CHAPTER XII

NEO-ROMANTICISM: JOHANNES BRAHMS AND CÉSAR FRANCK

The antecedents of Brahms--The life and personality of Brahms--The idiosyncrasies of his music in rhythm, melody, and harmony as expressions of his character--His works for pianoforte, for voice, and for orchestra; the historical position of Brahms--Franck’s place in the romantic movement--His life, personality, and the characteristics of his style; his works as the expression of religious mysticism.

I

In the lifetime of Beethoven tendencies became evident in music which during the nineteenth century developed extraordinarily both rapidly and far, and brought about new forms and an almost wholly new art of orchestration. Music underwent transformations parallel to those which altered the face of all the arts and even of philosophy, and which were closely dependent on the general political, social, and æsthetic forces set loose throughout Europe by the French Revolution. In the music of Beethoven himself many of these alterations are suggested, foreshadowed, actually anticipated. The last pianoforte sonatas, the Mass in D, the Ninth Symphony and the last string quartets were all colored by an intense subjectivity. The form was free and strange. They were and are to-day incomprehensible without deep study, they are not objectively evident. They are dim and trackless realms of music, hinting at infinite discoveries and possibilities. They were not models, not types for his successors to imitate, but gospels of freedom and messages from remote valleys and mountains. They cast a light over distances yet to be attained. At the same time they were the expression of his own soul, profoundly personal and mystical. We need not, however, look here for traces of the French Revolution nor signs of the times. This is not proud and conscious glorification of the individual, nor the confident expression of a mood, at once relaxed and self-assertive. This is the music of a man who was first cut off from the world, who was forced within himself, so to speak, by illness, by loneliness, by complete deafness, whose heart and soul were imprisoned in an aloofness, who could find inspiration but in the mystery and power of his own being. What he brought forth from such heights and depths was to be infinitely suggestive to musicians of a later age.

During the last half dozen years of Beethoven’s life, two younger men, strongly affected by the new era of freedom, were molding and coloring music in other ways. Schubert, fired by the poetry of the German romanticists, was pouring out songs full of freshness and the new spirit, expressing in music the wildness of storm and night, the gruesome forest-rider, the fairy whisperings of the brook, the still sadness of frosty winter. Under his hands the symphony became fanciful, soft, and poetical. He filled it with enchanting melody, with the warm-blooded life of folk-songs and native rhythm, veiled it in shifting harmonies. Beside him reckless Weber, full of German fairy tales, of legends of chivalry, sensitive to tone-color, was writing operas dear to the people, part-songs for men loyal to Germany, adorning legend and ballad with splendid colors of sound. Schubert had little grasp of form, which is order in music; Weber had hardly to concern himself with it, since his music was, so to speak, the draperies of a form, of the drama. For each, poetry and legend was the inspiration, romantic poetry and wild legend, essentially Teutonic; for each, rapture and color was the ideal. So it was at the death of Beethoven. Weber was already dead, Schubert had but a year to live. On the one hand, Beethoven the mystic, unfathomed, infinitely suggestive; on the other, Schubert and Weber, the inspired rhapsodist, the genial colorist, prototypes of much to come. On every hand were imminent needs, unexplored possibilities.

In the amazingly short space of twenty-five years there grew up from these seeds a new music, most firmly rooted in Schubert and Weber, at times fed by the spirit of Beethoven. The rhapsodist gloried in his mood, the colorist painted gorgeous panoramas; there were poets in music, on the one hand, and painters in music, on the other. The question of form and design, the most vital for music if not for all the arts, has been met in many ways. The poets have limited themselves, or at any rate have found their best and most characteristic expression, in small forms. They publish long cycles made up of short pieces. Often, as in the case of Schumann’s _Papillons_, _Carnaval_, or _Kreisleriana_, the short pieces are more or less closely held together in their relationship to one fanciful central idea. They are scenes at a dress ball, comments and impressions of two or three individualities at a fête, various expressions in music of different aspects of a man’s character. Or they may have no unity as in the case of Chopin’s preludes, studies, sets of mazurkas, or Mendelssohn’s ‘Songs Without Words,’ or Schumann’s _Bunte Blätter_. The painters in music have devised new forms. They prefer to paint pictures of action, they become narrative painters in music. The mighty Berlioz paints progressive scenes from a man’s life; Liszt gives us the battle between Paganism and Christianity in a series of pictures, the whole of life in its progress toward death, the dreams, the torture and the ultimate triumph of Mazeppa, of Tasso. They have acquired overpowering skill with the brush and palette, they write for tremendous orchestras, their scores are brilliant, often blinding. Their narratives move on with great rush. We are familiar with the story, follow it in the music. We know the guise in music of the characters which enact it, they are constantly before us, moving on, rarely reminiscent. The bands of strict form break before the armies of characters, of ideas, of events, and we need no balance, for the story holds us and we are not upset. But these painters, and we in their suite, are less thrilled by the freedom of their poem and by the stride of their narrative than bewitched and fired by the gorgeousness of the colors which they employ with bold and masterly hand.

