Walter Frisch is the H. Harold Gumm/Harry and Albert von Tilzer Professor of Music at Columbia University. He is the author of Brahms: The Four Symphonies and Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation. Kevin C. Karnes is assistant professor of music history at Emory University. He is the author of Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna.

BRAHMS AND HIS WORLD

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-14344-6

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………..ixPreface and Acknowledgments from the First Edition……………………………………………………………………………xiPermissions and Credits……………………………………………………………………………………………………xiiiTime and Memory: Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s Vienna LEON BOTSTEIN………………………………………………3Johannes Brahms, Solitary Altruist PETER F. OSTWALD………………………………………………………………………….27Brahms the Godfather STYRA AVINS…………………………………………………………………………………………..41Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms NANCY B. REICH……………………………………………………………………………57The Pianos of Johannes Brahms GEORGE S. BOZARTH AND STEPHEN H. BRADY…………………………………………………………..73Brahms, the Third Symphony, and the New German School DAVID BRODBECK…………………………………………………………..95The “Brahms Fog”: On Analyzing Brahmsian Influences at the Fin de Sicle WALTER FRISCH…………………………………………..117Between Work and Play: Brahms as Performer of His Own Music ROGER MOSELEY………………………………………………………137Brahms, Max Klinger, and the Promise of the Gesamtkunstwerk: Revisiting the Brahms-Phantasie (1894) KEVIN C. KARNES…………………167Five Early Works by Brahms (1862) ADOLF SCHUBRING……………………………………………………………………………195Discovering Brahms (1862-72) EDUARD HANSLICK………………………………………………………………………………..217The Brahms Symphonies (1887) HERMANN KRETZSCHMAR…………………………………………………………………………….233Brahms’s A Cappella Choral Pieces, op. 104 (1892) HEINRICH SCHENKER……………………………………………………………253Brahms’s Four Serious Songs, op. 121 (1914) MAX KALBECK………………………………………………………………………267Johannes Brahms: The Last Days Memories and Letters EDUARD HANSLICK……………………………………………………………307My Early Acquaintance with Brahms RICHARD HEUBERGER………………………………………………………………………….339Remembering Johannes Brahms: Brahms and His Krefeld Friends HEINZ VON BECKERATH…………………………………………………349Johannes Brahms as Man, Teacher, and Artist GUSTAV JENNER…………………………………………………………………….381Brahms and the Newer Generation: Personal Reminiscences by Alexander von Zemlinsky and Karl Weigl………………………………….425″Dedicated to Johannes Brahms” PREPARED BY WALTER FRISCH……………………………………………………………………..433Index……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………443Notes on the Contributors………………………………………………………………………………………………….459

Chapter One

Time and Memory: Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s Vienna

LEON BOTSTEIN

How can one grasp the nature and impact of Brahms’s musical language and communication in his own time? In the first instance one has to guard against an uncritical sense of the stability of musical texts, their meaning, and how they can be read and heard. The acoustic, cultural, and temporal habits of life of the late nineteenth century in which Brahms’s music functioned demand reconsideration if the listener in the early twenty-first century wishes to gain a historical perspective on Brahms’s music and its significance. A biographical strategy and the history of critical reception themselves are insufficient.

Brahms’s considerable success and notoriety, in Vienna and in German-speaking Europe as a whole, can be approached by a speculative effort to understand better the making of music, the thinking about music, and the listening to music during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In reconstructing the world in which Brahms worked and trying to reimagine the exchange between Brahms the composer and the various publics to which his music was directed-the meaning of musical discourse in Brahms’s era-one aspect of nineteenth-century life and culture on the periphery of musical life can be useful: science and the philosophical and psychological speculation related to it.

Understanding Brahms, his ambitions as an artist, and his impact on his contemporaries requires a grasp of the centrality of science and technology in Brahms’s world. His friend the Swiss writer J. V. Widmann described Brahms’s own perspective: “Even the smallest discovery, every improvement in any sort of gadget for domestic use; in short, every sign of human reflection, if it was accompanied by practical success, delighted him thoroughly. Nothing escaped his notice … if it was something new, in which progress could be discerned.” Except for the bicycle, Brahms “felt himself lucky that he lived in the age of great discoveries, and could not praise enough the electric light, Edison’s phonograph, and the like.” For example, Brahms welcomed innovations in the design and manufacture of pianos.

This widespread late nineteenth-century fascination with scientific progress was sufficiently pervasive to influence the conception of music and the musical experience. The enormous body of writing about the physics of sound, the psychology of hearing, the design of sound-producing instruments, and the aesthetics of music from the latter half of the nineteenth century mirrors the intersection of the intense enthusiasms for both music and science. The application of varied scientific and philosophic methods to the nagging questions of beauty, memory, time perception, the nature and meaning of music, consonance, and the historical evolution of musical communication illuminates habits of musical expectation, listening, and judgment. Systematic thinking, talking, and writing about the lure and consequence of music in themselves were important aspects of the musical experience, particularly in Brahms’s Vienna. The writings of such diverse individuals as Hermann Helmholtz, H. A. Koestlin, Heinrich Ehrlich (Brahms’s colleague in the 1850s), Theodor Billroth, and other members of the university faculties of Vienna and Prague (e.g., L. A. Zellner, Richard Wallaschek, and the great Ernst Mach) provide evidence of conceptions of music that both mirrored and influenced the contemporary evaluation of the experience of music. In order to make this connection, however, dimensions of the musical world Brahms inhabited require clarification.

