The Romantic composers’ preoccupation with the emotional moment had created new harmonic vistas, but it had two inescapable consequences. First, it had produced a tendency toward rhapsody that often resulted in a lack of structure. Second, it had slowed down the processes of music, so that Wagner had been able to discover a means of writing music that moved as slowly as his often-argumentative stage action. Many composers were thus decreasingly concerned to preserve the skill of taut, brilliant, and dramatic symphonic development that had so eminently distinguished the masters at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating in Beethoven’s chamber music and symphonies.
Brahms was acutely conscious of this loss, repudiated it, and set himself to compensate for it in order to keep alive a force he felt strongly was far from spent. But Brahms was desirous not of reproducing old styles but of infusing the language of his own time with constructive power. Thus his musical language actually bears little resemblance to Beethoven’s or even Schubert’s; harmonically it was much influenced by Schumann and even to some extent by Wagner. It is Brahms’s supple and masterful control of rhythm and movement that indeed distinguishes him from all his contemporaries. This power of movement stems partly from his reverence for music of the distant past, specifically for the polyphonic school of the 16th century, elements of which he incorporated into his work.
In his orchestral works Brahms displays an unmistakable and highly distinctive deployment of tone colour, especially in his use of woodwind and brass instruments and in his string writing, but the important thing about it is that colour is deployed, rather than laid on for its own sake. A close relationship between orchestration and architecture dominates these works, with the orchestration contributing as much to the tonal colouring as do the harmonies and tonalities and the changing nature of the themes. Brahms was peculiarly adapted to the more subtle aspects of the relation between orchestra and soloist, and he set himself to recover the depth and grandeur of the concerto idea. He realized that the long introductory passage of the orchestra was the means of sharpening and deepening the complex relationship of orchestra to solo, especially when the time came for recapitulation, where an entirely new and often revelatory distribution of themes, keys, instrumentation, and tensions was possible.
Brahms also was a masterly miniaturist, not only in many of his fine and varied songs but also in his cunningly wrought late piano works. As a song composer, he ranged from the complex and highly organized to the extremely simple, strophic type. His late piano music, most of which is of small dimension, has a quiet and intense quality of its own that renders the occasional outburst of angry passion the more potent. Brahms’s musical range is finally attested by his choral music. A German Requiem, one of the choral masterpieces of its period, shows all his characteristics in this field together with an ability to integrate solo and tutti with the same kind of subtlety as in the concerti. The spaciousness and grandeur of this work’s lines and the power of its construction place Brahms’s underlying melancholy within the scope of a large, objective, nonreligious humane vision.
Johannes Brahms: Maturity and Fame
