Crossing Paths: Schubert, Schumann, and Brahms by John Daverio

Author:John Daverio [Daverio, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-10-03T03:00:00+00:00

Example 6-5b: Brahms, String Quartet in C minor, Op. 51, no. 1, Allegretto, mm. 15-17

Example 6-5c: Brahms, String Quartet in C minor, Op. 51, no. 1, Allegretto, mm. 37- 40

Example 6-5d: Brahms, String Quartet in C mnor, Op. 51, no. 1, Allegretto, mm. 55-57

What can be gleaned from this clinical description? Viewed through the lens of Schoenberg’s theoretical principles, Brahms’s movement enacts a synthesis of two diametrically opposed methods of elaborating the fundamental “idea” of a musical work: the procedures associated with contrapuntal composition, on the one hand, and music of the “homophonic-melodic” style, on the other. Schoenberg used the term Abwicklung (variously translated as “unravelling,” “unfolding,” or “envelopment”) to designate the first of these methods, claiming that in contrapuntal genres such as canon or fugue “a basic configuration or combination taken asunder and reassembled in a different order contains everything which will later produce a different sound than that of the original formulation.” In contrast, music of the “homophonicmelodic” type was governed by the principle of Entwicklung (development) or entwickelnde Variation (developing variation), whereby “variation of the features of a basic [melodic] unit produces all the thematic formulations which provide for fluency, contrasts, variety, logic and unity . . . and character, mood, expression, and every needed differentiation.”32

Both principles obviously come into play in the Allegretto of Brahms’s C-minor String Quartet. The notion of Abwicklung addresses the initial combinative idea (a/b) and the various guises it assumes through the application of contrapuntal techniques that include canon (in the development section) and Stimmtausch, or voice exchange (in the coda). At the same time, the principle of Entwicklung, or developing variation, is at work in Brahms’s evolution of the movement’s subsidiary motivic combination (c/d) from elements of the basic form (the drooping chromatic line of motive d is a clear derivative of the sighs of motive a). Nor are these principles merely juxtaposed. On the contrary, it was Brahms’s aim to fuse them as thoroughly as he could, an ideal that emerges not only at the local level, with the development of individual lines in the contrapuntal texture, but also in terms of the design as a whole: a “homophonic-melodic” form, the sonata-allegro, whose principal sections are articulated by contrapuntal combinations and whose narrative trajectory turns on the presentation, development, and restoration of a basic motivic complex.

Like all of Brahms’s compositional strategies, this one has numerous precedents. Mozart had already negotiated a rapprochement between contrapuntal and homophonic procedures in the finales of his String Quartet in G (K. 387) and “Jupiter” Symphony (K. 551), both of which are sonata-form movements characterized by the alternation of passages in the “learned” style and the up-to-the-minute “galant” idiom.33 This dochotomy in turn had consequences both for Beethoven (Andante scherzoso quasi Allegretto of the String Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, no. 4; finale of the String Quartet in C, Op. 59, no. 3; second movement of the First Symphony, Op. 21) and for Brahms as well (finale of the String Quintet in F, Op. 88).

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