We shall look relatively in vain for such colors in the music of the ‘poets.’ They are lyricists, they express moods in music and each little piece partakes of the color of the mood which it enfolds--is in general delicate and monochrome. The poets are essentially composers for the pianoforte. They have chosen the instrument suitable for the home and for intimate surroundings, and their choice bars the brilliancy of color from their now exquisite now passionate and profoundly moving art. They are musicians of the spirit and the mood, meditative, genuine, passionate, tearful and gay by turn. The others are musicians of the senses and the act, dramatists, tawdry charlatans or magnificently glorious spokesmen, leaders, challengers, who speak with the resonance of trumpets and seduce with the honey of soft music.

Now the poets are descended from Schubert and the painters from Weber. Both are unwavering in their allegiance to Beethoven, but the spirit of Beethoven has touched them little. The poets more than the painters are akin to him, but they lack his breadth and power. The painters have something of his daring strength, but they stand over against him, are not in line with him. Such is the condition of music only twenty-five years after the death of him whom all, save Chopin, who worshipped Mozart, hailed as supreme master.

In September, 1853, Brahms came to Schumann, then conductor at Düsseldorf on the Rhine, provided with a letter of introduction from Joseph Joachim, the renowned violinist, but two years his senior. Brahms was at that time just over twenty years of age. He brought with him manuscripts of his own composing and played for Schumann. A short while before he had played the same things for Liszt at Weimar. Of his three weeks’ stay as Liszt’s guest very bitter accounts have been written. If Brahms was tired and fell asleep while Liszt was playing to him, if Liszt was merely seeking to impose himself upon the young musician when he played that young man’s scherzo at sight from manuscript, and altered it, well and good. Brahms was, at any rate--thanks in this case, too, to Joachim--received in the throne-room of the painters in music, and nothing came of it. He departed the richer by an elegant cigar-case, gift from his host; and in later years still spoke of Liszt’s unique, incomparable and inimitable playing. But in the throne-room of the poets he was hailed with unbounded rejoicing. Schumann took again in his gifted hand the pen so long idle and wrote the article for the _New Journal of Music_, which proclaimed the advent of the true successor of Beethoven. It was a daring prophecy and it had a tremendous effect upon Brahms and upon his career; for it was a gage thrown to him he could not neglect and though it at once created an opposition, vehement and longstanding, it screwed his best and most genuine efforts to the sticking place. Never through the rest of his life did he relax the self-imposed struggle to make himself worthy of Schumann’s confidence and hope.

Meanwhile, among the painters, directly in the line from Weber, another man had come to the fore, a colossal genius such as perhaps the world had never seen before nor is like to see again. Richard Wagner, at that time just twice the age of Brahms, was in exile at Zürich. He had written _Rienzi_, ‘The Flying Dutchman,’ _Tannhäuser_, and _Lohengrin_. All had been performed. The libretto of the Ring was done and the music to _Rheingold_ composed and orchestrated. Schumann disapproved. It is hard to understand why he, so recklessly generous, so willing to see the best in the music of all the younger school, the ardent supporter of Berlioz, should have turned away from Wagner. One must suspect a touch of personal aversion. He was not alone. No man ever had fiercer battle to wage than Wagner, nor did any man ever bring to battle a more indomitable courage and will. Liszt was his staunch supporter; and to Liszt, too, both Schumann and his wife had aversion, easier to understand than their aversion to Wagner. For Liszt, the virtuoso, was made of gold and tinsel. Liszt, the composer, was made so in part. But Wagner, the musician, was incomparably great, that is to say, his powers were colossal and unlike those of any other, and therefore not to be compared. That Schumann failed to recognize this comes with something of a shock to those who have been amazed at the keenness of his perception, and yet more to those who have rejoiced to find in the musician the nobility and generosity of a great-hearted man. It is obvious that the divergence between poets and painters had by this time become too wide for his unselfish, sympathetic nature to bridge; and thus when Brahms, a young man of twenty, was launched into the world of music he found musicians divided into two camps between which the hostility was to grow ever more bitter. Liszt at Weimar, Schumann at Düsseldorf, were the rallying points for the opposing sides, but within a year Schumann’s mind failed. The standard was forced upon Brahms, and Liszt gave himself up to Wagner.

It was almost inevitable that the great part of the world of music should be won over by Wagner. One by one the poets seceded, gave way to the influence of Wagner’s marvellous power, an influence which Clara Schumann never ceased to deplore. The result was that Brahms was regarded, outside the circle of a few powerful friends, as reactionary. He led, so to speak, a negative existence in music. He was cried down for what he was not, not for what he was. There is no reason to suppose that Brahms suffered thereby. The sale of his compositions constantly increased and after the first few probationary years he never lacked a good income from them. Still, perhaps the majority of musicians were blinded by the controversy to the positive, assertive, progressive elements in Brahms’ music. On the other hand, the adherents of Brahms, the ‘Brahmins,’ as they have been not inaptly called, retaliated by more or less shameful attacks upon Wagner, which later quite justly fell back upon their own heads, to their merited humiliation. They failed to see in him anything but a smasher of tradition, they closed their eyes to his mighty power of construction. In the course of time Wagner’s triumph was overwhelming. He remained the successful innovator, and Brahms the follower of ancient tradition.

