Brahms and the Scherzo

Studies in Musical Narrative

Ryan McClelland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317172833
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Despite the incredible diversity in Brahms's scherzo-type movements, there has been no comprehensive consideration of this aspect of his oeuvre. Professor Ryan McClelland provides an in-depth study of these movements that also contributes significantly to an understanding of Brahms's compositional language and his creative dialogue with musical traditions. McClelland especially highlights the role of rhythmic-metric design in Brahms's music and its relationship to expressive meaning. In Brahms's scherzo-type movements, McClelland traces transformations of primary thematic material, demonstrating how the relationship of the initial music to its subsequent versions creates a musical narrative that provides structural coherence and generates expressive meaning. McClelland's interpretations of the expressive implications of Brahms's fascinatingly intricate musical structures frequently engage issues directly relevant to performance. This illuminating book will appeal to music theorists, musicologists working on nineteenth-century instrumental music and performers.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Theoretical and Repertorial Contexts

As has often been remarked, Brahms never composed a true symphonic scherzo. While other mid-late nineteenth-century symphonists such as Mendelssohn, Schumann, Dvořák, and Bruckner usually penned third movements with character and form reminiscent of Beethoven’s symphonic scherzos, only in the Fourth Symphony did Brahms provide a sprightly third movement. Yet that movement disavows the standard ternary form with contrasting trio in favor of a continuous sonata-like design. The third movement of Brahms’s Second Symphony is generally quite energetic, but it too is formally unconventional with its indebtedness to variation technique. In the First and Third Symphonies, the three-part form is present, but both exhibit a wistful lyricism quite at odds with the tradition of the scherzo, or the late eighteenth-century minuet. Certainly among Brahms’s chamber works, there are numerous Beethovenian scherzos—and some minuets as well—but many movements exude the nostalgic tone more familiar to the nineteenth-century character piece (thus the cumbersome “scherzo-type movements” below!).

In program notes for a 1902 performance of Brahms’s First Symphony, Donald Francis Tovey commented, “In the place of a scherzo we find one of those terse and highly organized movements which are so short that contemporary criticism frequently fails to see that they are on a symphonic scale at all … . It is always important to discount the first impression that such movements make of being small and fragmentary.”1 More than a century has passed since Tovey’s admonition, but the treatment of scherzo-type movements—by Brahms and others—in the musicological and analytical literature still pales in comparison to that accorded to opening movements and finales. Indeed, the only monographs devoted exclusively to such movements are dissertations, and they focus on the early nineteenth century and the transition from minuet to scherzo (with emphasis on Beethoven’s music).2 Within Brahms studies, large-scale projects have gravitated around his sonata forms, including dissertations and books by Walter Frisch, Roger Graybill, Arno Mitschka, and Peter Smith, as well as an influential series of articles by James Webster.3 Even Brahms’s slow movements have received sustained inquiry in articles by Margaret Notley and Elaine Sisman.4 Despite the incredible diversity in Brahms’s scherzo-type movements, there has been no comprehensive consideration of this aspect of his oeuvre. Filling this lacuna is the primary objective of this book.

An in-depth look at Brahms’s scherzo-type movements will also contribute to our understanding of Brahms’s compositional language and his engagement with musical traditions. My work especially highlights the role of rhythmic-metric design in Brahms’s music and its relationship to expressive meaning. In the next several pages, I introduce these topics and situate them in the context of extant scholarship. The chapter subsequently comments on the historical development of the scherzo, provides an inventory and overview of Brahms’s scherzo-type movements, and concludes with an explanation of the book’s chapter-level organization.

