass line
from the final choralciaccona of Bach'sCantata150 ("Nach
dir, Herr, verlanget mich"), doubling its length and introducing a chromatic passing tone. Severalyears beforecomposing his last symphony, Brahms reportedlyplayed this
choral ciaccona for Hans von Biilow and suggestedthe appropriateness of its bass for an orchestral chaconne. (See
Richard Specht, Johannes Brahms, trans. Eric Blom [London, 1930], p. 270.) Although Bach's cantata providedthe
model for the bass line, there seems to be no other resemblance of melody, figuration, texture, or structurebetween
the choral ciaccona and Brahms'schaconne.
'2The parallels in figuration seem quite deliberate. The
opening stately dotted rhythm of the Bach Chaconne appears in the fourth variation of the Brahms, at the point
where the chaconne ostinato finally takes its rightfulplace
in the bass, and the next severalvariationsall correspondexactly in figurationto variationsin the Bach.
'3"Brahmsund die Musik vergangenerEpochen," in Die
Ausbreitung des Historismus fiberdie Musik.Aufsiitze und
Diskussionen, ed. WalterWiora(Regensburg,1969),p. 152.
14See Ludwig Misch's discussion of counterpoint, canon,
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