Intimate Brahms

June 2, 10:11 PMSF Classical Music ExaminerScott Foglesong

Previous Next

Comment Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the SF Classical Music Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

We've got liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, the old and the young. Dualities abound in our imaginations; we just love to play the game of either-or.

Nineteenth century Romanticism offers up a handy contrast between progressives and conservatives. For a while late in the century the two parties were downright scrappy about it all, the progressives (headed by Wagner, Liszt, and their minions) pitted against the conservatives (headed by the critic Eduard Hanslick, who more or less dragged Johannes Brahms and Antonin Dvorak along for the ride.) Wagner & Co. were all about pushing the envelope, going past the edge, annoying the heck out of the professors, while Brahms and his followers were much more concerned with enriching the great Austro-Germanic tradition represented by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

The warring factions are long gone, but the issues making up their differences go back as far as recorded history. Is it possible to balance tradition and innovation, or even reconcile them at all?

Among the composers who sought détente between old and new, Brahms was exceptionally successful. He avoided the more superficial avant-gardisms of his day, such as program music. Brahms wrote in the classic genres, period: you won't find anything called "Faust" anywhere in his output. You will find sonatas, symphonies, trios, quartets, variations, and choral works.

Brahms was one of the very few ranking composers of the late nineteenth century who wrote a significant amount of chamber music, and posterity has rewarded him by keeping just about all of it in the standard repertory. Brahms's best-known works are undoubtedly the big orchestral pieces — symphonies, concertos, etc. But in the chamber music you find Brahms at his most intimate, Brahms at his most communicative, Brahms at his most unbuttoned and confessional.

Lots of people used to think of Brahms's music as sterile, boring, even coldly mathematical. Maybe some still do. Ah, well...my granny considered Liberace as the last word in high-culture sophistication. Some of that might have been his imposing (intimidating) figure in later life, especially given the beard and wild hair. (Brahms, I mean; this is most definitely not a picture of Liberace.)

But the young Brahms — pre-beard, pre-girth, pre-symphonies, pre-Cultural-Monument — is less familiar. The guy could have been a matinée idol. Now, come on: does this look like the author of calculated frigidities?

Rachel Barton Pine