Margaret Notley
LATENESS AND BRAHMS
Music and culture in the twilight of Viennese Liberalism
245pp. Oxford University Press. £32.99.
9780195305470

Inge van Rij
BRAHMS’S SONG COLLECTION
271pp. Cambridge University Press. £40.
9780521835589

Barbara Owen
THE ORGAN MUSIC OF JOHANNES BRAHMS
184pp. Oxford University Press. £19.99.
9780195311075

When we discuss Beethoven’s “late quartets”, it is worth remembering that we are referring to the work of a man in his mere mid-fifties. Why, then, “late”? Because in a man of fifty-five we expect or are determined to find a new kind of seriousness, an original slant on convention, an avoidance of bustle, a tendency to the abstract? Because we know he died a year or two afterwards? Or because either way biography will just not stay out of things, and knowledge of it rules the listener?

Or does the documentary record of musical geniuses offer no better idea for the way they work than Hansard does for non-geniuses? Anything I know of the biographical background to Bach’s B minor Mass will affect, govern even, any feeling I have that such-and-such a movement must be late, while another is much earlier; but it is very easy to be wrong. When we note how fascinated Beethoven became with the most elementary musical ideas in his lateish Diabelli Variations, or how hard Wagner finally had to work on melody in Parsifal compared to Götterdämmerung, we may be tempted to ascribe these changes in emphasis and intensity to the composers’ ages (fifty and mid-sixties respectively). But is there any necessary correlation? Brahms’s most mature works, argues Margaret Notley in her book Lateness and Brahms, express the “melancholy” of “a middle-aged person aware of lateness”, but even if there is no intentional fallacy lurking here, the question is certainly raised whether music expresses anything beyond itself. Is there not, in all these compositions, simply an experienced composer’s calm and confident grasp of the tools of his trade?

The three books under review deal in different ways with the notion of lateness in connection with a much-loved composer, one whom it is not easy to imagine having ever been young, so weighty and well-wrought is his music from first to last. Brahms’s Song Collections by Inge van Rij centres on the Op. 105 and Op. 121 sets of songs, published at the ages of fifty-five and sixty-three respectively. Margaret Notley’s Lateness and Brahms takes a different line: the composer’s “late romantic” idiom is found to be appropriate to the “twilight of Viennese liberalism”, and any archaic elements in the music reflect his “close ties to the upper-class elite” who liked the familiar. Barbara Owen’s The Organ Music of Brahms pays particular attention to his organ chorales Op. 122, based on old Lutheran chorale-melodies. Since some of these settings are the last music Brahms ever wrote, the temptation is to see in them both a deliberate return to his Protestant roots and a natural habit of mature contemplation. But Ms Owen is nicely discreet on such matters.

Van Rij’s book toys with the Anxiety of Influence (not so called) insofar as it recognizes that nobody composing sets of songs, even today perhaps, can be quite free of Schubert’s Winterreise and Schöne Müllerin. Asking anew in what way these, and therefore Brahms’s, sets of songs really are coherent cycles is the book’s main topic, as it examines the composer’s own term, “Bouquet”. This word has a long history in music, with examples from the 1730s (Fischer’s Blumenstrauss) or even the 1630s (Frescobaldi’s Fiori), and these are just the kinds of publication the antiquarian-minded Brahms knew and studied. His interest in old music could have played a bigger part in van Rij’s story: one could hardly think of a composer more removed from Brahms than François Couperin, yet the former edited the latter and knew his word “ordre” for sets of pieces – a categorical term much less restrictive than either “cycle” or “suite”.

Notley’s book deals with what it calls the “Viennese climate of opinion”, in which Brahms appears as a “dogmatic Liberal”. It contains quite a lot of Adorno, and occasional Marxist jargon (“phase”), all rather disguising the book’s conventional aesthetic argument, which is that music “expresses the spirit of its age” and is a handy indication thereof. In my view this is quite wrong; I don’t understand how aspects of the Austrian Liberal worldview – “pro-German sentiment, antagonism toward the \[Roman\] Catholic church, and profound distrust of anti-intellectual trends”, all as entertained by “the Jewish-German upper middle classes” – say much about specific compositions. For example, what do they reveal about the backwardness of Brahms’s last symphony, written just as Mahler, in the same city, was about to explore new worlds with his first? At least Notley usefully makes it clear that Adorno’s dicta are less than illuminating. (Hannah Arendt’s criticism of Adorno – “such a mishmash of anything that comes to mind is unbearable” – rings true for me whenever he pontificates on musical sociology.)

Owen’s book includes a lot of useful information on the period. Its focus on Brahms’s organ music is refreshingly down-to-earth and revealing about his modest but creative interest in organs and organ music. It was evidently less of a concern for Brahms than it was for Liszt, had been for Mendelssohn or would be for Reger, yet it should not be forgotten that more people from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries heard organ music than they did any song cycle or chamber music. Brahms’s involvement in it reflected his lifelong preoccupation with J. S. Bach, fugal counterpoint and choral tradition. And how many other composers were not similarly engaged?