II

The life of Brahms offers little that is striking or unusual. He was born in Hamburg, the northern city by the sea, on the 7th of May, 1833, of relatively humble parents. His father was a double-bass player in a theatre orchestra. His mother, many years older than his father, and more or less a cripple, seems to have had a deep love for reading and a remarkable memory to retain what she had read. In his earliest childhood Brahms commenced to acquire a knowledge of poetry from his mother, which showed all through his later life in the choice of poems he made for his songs. His ability to play the piano was so evident that his father hoped to send him as a child wonder to tour the United States, from which fate, however, he was saved by the firmness of one of his teachers. Twice in November, 1847, he appeared with others in public, playing conventional show pieces of the facture of Thalberg; but in the next year he gave a recital of his own at which he played Bach, a point of which Kalbeck[118] makes a trifle too much. The income of the father was very small, and Brahms was not an overwhelming success as a concert pianist. To earn a little money, therefore, he used to play for dancing in taverns along the waterfront; forgetful, we are told, of the rollicking sailors, absorbed in books upon the desk of the piano before him. His early life was not an easy one. It helped to mold him, however, and brought out his enormous perseverance and strength of will. These early days of hardship were never forgotten. He believed they had helped rather than hindered him, a belief which, it must be admitted, is refreshingly manly in contrast to the wail of despised genius so often ringing in the ears of one who reads the lives of the great musicians as they have been penned by their later worshippers. Not long before he died, being occupied with the question of his will and the disposal of his money, he asked his friend, the Swiss writer J. V. Widmann for advice. Widmann suggested that he establish a fund for the support and aid of struggling young musicians; to which Brahms replied that the genius of such, if it were worth anything, would find its own support and be the stronger for the struggle. The attitude is very characteristic.

Occasional visitors to Hamburg had a strong influence upon the youth. Such were Joachim and Robert and Clara Schumann, though he did not then meet the latter. At the age of nineteen, having already composed the E-flat minor scherzo, the F-sharp minor and C-major sonatas and numerous songs, he went forth on a concert tour with the Bohemian violinist Remenyi. On this tour he again came in touch with Joachim, who furnished him with letters to Liszt at Weimar and the Schumanns at Düsseldorf. Of his stay at Weimar mention has already been made. At Düsseldorf he was received at once into the heart of the family. In striking contrast with the gruffness of later years is the description given by Albert Dietrich of the young man come out of the north to the home of the Schumanns. ‘The appearance, as original as interesting, of the youthful almost boyish-looking musician, with his high-pitched voice and long fair hair, made a most attractive impression upon me. I was particularly struck by the characteristic energy of the mouth and serious depths in his blue eyes....’ One evening Brahms was asked to play. He played a Toccata of Bach and his own scherzo in E-flat minor ‘with wonderful power and mastery; bending his head down over the keys, and, as was his wont in his excitement, humming the melody aloud as he played. He modestly deprecated the torrent of praise with which his performance was greeted. Everyone marvelled at his remarkable talent, and, above all, we young musicians were unanimous in our enthusiastic admiration of the supremely artistic qualities of his playing, at times so powerful or, when occasion demanded it, so exquisitely tender, but always full of character. Soon after there was an excursion to the Grafenberg. Brahms was of the party, and showed himself here in all the amiable freshness and innocence of youth.... The young artist was of vigorous physique; even the severest mental work hardly seeming an exertion to him. He could sleep soundly at any hour of the day if he wished to do so. In intercourse with his fellows he was lively, often even exuberant in spirits, occasionally blunt and full of wild freaks. With the boisterousness of youth he would run up the stairs, knock at my door with both fists, and, without awaiting a reply, burst into the room. He tried to lower his strikingly high-pitched voice by speaking hoarsely, which gave it an unpleasant sound.’

All accounts of the young Brahms lay emphasis on his lovableness, his exuberant good spirits, his shining good health and his physical vitality. Clara Schumann wrote in her diary: ‘I found a nice stanza in a poem of Bodenstedt’s which is just the motto for Johannes:

’“In winter I sing as my glass I drain, For joy that the spring is drawing near; And when spring comes, I drink again, For joy that at last it is really here.”'

Clara, too, admired his playing, and she was competent to judge. ‘I always listen to him with fresh admiration,’ she wrote. ‘I like to watch him while he plays. His face has a noble expression always, but when he plays it becomes even more exalted. And at the same time he always plays quietly, i. e. his movements are always beautiful, not like Liszt’s and others’.’ He was always devoted to Schubert and she remarked that he played Schubert wonderfully. Later in life his playing became careless and loud.

Not half a year after Brahms was received at Düsseldorf Schumann’s mind gave way. In February, 1854, he attempted suicide, and immediately after it became necessary to send him to a private sanatorium at Endenich. For two years longer he lived. They were years of anguish for his wife, during which Brahms was her unfailing refuge and support. She wrote in her diary that her children might read in after years what now is made known to the world. ‘Then came Johannes Brahms. Your father loved and admired him as he did no man except Joachim. He came, like a true comrade, to share all my sorrow; he strengthened the heart that threatened to break, he uplifted my mind, he cheered my spirits whenever and wherever he could, in short, he was in the fullest sense of the word my friend.’