I. The Character of Viennese Musical Culture

The salient dimensions of Viennese musical life during Brahms’s years were (1) the existence of an active amateur choral tradition; (2) the broadening, redefinition, and domination of music education (as well as the transformation of the ideal of musical sound) by the modern piano in the form it took after the late 1860s; (3) the evolution of musical connoisseurship through reading about music in newspapers, journals, and books; (4) the slow extension of concert life until the 1890s and the gradual formation of a canon in the repertoire; and (5) the professionalization of music history as an aspect of historicism in musical taste.

When one thinks of Brahms’s public, particularly in Vienna between 1862 and 1897, one can distinguish among three discrete generations. The first was composed of those who had come of age before 1848: a cohort that included individuals of the ages of Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47), and Robert Schumann (1810-56). The second was made up of Brahms’s exact contemporaries, those born between 1825 and 1848: individuals who had reached full maturity during Brahms’s lifetime. The third and last group included those who were young in comparison to Brahms: the generation around Gustav Mahler, individuals born in the 1850s, ’60s, and early ’70s.

The first group witnessed the great expansion of musical culture. The piano, although the subject of steady technological change between 1820 and 1860, became the leading instrument of musical communication. The first great period of virtuosity and concert life occurred between the years 1815 and 1848. Central to this first generation, however, was the voice and singing. The piano still played a secondary role in music education, in the cultivation of a mode of musical expression that linked words and music. Furthermore, amateur proficiency on string instruments competed and held its own against keyboard amateurism. This was the generation for whom Beethoven remained the towering presence. The rediscovery of the musical past, beyond the occasional Handel oratorio, was begun by Mendelssohn and his contemporaries. This generation fought the first battle for the attention of a wider public on behalf of serious music, past and present, and for music as a Romantic art expressive of the poetic and the spiritual. The fight was against the philistine tendencies of theatricality evident in virtuosity and the puerile sentimentality of efforts to entertain a rapidly growing public for music.

It is instructive to speculate about the impression the Viennese from this first musically informed generation might have had when Brahms arrived in Vienna in 1862. Apart from the legendary article Robert Schumann wrote about Brahms in 1853, an article on Brahms published in 1856, in perhaps the leading encyclopedic musical lexicon of the era, revealed the extent to which Brahms was regarded as unformed and a radical new spirit, possibly and ironically at odds with a Classical aesthetic. The author, Julius Schladebach (1810-72), a trained physician who composed church music but worked primarily as a journalist, wrote that apart from the enthusiasts who agreed with Schumann’s assessment, there were those

moderates who found certainly talent and much courage, but also much rawness, lack of skill, and complete immaturity. The courage was not attributed by them as deriving from Brahms’s uncanny artistic powers but, to the contrary, from a lack of skill in formulation, and therefore courage appeared to them rather as presumption, one that overrides arrogantly the laws of beauty and perpetrates lawlessness, without having sufficiently understood and recognized rules and laws; in other words, without having climbed to that level of artistic training from which one can distinguish freedom from licentiousness. Which of the two camps is right cannot yet be decided today.

This judgment possesses a dimension of irony, considering Brahms’s later reputation as a conservative and a Classical master, a reputation best demonstrated by the ceiling painting of the Zurich Tonhalle, which opened in 1895. Brahms was placed next to Beethoven and on a par with Gluck, Haydn, Bach, Handel, and Mozart. Wagner was also depicted, but in profile and slightly obscured.

This early criticism is also significant in view of Brahms’s severe self-criticism regarding his command of musical form and materials. Brahms’s drive to conquer and extend Classical procedures in his work may have been spurred by the awareness of such criticism from an older established generation. Those contemporaries of Schumann who did not share Schumann’s enthusiasm did so not because they followed the path set by Liszt but because they maintained a sensibility far more traditional than Schumann’s. Historians have a tendency to overlook dominant tastes and aesthetics that seem not to play themselves out through some progressive and teleological historical narrative. Schumann, after all, generally was not viewed by his contemporaries as a conservative.

It was in the second generation, however-Brahms’s exact contemporaries-that the piano advanced substantially over all other mediums of musical activity. Among amateurs, solo singing was overshadowed by the intense interest in choral singing. In this generation the professional musician came to dominate musical life. In Vienna, for example, only in the later 1850s did the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde place all activities under the direction of professionals and systematically begin to eliminate all amateur instrumentalists from official concerts open to the public at large.

