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.