Brahms was profoundly affected by the suffering he witnessed and by the personal grief at the loss of a friend who had meant so much to him. The hearty, boisterous gaiety such as he poured into parts of his youthful compositions, into the scherzo of the F-minor sonata, for instance, and into the finale of the C-major, never again found unqualified expression in his music. His character was set and hardened. From then on he locked his emotions within himself. Little by little he became harsh, rejected, often roughly, kindness and praise--made himself a coat of iron and shut his nature from the world. Ruthlessly outspoken and direct, seemingly heedless of the sensibilities of those who loved him dearly and whom he dearly loved, he presents only a proud, fierce defiance to grief, to misfortune, even to life itself. What such self-discipline cost him only his music expresses. Three of his gloomiest and most austere works came first into his mind during the horror of Schumann’s illness; the D-minor concerto for the piano, the first movement of the C-minor quartet, and the first movement of the C-minor symphony.

Meanwhile he was earning a precarious living by giving concerts here and there, not always with success; and he had begun a relentlessly severe course of self-training in his art. Here Joachim and he were mutually helpful to each other. Every week each would send to the other exercises in music, fragments of compositions, expecting in return frank and merciless criticism. In the fall of 1859 he accepted a position at Detmold as pianist and leader of the chorus. A small orchestra was at his service, which offered him opportunity to study instrumental effects, especially wind instruments, and for which he wrote the two serenades in A and in D major. Likewise he profited by his association with the chorus, and laid at Detmold the foundation for his technique in writing for voices, which has very rarely been equalled. Duties in this new position occupied him only during the musical season, from September to December. At other times he played in concert or went back to his home in Hamburg. At one concert in Leipzig in 1859 he was actually hissed, either because his own concerto which he played or his manner of playing it was offensive. The critics were viciously hostile. Brahms took the defeat manfully, evidently ranked it as he did his days of playing for the Hamburg sailors, among the experiences which were in the long run stimulating. At Hamburg he organized a chorus of women’s voices for which many of his loveliest works were then and subsequently composed. In the chorus was a young Viennese lady from whom, according to Kalbeck, he first heard Viennese folk-music. With Vienna henceforth in mind he continued in his work at Detmold until 1862, when he broke away from North Germany and went to establish himself in the land of his desire. He came before the public first as a pianist, later as a composer. For a year he was conductor of the _Singakademie_. Afterward he never held an office except during the three years 1872-1875, when he was conductor of the _Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde_.

The death of his mother in 1867 aggravated his tendency to forbidding self-discipline. The result in music was the ‘German Requiem,’ which even those who cannot sympathize with his music in general have willingly granted to be one of the great masterpieces of music. As it was first performed at a concert of the _Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde_ in Vienna in April, 1867, it consisted of only three numbers. To these he later added four, and in this form it was performed on Good Friday, April 10, 1868, in Bremen. Clara Schumann, who was present, wrote in her diary that she had been more moved by it than by any other sacred music she had ever heard. It established Brahms’ reputation as a composer, a reputation which steadily grew among conservatives. A group of distinguished critics, musicians, and men of unusual intellectual gifts gathered about him in Vienna. Among them were Dr. Theodor Billroth, the famous surgeon, probably his most intimate friend; Eduard Hanslick and Max Kalbeck among the critics, K. Goldmark and Johann Strauss among the musicians. Joachim was a lifelong friend, Von Bülow and Fritz Simrock, the publisher, were staunch admirers, and in Dvořák he later took a deep interest. Journeys to Italy and to Switzerland took him from Vienna for some time every year, and he often spent a part of the summer with Clara Schumann at various German watering places.

A few works were inspired by unusual events, such as the ‘Song of Triumph’ to celebrate the victory of the German armies in the war against France, and the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ composed in gratitude to the university at Breslau which conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. A similar degree was offered by the University of Cambridge, which Brahms was forced to refuse because he was unwilling to undertake the voyage to England.

He was an omnivorous reader and an enthusiastic amateur of art. Regular in his habits, a stubborn and untiring worker, he composed almost unceasingly to the time of his last illness and death in April, 1897. The great works for the orchestra comprise ‘Variations on a Theme of Haydn’s,’ the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ and the ‘Tragic Overture,’ four great symphonies, the second concerto for piano and orchestra, the concerto for violin and orchestra, and a concerto for violin and violoncello. The great choral works are the ‘Requiem,’ ‘The Song of Triumph,’ and ‘The Song of Destiny,’ a cantata, ‘Rinaldo,’ and a great number of songs. Besides these there are many sets of works for the piano, all in short forms, generally called caprices or intermezzi, and several sets of variations, one on a theme of Paganini, one on a theme of Handel; sonatas for piano and violin, and piano and violoncello; the magnificent quintet in F-minor for piano and strings, sonatas for clarinet and piano, string quartets, piano quartets, and trios.

