BRAHMS, JOHANNES

BRAHMS, JOHANNES (1833–1897), one of the most important Austro-Germanic composers of the second half of the nineteenth century.

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, but from 1862 spent the majority of his adult life in Vienna. Active in all the major genres of the period apart from opera and program music, he was also a virtuoso concert pianist, a conductor, and an editor of older music. His mature compositional style presents a remarkable synthesis—of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century choral music, Baroque music (especially Johann Sebastian Bach [1685–1750]), the Viennese Classics, Beethovenian rhetoric and technical procedures, Schubertian lyricism, and folk and popular idioms. Brahms's work was informed by a number of ideological positions, including historicism, Romanticism, later nineteenth-century political liberalism, proto-modernist strains, and aspects of the age's materialism. Such breadth of reference bespeaks an almost democratic artistic open-mindedness, and the latent political ramifications of this were sometimes overtly manifested. For example, the composer's Ein deutsches Requiem (A German requiem) op.45 (completed in its final form in 1868), which established Brahms as a major European composer, aspires toward a universal message (Brahms referred to it as a "human" requiem) rather than a specifically Christian one. Democratic artistic tendencies also placed Brahms at a tangent to the predominant artistic cult of originality, and the increasingly chauvinistic political atmosphere of his times—although it should be noted that Brahms himself could be deeply jingoistic.

Brahms achieved this flexibly synthetic style through self-conscious, almost scholarly contemplation and self-criticism, activities that were further to distinguish Brahms from his era, which often valorized the creative act in radically Romantic terms, as an unmediated overflow of expression. This self-consciousness also placed an intimate stamp on his music that led the music critic Paul Bekker (1882–1937) to describe Brahms in 1918 as an essentially bourgeois composer of chamber music; on the other hand, later writers (including Theodor Adorno [1903–1969] and Carl Dahlhaus [1929–1989]) saw it as a sign of progressiveness. Brahms, however, started out strongly within the orbit of Romanticism and the musical avant-garde: as a young man he read the Romantic literature of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) and Jean Paul (1763–1825). His compositional style, while already eclectic in its sources (though not fully fused), could be oriented toward turbulent Romantic expression and formal fantasy, and also the up-to-date musical techniques of thematic transformation with which the composer Franz Liszt (1811–1886), whom Brahms met in Weimar in 1853, was then presently working. The composer Robert Schumann (1810–1856) famously wrote in 1853, the year he met Brahms, that each of Brahms's works was then "so different from the others that it seemed to stream from its own individual source."

Brahms transformed these creative sources into one synthesized compositional identity during the 1850s, leading in the first half of the 1860s to what the English music critic Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1875–1940) referred to as Brahms's "first maturity": a group of works (including the remarkably integrated Piano Quintet in F Minor, op. 34) that set the basic agenda for Brahms's compositional style for the rest of his life. The 1850s were also marked by intense interest in the music of the past (including a course of study in counterpoint)—a historicist tendency that remained with Brahms, and which is most famously expressed later by his dramatic use of the Baroque passacaglia form for the last movement of his Symphony no. 4, op. 98 (1885). Finally, the decade saw Brahms briefly withdraw from the arena of German musical life, resulting in compositional silence toward the end of the 1850s, and the formulation of a critical distance to the so-called New German School of composition and its claims to stand for the "music of the future." This latter move led, to Brahms's embarrassment, to his name appearing at the head of manifesto in 1860 asserting that the programmatic aspirations of Liszt and others were contrary to the "inner spirit of music." The repercussions were that Brahms became associated with the music critic Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) and the idea of absolute music, and also scripted as an antipode to Richard Wagner (1813–1883)—misleadingly, since Brahms held Wagner, whom he met in 1862, and his music in high esteem. Such associations were only strengthened, particularly in 1876, by the milestone first performance of Brahms's First Symphony, which brought to an end the mid-century domination of orchestral symphonic music by the programmatic agendas of Liszt and his followers.

Scholarship around the turn of the twenty-first century has emphasized extra-musical elements and influences, but the association of Brahms with absolute music and musical formalism remains important. However surprising, lyrical, or Romantic its expressive appearance, Brahms's music is frequently grounded in the more purely musical parameters of what the composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) famously was to call "developing variation": a seamless and highly economical musical logic, where each moment in the score can be justified in terms of its motivic derivation from the preceding material. For Schoenberg, this marked Brahms as a protomodernist; and indeed, the increasingly material concentration of Brahms's music (culminating in such late examples as the Vier ernste Gesange [Four serious songs], op. 121) whereby entire musical structures are unified by webs of thematic and motivic cross-references and derivations, is remarkably prophetic. But such unifying techniques, which ground Brahms's music in quantifiable musical relations, also like Brahms strongly to the materialist predilections of European thought at that time, which rejected the metaphysical and idealist strains of early-nineteenth-century Romanticism for having contributed to the failure of the Revolutions of 1848 and thus sought a theoretical outlook, both within the arts (for example, in realism and naturalism) and the sciences (with positivism), orientated more toward the empirically verifiable constituents of existing reality. Ironically, though, Brahms's materialist credentials helped to distinguish him from the predominant musical culture of the second half of the nineteenth century, which was driven by a metaphysics of music inspired by the early-nineteenth-century philosopher Schopenhauer, and thus continued to align itself with the transcendental tendencies of Romanticism, if in a somewhat overdetermined form.

In the final analysis, Brahms is a slippery combination of seemingly contradictory positions (simultaneously modernist, retrospective, and contemporaneous) unique in the later nineteenth century. As a result, the man and his music have been open to appropriation by a number of divergent polemics, thus making him a fascinating subject for reception history in our own pluralistic postmodern world.

See alsoLiszt, Franz; Modernism; Music; Romanticism; Schoenberg, Arnold; Schopenhauer, Arthur; Wagner, Richard.

bibliography

Frisch, Walter. Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation. Berkeley, Calif., 1984.

Frisch, Walter, ed. Brahms and His World. Princeton, N.J., 1990.

Musgrave, Michael. The Cambridge Companion to Brahms. Cambridge, U.K., 1999.

——. The Music of Brahms. London, 1985.

Schoenberg, Arnold. "Brahms the Progressive." In Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, edited by Leonard Stein, translated by Leo Black. London, 1975.

James Currie