In the midcentury, between 1860 and 1880, music education experienced an explosive growth, fueled by the piano, a stable, cheaply produced item of modern engineering and industry. The piano’s growing eminence began to direct the mode of musical education away from techniques of ear-training and pitch recognition to rote methods for training dexterity so that individuals could play finished works. But in this generation amateur musical literacy remained high by today’s standards. Billroth, for example, possessed exemplary skills and was able to play several instruments and read scores. Brahms valued his judgment. Amateur composers existed. But during the midcentury musical education increasingly depended on reading about music and the teaching of repertoire and an historical canon, usually beginning with Bach and ending with contemporary composers.

Nevertheless, the overwhelming character of musical culture was one that underscored musical communication as a mode of contemporary expression. New works by living composers took central stage, making music publishing a thriving business, fueled by new works for home and concert hall. The skills of professional and amateur were directed at a vital art form. Perhaps the most important aspect of these years was the phenomenal growth in numbers of individuals engaged in music. This engagement, however, was still tied to the conceit of active playing and singing; and to the conception of hearing, as it related to one’s capacity to anticipate, follow, recall, and reproduce what one heard. But it was also in this generation that a tension was felt between the widening of the audience and future standards of taste. Musicality and the appreciation of music were clearly understood to be matters of education and training and superior discernment; emphasis was placed on a high order of cultural development.

The last generation to encounter Brahms as a living composer experienced the gradual decline of the choral tradition, the almost total domination of musical culture by the piano, the erosion of amateur singing and instrumental playing as an alternative, and the centrality of music journalism. Coincidentally, the change in the mode of musical education away from the active command of musical skills toward the training of mechanical facility to reproduce existing works strengthened a perceptible shift in taste. The historical became defined through familiarity, through the repetition of selected repertoire.

Concert life achieved some greater frequency. In 1890 in Vienna, for example, there were roughly 240 concerts among the Bsendorfer, Ehrbar, and Musikverein halls. This number included amateur choral groups and group recitals of students. There were only seventeen professional concerts using large orchestral and choral forces. And tickets for these were spoken for by an elite. The access to live professional concerts was limited to a mere fraction of the public.

In the decade of the 1880s, a resident of Vienna lucky enough to possess a subscription to the Vienna Philharmonic (which began its tradition of a limited series of regular concerts only in the 1860s) had to wait for nearly a decade to hear all Beethoven symphonies performed by a professional orchestra. The Vienna Philharmonic gave only eight concerts a year, and the tradition of traveling orchestras began in earnest only in the 1890s. Brahms was in his twenties when he first heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Cologne. It was performed in Vienna only thirteen times in the thirty-four years between 1863 and 1897. In the five seasons from 1890 to 1895, the great Classical composers, from Haydn to Schumann, occupied 35 percent of the repertoire; Brahms, Wagner, and Bruckner accounted for 12 percent. Musical literacy, therefore, depended on active skills, not merely the capacity for listening. When Brahms continually emphasized the need for “proper” learning, the value of hard work, and the essentials of the craft and technique of musical composition, in the sense of historical models as well as normative aesthetic imperatives; and when later in life he complained bitterly about the level of contemporary musical education and training, he was expressing more than his legendary habits of being critical and self-critical. He was articulating a form of generational and cultural criticism.

The transition from the first generation in the musical public to the third generation included a weakening of the skills of literacy, the kind that made Elisabeth von Herzogenberg so alluring. These included the capacity to read a score and hear music, to write down what one heard as well as to play and sing new and old printed music. The shift to piano-based music education and the increasing opportunity, however limited, to be a mere listener only served to weaken the level of active literacy, much less thorough training.

Brahms articulated a widespread concern for the decline in standards that accompanied the extension of the audience during his lifetime. The newer generation became the consumers of lexica, concert guides, and journalistic accounts-genres that experienced enormous success in the 1880s and 1890s. Hermann Kretzschmar’s famous concert guide, which first appeared in 1887-an excerpt appears elsewhere in this volume-gives a glimpse of the standard of education in the late nineteenth century. Kretzschmar assumed sufficient training to hear key changes, melodic lines, and orchestral timbres. The Vienna Philharmonic first felt the need in the 1890s to introduce written descriptive program notes. In both these notes and Kretzschmar’s guide, narrative description functioned as a translating mechanism, designed to enable the hearer to follow and remember by offering a descriptive narration akin to prose fiction, travel guides, or journalistic reportage.

Part of the impetus behind the criticism of Wagner and Bruckner that came from Brahms’s amateur partisans in Vienna (Theodor Billroth, for example) was the recognition that Wagner, through the use of leitmotivs and thematic repetition, and Bruckner, through his own reliance on repetitions and extended moments of exposition, pandered to the new habits of hearing. Their popularity, Billroth suspected, was the result of the public’s ignorance and insufficient musical education. Brahms demanded the true connoisseur: the musical cognoscenti of his and Hanslick’s generation who understood the communicatory power and logic of music alone and could hear a dense, purely musical discourse. As a result of the shift in music education, the superficial, foreground habit of hearing, recognizable in program notes and guides, became the norm. It was against this norm that both Heinrich Schenker and Arnold Schoenberg-following explicitly a concept of form and technique derived from their understanding of Brahms, and mirroring Brahms’s own critique of composition, his own and others’-would expend their unforgettable vitriol.

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