III

Brahms is to be ranked among the romantic composers in that all his work is distinctly a reflection of his own personality, in that every emotion, mood, dream, or whatever may be the cause and inspiration of his music is invariably tinged with the nature through which it passed. The lovable, boisterous frankness which was characteristic of him as a young man was little by little curbed, subdued, levelled, so to speak. He cultivated an austere intellectual grasp of himself, tending to crush all sentimentality and often all sentiment. We may not hesitate to believe his own word that Clara Schumann was dearer to him than anyone else upon the earth, nor yet can we fail to read in her diary that she suffered more than anyone else from his uncompromising intellectuality. If she attempted to praise or encourage him she met with a heartless intellectual rebuke. Not long after Schumann died, he wrote a letter to reprimand her for taking his own cause too much to heart. ‘You demand too rapid and enthusiastic recognition of talent which you happen to like. Art is a republic. You should take that as a motto. You are far too aristocratic.... Do not place one artist in a higher rank and expect the others to regard him as their superior, as dictator. His gifts will make him a beloved and respected citizen of this republic, but will not make him consul or emperor.’ To which she replied: ‘It is true that I am often greatly struck by the richness of your genius, that you always seem to me one on whom heaven has poured out its best gifts, that I love and honor you for the sake of many glorious works. All this has fastened its roots deep down in my heart, so, dearest Johannes, do not trouble to kill it all by your cold philosophizing.’ Clara exerted herself to bring his compositions before the public. A short extract from her diary will show how Brahms rewarded her efforts. ‘I was in agonies of nervousness but I played them [variations on a theme of Schumann’s] well all the same, and they were much applauded. Johannes, however, hurt me very much by his indifference. He declared that he could no longer bear to hear the variations, it was altogether dreadful to him to listen to anything of his own and to have to sit by and do nothing. Although I can well understand this feeling I cannot help finding it hard when one has devoted all one’s powers to a work, and the composer himself has not a kind word for it.’ The tenderness which would have meant much to her he failed to show. He made himself rough and harsh, stern and severe. That a man could write of him as ‘a steadfast, strong, manly nature, self-contained and independent, striving ever for the highest, an uncompromisingly true and unbending artistic conscience, strict even to harshness, rigidly exacting,’ wins the adherent, wins loyalty and admiration, hides but does not fill the lack.

Undoubtedly, as a son of a gloomy northern land, the tendency to self-restraint was a racial heritage. Outward facts of his life show that he was himself conscious of it and that he tried in a measure to escape from it. His love of gay Vienna, his journeys into Switzerland, his oft-repeated search for color and spontaneous emotion in Italy, are all signs of a man trying to be free from his own nature. ‘But that, in spite of Vienna,’ writes Walter Niemann, ‘he remained a true son of the sea-girt province, we know from all accounts of his life. Melancholy, deep, powerful and earnest feeling, uncommunicativeness, a noble restraint of emotion, meditativeness, even morbidness, the inclination to be alone with himself, the inability both as man and as artist to get away from himself, are characteristics which must be ever assigned to him.’[119]

There is something heroic in this, a grim strength, the chill of northern forests and northern seas, loneliness and the power to endure suffering in silence. It is an old ideal. The thane, were he wanderer or seafarer, never forgot it was his duty to lock his sorrow within his breast. That it might lead and has led to morbidness, to taciturnity, on the one hand, is no less evident than that, on the other, it may lead to splendid fortitude and nobility. This old ideal has found its first full expression in music through Brahms. We come upon a paradox, the man who would express nothing, who has in music expressed all.

It is striking how the man reveals himself in his music. The rigorous self-discipline and restraint find their counterpart in the absolute perfection of the structure, the polyphonic skill, the intellectual poise and certainty. There is a resultant lack of obvious color, a deliberate suppression of sensuousness, so marked that Rubinstein could call him, with Joachim, the high-priest of virtue, a remark which carries the antidote to its own sting, if one will be serious. And the music of Brahms is essentially serious. In general it lacks appealing charm and humor. Its beauties yield only to thoughtful study, but the harvest is rich, though often sombre. He belongs to the poets, not the painters, in that his short pieces are saturated with mood, even and rather monochrome. The mood, too, is prevailingly dark, not light. That he could at times rise out of it and give way to light-heartedness and frank humor no one can deny who will recall, for instance, the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ where the mood is boisterous and full of fun, student fun. The Passacaglia in the Fourth Symphony hints at it as well, and some of the songs, and the last movement of the violin concerto. But these are in strong contrast to the general spirit of his music. His happier moods are ever touched with wistfulness or with sadness. In such vein he is often at his best, as, for example, in the allegretto of the first and of the second symphonies. Such a mischievous humor as Beethoven expressed in the scherzo of the Eroica Symphony, such peasant joviality as rollicks through the scherzo of the Pastoral, such wit as glances through the eighth symphony, were, if he had them at all within him, too oppressed to find utterance and excite laughter or even smiles. As a boy, it will be remembered, he was often overbrimming with good spirits, full of freakish sport. The first three sonatas reflect this. Then came the illness of Schumann, his adored friend, and, knowing what grief and suffering were, he fortified himself against them. He took a wound to heart and never after was off his guard.

