A Man of Substance

Back in my days as a musical whore, when my pianistic services were to be had by the flashing of a few banknotes, I accompanied a ‘cellist for a concert in some smallish city/largish town up north. I have no memory whatsoever of the concert—no more than an aging hooker can recall the facial features of a nondescript john—but the post-concert reception has lingered. The soirée was put together by the local art-and-music dragons, i.e., a posse of ladies who were grimly determined to stuff the community with frequent dollops of the fine arts, at gunpoint if necessary. At the concert’s conclusion we were hustled over to the head dragon’s house, there to nod gracefully and speak politely, all the while calculating the odds of making a quick exit.

This particular house was dimly lit by wall sconces, each sporting flickering, vaguely flame-shaped, orange-hued bulbs; the same also provided the illumination for the elaborate electric candelabrum on the table. The comestibles were either encased in aspic or wrapped in pastry; for libation, sweet sherry or Chablis. Everywhere one looked—or squinted, given the dim orange light—one saw endless geegaws, trifles and knickknacks. Every possible horizontal surface bristled with porcelain or glass or pottery, every vertical surface was hung with oil paintings encased in frilly frames. The draperies were thick, the atmosphere stifling.

Please God tell me this isn’t happening, I thought. But it was happening and God, if he were indeed responsible, had learned home decor from a 1942 Redbook. I escaped to the gentleman’s lounge where I found that the toilet paper was suspended between the arms of a smirking cherub while the room swam in a thick stench of sachet. And it was dimly lit.

Flashing back on the tackiest home interior in my experience (well, maybe second tackiest, considering a gay couple’s apartment that took homo baroque style to undreamed-of heights), I’m inclined towards the inevitable comparison with composers and their output.

Who might be my unlucky candidate as the musical analog of that rococo cherub-fest in the hills? Allow me to present Edward MacDowell, or perhaps Maurice Ravel in all his twee preciousness. Both have more than a whiff of Martha Stewart about them, an emphasis on superficial polish that, in its insistence on maintaining gentility, becomes tasteless—the acoustic equivalent of frilly pantaloons on piano legs, or drippy crystal chandeliers in boxy suburban tract houses.

And who might stand for the opposite, i.e., the composer who avoids the emptily decorative but nonetheless creates music of beauty? For that, I must turn to Johannes Brahms, a writer of absolute integrity and nobility, but a conjuror of enchantment nonetheless. The Brahms who gave us the Liebeslieder waltzes, all gemütlichkeit and Viennese nostalgia, also produced the Third Symphony—passionate, intimate, sometimes difficult but always compelling and absorbing.

Brahms belonged to that exclusive club of artists of superior sensibility, without an iota of cheapness to them, creators for whom pandering to lesser tastes was impossible. Such are very few, indeed—in fact, I can place only Sebastian Bach alongside Brahms when it comes to sheer consistency of intent. Both Brahms and Bach could write dull music sometimes, but neither man was capable of writing bad music. Brahms, in fact, consigned lesser manuscripts to the fireplace. Nor did he ever let off tinkering with his compositions if improvement was still to be had. As a result, the closest thing to second-rate Brahms might be his early cantata Rinaldo, but even that work falls short of Brahmsian norms not due to flimsiness, but due to Brahms’s unsuitability at musical storytelling. Rinaldo—which tiptoes hesitantly around the sinkhole of musical theater without ever actually falling in—proves beyond doubt that Brahms, like Bach, was right to steer clear of operatic floozies.

Brahms was at his best, I think, when his inspiration remained free from any taint of the extra-musical. Stories and words, catnip to some composers, were so much treacle to him. His many lieder, while often beguiling, have never caught on with the same force as his chamber, orchestral, or instrumental works. Certainly Ein Deutsches Requiem points to a Brahms who could meld words and music into a compelling whole, but in his lieder Brahms seems content to use words as placeholders that follow, rather than dictate, his musical message. Most of Brahms’s lieder remain untouched if one removes the actual texts and substitutes solfège syllables in their place. Try that with Schumann, and the music collapses.

In fact, the obscurities of the Brahms canon lie almost entirely in the realm of the voice. Of his many choral works only the Requiem has retained traction (who ever programs the “Song of Destiny”, “Song of Triumph”, or “Song of the Fates”?), while of his abundant accompanied vocal pieces perhaps only the Liebeslieder Waltzes ever get a hearing beyond the occasional short set of solo songs. I would guess that not one musician in ten thousand is aware that Brahms, like Schubert, wrote an Ave Maria—except his setting is for chorus with organ accompaniment.

But as an instrumental and orchestral composer, he is to my mind unparalleled amongst late Romantics. He was not one to churn out music in bulk; there are but four symphonies, three violin sonatas, two ‘cello sonatas, two clarinet sonatas, three string quartets, three piano quartets. But each is a mainstay in its respective bailiwick, as are his concertos (four in all). If his earlier piano music has slipped to the edges of the repertory, the same cannot be said of the later works, those rambling cycles of short character pieces with their studiedly abstract names: intermezzo, capriccio, rhapsody. And within that restricted but abundant output lies endless fascination. Recently I was reduced to tears by a recording of the Variations on a Theme of Haydn, not moved by tragedy (it’s a sunny work) but by the sheer joy of such superbly-made music in such a radiant performance (Iván Fischer conducting the Budapest Festival Orchestra, on Channel Classics.) I’ve known the Haydn Variations since I was a teenager, but no matter; Brahms never goes stale.

Nor does his ability to challenge ever fade. His technical mastery stands at the summit, up there with our most revered giants such as Bach, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven. No student of form ever takes on a Brahms sonata movement casually; a significant journey lies ahead and only a fool would expect otherwise. Brahms’s harmonic progressions reveal a polyphonic sturdiness that is rooted solidly in the great Germano-Austrian tradition. Although he avoided the cheaply decorative or trivial, Brahms was never averse to writing harmonies of breathtaking beauty when the music was served by doing so, typically saving his most ravishing harmonic wizardy for transitional passages when the ear needs a bit of help to traverse the formal landscape.

Sometimes critics have taken potshots at his orchestration, accusing him of a lack of imagination or downright dullness. To be sure, no late Romantic showed such restraint as Brahms; the occasional ding-a-ling on the triangle marks the limit of his jazzy sound effects. He was subtle rather than overt, which might lead the unobservant to think him unimaginative. Consider the third movement of the Third Symphony, in which the main theme is originally stated in the strings, and then upon the recapitulation is given to an oboe backed up by bassoon—and then joined by the clarinet in a moment which rivals anything in the literature for sheer orchestral magic. Brahms showed no interest whatsoever in exotic percussion, fancy-pants brass instruments, unusual instrumental techniques, or spectacle.

But that’s just the point: Brahms didn’t need any of that. A lesser composer might be obliged to rely on string harmonics, sul ponticello, col legno, overblowing, exotica, or an orchestra of a thousand—like the preciousness of those art-dragon ladies and their definition of elegance as orange-flicker candelabra, aspic, and cherub toilet-paper-holders. But Brahms offers the elegance of a beautifully turned wooden table, perfectly finished and stained, built to last a thousand years and placed just so in a spacious, comfortable room. Ageless integrity, precision, and quality—that’s Brahms, creator of unimpeachable substance.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.