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...
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