It cannot be said that his music is wholly lacking in humor. Reckless, ‘unbuttoned’ humor is indeed rarely if ever evident; but the broader humor, the sense of balance and proportion, strengthens his works almost without exception. If it can be said that he was never able to free himself from a mood of twilight and the northern sea, it cannot be said that he was so sunk in this mood as to lose himself in unhealthy morbidness, to lose perspective and the power of wide vision. Above all else his music is broadly planned. It is wide and spacious, not to say vast. There is enormous force in it, vigor of mind and of spirit, too. Surcharged it may not be with heat and color, but great winds blow through it, it is expansive, it lifts the listener to towering heights, never drags him to ecstatic torture in the fiery lake of distressed passion and hysterical grief. For this reason Liszt could say of some of it that it was ‘sanitary,’ and here again we must be serious not to smart with the sting.

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.

Analysis of the great works is reserved for later volumes. The ‘Requiem,’ the quintet for piano and strings, the ‘Song of Destiny,’ the overwhelmingly beautiful concerto for violin and orchestra, the songs, the songs for women’s voices with horn and harp, the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ and the ‘Tragic Overture,’ the works for pianoforte, the trios, quartets and quintets for various instruments, the four mighty symphonies--all bear the stamp of the man and of his genius in ways which have been hinted at. No matter how small the form, there is suggestion of poise and of great breadth of opinion. It is this spirit of expanse that will ever make his music akin to that of Bach and Beethoven. Schumann’s prophecy was bold. Some believe that it has been fulfilled, that Brahms is in truth the successor of Beethoven. Whether or not Brahms will stand with Bach and Beethoven as one of the three greatest composers it is far too early to say. The limitations of his character and of his temperament are obvious and his music has not escaped them. On the other hand, the depth and grandeur, the heroic strength, the power over rhythm, over melody, and over harmony belong only to the highest in music. He was of the line of poets descended from Schubert through Schumann, but he had a firmer grasp than they. His music is more strongly built, is both deeper and higher. Its sombreness has been unjustly aggravated by comparison with Wagner, but the time has come when the two men are no longer judged in relation to each other, when they are found to be of stuff too different to be compared any more than fire and water can be compared. They are sprung of radically different stock. It might almost be said that they are made up of different elements. If with any composers, he can only be compared with Bach and Beethoven. His perfect workmanship nearly matches that of the former; but Bach, for all the huge proportions of his great works, is a subtle composer, and Brahms is not subtle. The harmonies of Bach are chromatic, those of Brahms, as we have seen, are diatonic. His forms are near those of Beethoven, and his rugged spirit as well. His symphonies, in spite of the lyrical side of his genius which is evident in them, can stand beside those of the master of Bonn and lose none of their stature. But he lacks the comic spirit which sparkles ever and again irrepressibly in the music of Beethoven. He is indubitably a product of the movement which, for lack of a more definite name, we must call romantic; and, though it has been said with truth that some of the music of Beethoven and much of Bach is romantic, it cannot be denied that the romantic movement brought to music qualities which are not evident in the works of the earlier masters. The romanticists in every art took themselves extremely seriously as individuals. From their relationship to life as a whole, to the state, and to man they often rebelled, even when making a great show of patriotism. A reaction was inevitable, tending to realism, cynicism, even pessimism. Brahms stood upon the outer edge of romanticism, on the threshold of the movement to come. He took himself seriously, not however with enjoyment in individual liberty, with conscious indulgence in mood and reverie, but with grim determination to shape himself and his music to an ideal, which, were it only that of perfect law, was fixed above the attainment of the race. If, as it has been often written, Beethoven’s music expresses the triumph of man over destiny, Brahms may well speak of a triumph in spite of destiny. That over which Beethoven triumphed was the destiny which touches man; that in spite of which and amid which the music of Brahms stands firm and secure is the destiny of the universe, of the stars and planets whirling through the soundless, unfathomable night of space, not man’s soul exultant but man’s reason unafraid, unshaken by the cry of the heart which finds no consolation.

V

The drift of romanticism toward realism is easy to trace in all the arts. There were, however, artists of all kinds who were caught up, so to speak, from the current into a life of the spirit, who championed neither the glory of the senses, as Wagner, nor the indomitable power of reason, as Brahms, but preserved a serenity and calm, a sort of confident, nearly ascetic rapture, elevated above the turmoil of the world, standing not with nor against, but floating above. Such an artist in music was César Franck, growing up almost unnoticed between Wagner and Brahms, now to be ranked as one of the greatest composers of the second half of the century. He is as different from them as they are from each other. Liszt, the omniscient, knew of him, had heard him play the organ in the church of Ste. Clotilde, where in almost monastic seclusion the greater part of his life flowed on, had likened him to the great Sebastian Bach, had gone away marvelling; but only a small band of pupils knew him intimately and the depth of his genius as a composer.