In the scholarly literature, studying motivic development is one of the most pervasive analytic approaches to the music of Brahms and, when undertaken with appropriate care, produces valuable insights. One can scarcely imagine a thorough treatment of, for instance, the Second Symphony that does not make connections to the opening neighbor-note figure.5 In his commemorative essay “Brahms the Progressive,” Arnold Schoenberg celebrated Brahms’s penchant for continuous development of short melodic motives and their interaction with irregular grouping and metric structures.6 Even given his desire to enlist Brahms’s music as an antecedent to his own style, Schoenberg’s concepts of “developing variation” and “musical prose” isolate significant aspects of Brahms’s music that permit its successful appropriation of the formal types inherited from Viennese classicism. Schoenberg, unfortunately, carries out his analyses over excerpts rather than complete pieces, and his insights—valuable as they are—involve only the immediate musical surface and do not also consider the impact of higher-level tonal and metric structures.7

Many writers explicitly adopt the Schoenbergian view of Brahms’s music, most notably Walter Frisch. In Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation, Frisch tackles complete works, providing convincing illustrations that continuous motivic development permeates Brahms’s mature works. Frisch shows evolution within Brahms’s style, demonstrating that his early works favor thematic transformation, sequential development, and periodic phrase designs. My examination of Brahms’s scherzo-type movements confirms Frisch’s assessment; in fact, the scherzos from Brahms’s piano sonatas (Opp. 1, 2, and 5) clearly possess similarities to the styles of Schumann and Liszt, composers whose influence quickly faded relative to that of the Viennese classicists. Frisch’s emphasis, like Schoenberg’s, is on moment-to-moment motivic development, but he does point out large-scale processes, such as his description of the tonal and metric conflicts at the start of the Third Symphony, which are resolved at the end of the movement (and at the end of the finale).8 Frisch focuses on local continuities since he contends that Brahms’s handling of large-scale thematic change—as evidenced by recomposition of thematic recapitulations—“does not differ greatly from the Viennese classical composers, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, who also alter thematic returns with considerable imagination and variety.”9 Although recomposing thematic returns (or giving a thematic return an idiosyncratic preparation) was not entirely new, I do believe that Brahms does go substantially beyond the practice of his predecessors—especially when one compares his scherzo-type movements to earlier Viennese minuets and scherzos. Since the prevalence of developing variation is well established, I will not often trace moment-to-moment motivic process in detail; rather, I will focus on larger-scale thematic development. Close motivic analysis will tend to occur only in connection with rhythmic-metric issues, particularly variation in the metric placement of motives.

Brahms’s fondness for foreground rhythmic-metric irregularities, such as hemiola and metric displacement, has been widely noted and ascribed to influences from Renaissance music to Beethoven to Schumann.10 While devices such as hemiola and metric displacement are key components of Brahms’s style, their study does not exhaust the richness of his handling of musical time. Unlike many nineteenth-century works (such as the majority of Schumann’s), Brahms’s mature pieces exhibit great flexibility of hypermeter (levels of meter above the notated measure), in the tradition of Viennese classicism. I will take note of hemiolas and metric displacements when they play a central role in a movement, but my focus will be more consistently on phrase rhythm—the interaction of hypermeter with phrase design.11 In these areas, my theoretical framework owes much to the work of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, Carl Schachter, and William Rothstein.12 Following Lerdahl and Jackendoff, I maintain a conceptual separation of hypermeter from phrase structure (grouping), a clear delineation of metric accents from structural (tonal) accents as well as phenomenal accents, and an explicit approach to understanding metric entrainment. I endorse their notion of a hierarchical metric grid, but I emphasize the more nuanced concept of hypermeter offered by Schachter and Rothstein.13 Particularly important for me is Rothstein’s thorough study of phrase expansion and its interaction with hypermeter. William Caplin also contributes significantly to the study of phrase expansion through his detailed exposition of thematic construction in the music of the late eighteenth century.14 Although one must remain open to the possibility of the emergence of fundamentally new phrase types during the nineteenth century, phrases in Brahms’s scherzo-type movements can be interpreted as replicating established phrase types or deforming them in a specifiable way. Applying a theory designed for the repertoire around the start of the nineteenth century is not anachronistic but is, in fact, in keeping with how listeners and performers respond to phrase structure in Brahms’s music.

