Language of the Spirit: An Introduction to Classical Music by Jan Swafford

Author:Jan Swafford [Swafford, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2017-04-10T21:00:00+00:00

Of Brahms’s early masterpieces the best-known is Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), finished after years of work in 1868. A skeptic and agnostic, Brahms assembled his own text from scripture and pointedly avoided mention of the eponymous founder of the Christian religion. This is a requiem with no smell of incense or bowing to the altar; it is directed to all humanity. “Selig” (blessed), the chorus begins. At the end of its journey, the music comes to rest again on the word selig. The gentleness and limpid twilight beauty of the opening sets the tone of the whole work. It was an unequivocal success from its premiere, and since then has lived in the heart and soul of the choral repertoire. Singers sometimes speak of performing it as a life-changing experience.

Brahms came to maturity mainly writing chamber music. For a sample, I’ll propose two pieces in quite different directions. The Piano Quintet in F Minor is a work of piercing tragic intensity, from its relentlessly driving opening to its spine-tingling non-scherzo to its finale that begins with a bleak landscape and ends in fury. The relief is the lilting nocturne of its slow movement, where Brahms’s lyricism—partly learned from Schubert, but essentially his own—is on tender display.

Since Brahms never wrote program pieces and rarely left overtly personal elements in his music, his followers have always tended to view him as an abstractionist, his music free of autobiography. He was indeed an intensely guarded and private man, but he never made any such claims, and periodically admitted to friends that his music had been drawn from his life. The exquisite String Sextet in G Major is another work suffused with beautiful lyricism, much of it wonderfully warm, music of love, but woven into it is a vein of piercing regret. The climactic theme of the first movement is made from notes that spell out “Agathe,” the name of a woman Brahms was once engaged to, and jilted. “Here,” he said of the piece, “I have freed myself from my last love.”

From the early years of his fame, everybody was expecting a symphony from Brahms. He could only fulfill Schumann’s prophecy and officially take up the mantle of Beethoven if he attempted that king of musical forms. Partly for that reason, Brahms took decades to allow a symphony out of the house. What became Symphony No. 1 in C Minor began with a draft of a first movement that he sent to Clara Schumann in 1862. Then, fourteen years passed. “I’ll never write a symphony!” he anguished. “You have no idea how the likes of me feels with the tramp of a giant like him behind you!” The giant, of course, was Beethoven.

Yet over the years Brahms kept hammering away at the piece. The First was finally finished in 1876. It begins on a note of searing drama: keening, searching melodies spreading outward, under them the pounding timpani Brahms always associated with fate. The introduction gives way to an allegro that never flags in its driving, churning energy.

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