His life was retired. He was indifferent to lack of appreciation. When, through the efforts of his devoted disciples, his works were at rare intervals brought to public performance, he was quite forgetful of the cold, often hostile, audience, intent only to compare the sound of his music as he heard it with the thought he had had in his soul, happy if the sound were what he had conceived it would be. Of envy, meanness, jealousy, of all the darker side of life, in fact, he seems to have taken no account. Nor by imagination could he picture it, nor express it in his music, which is unfailingly luminous and exalted. Most striking in his nature was a gentle, unwavering, confident candor, and in his music there is scarcely a hint of doubt, of inquiring, or of struggle. It suggests inevitably the cathedral, the joyous calm of religious faith, spiritual exaltation, even radiance.

His life, though not free in early years from hardship, was relatively calm and uneventful. He was born in Liège in December, 1822, eleven years after Wagner, eleven years before Brahms, and from the start was directed to music by his father. In the course of his early training at Liège he acquired remarkable skill as a virtuoso, and his father had hopes of exploiting his gifts in wide concert tours. In 1835 he moved with his family to Paris and remained there seven years; at the end of which, having amazed his instructors and judges at the Conservatoire, among whom, be it noted, the venerable Cherubini, and won a special prize, he was called from further study by the dictates of his father and went back to Liège to take up his career as a concert pianist. For some reason this project was abandoned at the end of two years, and he returned to Paris, there to pass the remainder of his life.

At first he was organist at the church of Notre Dame de Lorette, later at Ste. Clotilde, and in 1872 he was appointed professor of the organ at the Conservatoire. To the end of his life he gave lessons in organ and pianoforte playing, here and there, and in composition to a few chosen pupils. He was elected member of the Legion of Honor in 1885; not, however, in recognition of his gifts as a composer, but only of his work as professor of organ at the Conservatoire. He died on the 8th of November, 1890. At the time of his marriage, in 1848, he resolved to save from the pressure of work to gain a livelihood an hour or two of every day for composition--time, as he himself expressed it, to think. The hours chosen were preferably in the early morning and to the custom, never broken in his lifetime, we owe his great compositions, penned in those few moments of rest from a busy life. He wrote in all forms, operas, oratorios, cantatas, works for piano, for string quartet, concertos, sonatas, and symphonies.

With the exception of a few early pieces for piano all his work bears the stamp of his personality. Like Brahms, he has pronounced idiosyncrasies, among which his fondness for shifting harmonies is the most constantly obvious. The ceaseless alteration of chords, the almost unbroken gliding by half-steps, the lithe sinuousness of all the inner voices seem to wrap his music in a veil, to render it intangible and mystical. Diatonic passages are rare, all is chromatic. Parallel to this is his use of short phrases, which alone are capable of being treated in this shifting manner. His melodies are almost invariably dissected, they seldom are built up in broad design. They are resolved into their finest motifs and as such are woven and twisted into the close iridescent harmonic fabric with bewildering skill. All is in subtle movement. Yet there is a complete absence of sensuousness, even, for the most part, of dramatic fire. The overpowering climaxes to which he builds are never a frenzy of emotion, they are superbly calm and exalted. The structure of his music is strangely inorganic. His material does not develop. He adds phrase upon phrase, detail upon detail with astonishing power to knit and weave closely what comes with what went before. His extraordinary polyphonic skill seems inborn, native to the man. Arthur Coquard said of him that he thought the most complicated things in music quite naturally. Imitation, canon, augmentation, and diminution, the most complex problems of the science of music, he solves without effort. The perfect canon in the last movement of the violin sonata sounds simple and spontaneous. The shifting, intangible harmonies, the minute melodies, the fine fabric as of a goldsmith’s carving, are all the work of a mystic, indescribably pure and radiant. Agitating, complex rhythms are rare. The second movement of the violin sonata and the last movement of the ‘Prelude, Aria, and Finale’ are exceptional. The heat of passion is seldom felt. Faith and serene light prevail, a music, it has been said, at once the sister of prayer and of poetry. His music, in short, wrote Gustave Derepas, ‘leads us from egoism to love, by the path of the true mysticism of Christianity; from the world to the soul, from the soul to God.’

His form, as has been said, is not organic, but he gives to all his music a unity and compactness by using the same thematic material throughout the movements of a given composition. For example, in the first movement of the ‘Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue’ for piano, the theme of the fugue which constitutes the last movement is plainly suggested, and the climax of the last movement is built up out of this fugue theme woven with the great movement of the chorale. In the first movement of the ‘Prelude, Aria, and Finale,’ likewise for piano, the theme of the Finale is used as counterpoint; in the Aria again the same use is made of it; in the Finale the Aria theme is reintroduced, and the coda at the end is built up of the principal theme of the Prelude and a theme taken from the closing section of the Aria. The four movements of the violin sonata are most closely related thematically; the symphony, too, is dominated by one theme, and the theme which opens the string quartet closes it as well. This uniting of the several movements of a work on a large scale by employing throughout the same material was more consistently cultivated by Franck than by any other composer. The concerto for piano and orchestra in E-flat by Liszt is constructed on the same principle; the D minor symphony of Schumann also, and it is suggested in the first symphony of Brahms, but these are exceptions. Germs of such a relationship between movements in the cyclic forms were in the last works of Beethoven. In Franck they developed to great proportion.