These three volumes prompt thoughts again on what it is to write scholarly books on music, especially difficult today when university departments have to struggle on two fronts. On the one hand, they need to keep “classical music” alive in an age when cultural chit-chat constantly interferes with it, and when young musicians, barely able to harmonize a scale on the piano, are wizards at composing electronically. On the other hand, musicologists heavily influenced by literary theory, particularly in American universities, still find themselves having to face up to music’s ageless incorrigibility, and the fact that it is more than a sociopolitical manifestation. Indeed, how does one write about it? Notley’s solution is to discuss previous authors’ ideas about “lateness”, to sketch in aspects of Viennese society (including its anti-Semitism) and to discuss other relevant music. These general matters are interspersed with lengthy technical-analytical details about Brahms’s fondness for certain kinds of counterpoint, similarities between themes, grammatical rules, types of adagio, etc. But the deep link between culture and music is not as apparent as Notley assumes it to be; moreover, the technical detail itself seems to me not very advanced, and derived from passive, partial reading rather than experience “from the inside” of as much music as possible.

Van Rij’s survey of the songs is rather more straightforward. It tends to look at concepts (musical organicism) and people (Schlegel, Coleridge) as if they haven’t been looked at before, but a certain freshness results. Again, I am not convinced by the handling of technical details, such as the illustrations of “harmonic ambiguity”, or thematic similarities, or those effects the author calls “chromatic” and “Neapolitan”. More importantly, I am not sure that in considering what a song-cycle ought to mean she has properly acknowledged a basic fact of musical life: that composers will do almost anything to have their music performed, whether in sets, cycles, one-offs, or pieces that are transcribed, transposed, put in one order, and then another.

Just as Notley draws on other authors of Brahms’s time and her own, so van Rij draws on a “graphic artist”, Max Klinger, to whom Brahms dedicated his final set, the wonderful Four Serious Songs. But was there really in Klinger’s nightmarishly erotic and mythological images something that matched Brahms’s “increasingly dark songs of maturity”? Anything more than a certain heavy density, common to so much artistic production of the period? If there is anything in Klinger that can truly be shown to be relevant to Brahms’s conceptions – the way, for instance, so many of his works move from “sorrow to comfort” (the Requiem, the First and Third Symphonies) – well, I don’t see it. And is there not a risk that for readers of the book, performances of the late Clarinet Quintet will for evermore bring to mind Klinger’s horrible drawings?

Owen’s answer to the problem of writing about music is more traditional and practical. She discusses the pieces one by one, the personnel (not many people know that Clara Schumann pumped organ bellows for Robert) and organs from Brahms’s early days in Hamburg to late on in Vienna, and she offers advice on performance. Other composers, including Leipzig’s Reger and Gloucester’s Parry, are neatly involved. It would be a pity if readers took one look at the book’s lists of organ stops and thought the book had nothing to say to them about Brahms. Such books on music are becoming increasingly rare, at least at this level,so vulnerable has the (tiny) market become to cultural theory.

One of the main difficulties that such theory has is with the expression of useful value judgements, positive and negative. I used to find that Brahms’s songs were of immense worth for one particular reason: you could work out from their melodies a good and logical harmony. This was invaluable experience for the student. Brahms’s songs make “musical sense”, the best thing one can say of a composer, and something that’s worth trying to pin down. If this process involves odious comparison and personal opinion, so be it.

At the same time, I think it a pity to ignore George Bernard Shaw’s view of Brahms’s major works as

"a string of incomplete dance and ballad tunes . . . . with no more coherence than the succession of passing images reflected in a shop window in Piccadilly during any twenty minutes of the day."

This is a remark that becomes the less vague the more one thinks about it: Shaw, who was by no means deaf to Brahms’s abilities, is making a real point, and doing so, after all, as a contemporary reacting to the music. When he refers to the late Clarinet Quintet as “this latest exploit of the Leviathan Maunderer”, he is making two criticisms: first, that Brahms’s idiom is full of commonplaces, and second that it “outfaces” these “by dint of sheer magnitude”, in both respects very like (so Shaw claimed) the speeches of Mr Gladstone.

Now Margaret Notley’s description of a certain series of chords in the Clarinet Quintet as a “prototype” – the series was an old formula, worn to a frazzle after two centuries – may appear to be more exact than Shaw’s “commonplace”, but I think the latter prompts better ideas about lateness. Brahms disguises the chords by a clever filigree of melody and rhythm; they are so formulaic that any divergence is immediately effective; the work begins in a rapt, cool-hothouse kind of way; the clarinet can hardly help being sensuous; and every polished detail is that of a complete master. But does it all really add up to more than the maundering of a Leviathan (a “person of formidable ability”, OED)?

Peter Williams is former Dean of Music, University of Edinburgh. His books include a Life of Bach, 2004, The Chromatic Fourth during Four Centuries of Music, 1998, and The King of Instruments: How churches came to have organs, 1993.

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