The fugue in the ‘Prelude, Chorale and Fugue’ and the canon in the last movement of the violin sonata are superbly built, and his restoration of strict forms to works in several movements finds a precedent only in Beethoven and once in Mozart. The treatment of the variation form in the _Variations Symphoniques_ for piano and orchestra is no less masterly than his treatment of fugue and canon, but it can hardly be said that he excelled either Schumann or Brahms in this branch of composition.

Franck was a great organist and all his work is as clearly influenced by organ technique as the works of Sebastian Bach were before him. ‘His orchestra,’ Julien Tiersot wrote in an article published in _Le Ménéstrel_ for October 23, 1904, ‘is sonorous and compact, the orchestra of an organist. He employs especially the two contrasting elements of strings (eight-foot stops) and brass (great-organ). The wood-wind is in the background. This observation encloses a criticism, and his method could not be given as a model; it robs the orchestra of much variety of coloring, which is the richness of the modern art. But we ought to consider it as characteristic of the manner of César Franck, which alone suffices to make such use legitimate.’ Undeniably the sensuous coloring of the Wagnerian school is lacking, though Franck devoted himself almost passionately at one time to the study of Wagner’s scores; yet, as in the case of Brahms, Franck’s scoring, peculiarly his own, is fitting to the quality of his inspiration. There is no suggestion of the warmth of the senses in any of his music. Complete mastery of the art of vivid warm tone-coloring belongs only to those descended from Weber, and preëminently to Wagner.

The works for the pianoforte are thoroughly influenced by organ technique. The movement of the rich, solid basses, and the impracticably wide spaces call urgently for the supporting pedals of the organ. Yet they are by no means unsuited to the instrument for which they were written. If when played they suggest the organ to the listener, and the Chorale in the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue is especially suggestive, the reason is not be found in any solecism, but in the religious spirit that breathes from all Franck’s works and transports the listener to the shades of vast cathedral aisles. Among his most sublime works are three Chorale Fantasias for organ, written not long before he died. These, it may safely be assumed, are among the few contributions to the literature for the organ which approach the inimitable master-works of Sebastian Bach.

There are three oratorios, to use the term loosely, ‘Ruth,’ ‘The Redemption,’ and ‘The Beatitudes,’ belonging respectively in the three periods in which Franck’s life and musical development naturally fall. All were coldly received during his lifetime. ‘Ruth,’ written when he was but twenty-four years old, is in the style of the classical oratorios. ‘The Redemption,’ too, still partakes of the half dramatic, half epic character of the oratorio; but in ‘The Beatitudes,’ his masterpiece, if one must be chosen, the dramatic element is almost wholly lacking, and he has created almost a new art-form. To set Christ’s sermon on the mount to music was a tremendous undertaking, and the great length of the work will always stand in the way of its universal acceptance; but here more than anywhere else Franck’s peculiar gift of harmony has full force in the expression of religious rapture and the mysticism of the devout and childlike believer.

It is curious to note the inability of Franck’s genius to express wild and dramatic emotion. Among his works for orchestra and for orchestra and piano are several that may take rank as symphonic poems, _Les Éolides_, _Le Chasseur maudit_, and _Les Djinns_, the last two based upon gruesome poems, all three failing to strike the listener cold. The symphony with chorus, later rearranged as a suite, ‘Psyche,’ is an exquisitely pure conception, wholly spiritual. The operas _Hulda_ and _Grisèle_ were performed only after his death and failed to win a place in the repertory of opera houses.

It is this strange absence of genuinely dramatic and sensuous elements from Franck’s music which gives it its quite peculiar stamp, the quality which appeals to us as a sort of poetry of religion. And it is this same lack which leads one to say that he grows up with Wagner and Brahms and yet is not of a piece with either of them. He had an extraordinarily refined technique of composition, but it was perhaps more the technique of the goldsmith than that of the sculptor. His works impress by fineness of detail, not, for all their length and remarkable adherence of structure, by breadth of design. His is intensely an introspective art, which weaves about the simplest subject and through every measure most intricate garlands of chromatic harmony. It is a music which is apart from life, spiritual and exalted. It does not reflect the life of the body, nor that of the sovereign mind, but the life of the spirit. By so reading it we come to understand his own attitude in regard to it, which took no thought of how it impressed the public, but only of how it matched in performance, in sound, his soul’s image of it.

With Wagner, Brahms and César Franck the romantic movement in music comes to an end. The impulse which gave it life came to its ultimate forms in their music and was for ever gone. It has washed on only like a broken wave over the works of most of their successors down to the present day. Now new impulses are already at work leading us no one knows whither. It is safe to say that the old music has been written, that new is in the making. An epoch is closed in music, an epoch which was the seed time of harmony as we learned it in school, and as, strangely enough, the future generations seem likely to learn it no more.

Beethoven stood back of the movement. From him sprang the two great lines which we have characterized as the poets and painters in music, and from him, too, the third master, César Franck. It would indeed be hardihood to pronounce whether or not the promise for the future contained in the last works of Beethoven has been fulfilled.

L. H.

FOOTNOTES:

[118] Max Kalbeck: ‘Johannes Brahms,’ 3 vols. (1904-11).

[119] Walter Niemann: _Die Musik seit Richard Wagner_, Berlin, 1914.