In introducing some of the work that has been done on motivic process and rhythmic-metric features in Brahms’s music, I have given hints of how my study of the scherzo-type movements fits into this scholarship, but I now broach this subject directly. I begin by recalling an important question posed by Frisch in his book on developing variation: What function do techniques like hemiola and metric displacement serve in Brahms’s music? Frisch proposes that they “become tools of developing variation, means for modifying and transforming thematic-motivic material.”15 My perspective differs slightly. Frisch implies that rhythmic-metric structure is subsidiary to motivic development; it is a tool of developing variation. In my analyses, I suggest a more primary role for rhythm and meter. Rhythmic and metric phenomena not only vary the motives embedded within themes, but can themselves be motivic agents whose journey is as central as the development of pitch motives.16

The central theoretical contribution of this book is to demonstrate the operation of musical narratives—especially rhythmic-metric narrative—and their connection to musical expressivity. In Brahms’s scherzo-type movements, the opening material undergoes transformation, and the relationship of the initial music to its subsequent versions creates a musical narrative. I use the term narrative to capture the sense that these discrete events cohere into a larger framework, and that this framework is essential to understanding the full meaning of individual events. By invoking the term narrative, I do not assert the presence of all of the attributes of literary narrative, including the level of specificity involved in the identification of meaning. I do intend to suggest, however, that the scherzo-type movements have musical structures that span entire movements and create effects such as conflict, struggle, triumph, transcendence, and resignation. Certainly one might refer to these musical structures as musical processes, but I wish to emphasize both their global scale and their direct connection to musical meaning. The term narrative suggests both of these features, whereas process is more often associated with structural changes over a more limited segment of music and ones whose relevance to musical meaning is perhaps less clear.

My appropriation of the term narrative is similar to that of Harald Krebs in his work on metric dissonance in Schumann’s music.17 Krebs identifies several types of metric progressions and metric processes, refines terminology to describe metric dissonances, and establishes metric maps as a mode of representation. In studying a complete piece, Krebs appropriately rejects reducing its succession of dissonance states in a systematic manner “in favor of intuitive, informal reductions to an underlying basic progression that spans the given work.”18 He continues:

Possible progressions of this type are large neighboring motions of the form “C–D–C” (where the work begins in a primarily consonant fashion, becomes more dissonant, and ends with restoration of the original mainly consonant state); curtailments of such motions, namely C–D (where the work begins consonantly but becomes dissonant and ends dissonantly) and D–C (where the work begins dissonantly but ultimately resolves the dissonance); and innumerable shadings of the basic states of consonance and dissonance (for example, a state “D,” composed of a variety of individual dissonances or of a variety of degrees of intensity of a single dissonance). Such informal “bird’s-eye views” of a metrical progression take us to the rhythmic heart of a given work—to its most basic metrical “narrative.”19

The major difference between my approach and Krebs’s is that while I emphasize rhythmic-metric elements I devote considerable attention to several other parameters (especially form and tonal structure). My analyses will probe how rhythmic-metric narratives interact with tonal ones to create expressive meaning.

A few other recent writings trace rhythmic-metric narratives in nineteenth-century music and open new avenues into temporal design. Richard Kurth surveys the interplay between 3/4 and 6/8 elements in the first movement of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony.20 Particularly sensitive is Kurth’s observation that these two metric identities coexist in different ways, which he refers to as metric colloquy and metric antimony. Justin London returns once again to the hypermetric conflicts in the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but he additionally emphasizes shifts in levels of subdivision—flux within metric consonance—during the movement.21 Richard Cohn explores the dramatic consequences of various levels of duple and triple hypermeter in the scherzo from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.22 Broadening the range of temporal phenomena beyond metric dissonance and hypermeter is characteristic of Frank Samarotto’s temporal plasticity framework, which models subtle relations among tonal content, metric placement, and durational pacing.23 Among Brahms scholarship, Cohn’s study of metric dissonance in “Von ewiger Liebe” (Op. 43, No. 1) argues, “To a considerable degree, the song’s sense of musical motion, journey and narrative is displaced onto rhythmic events.”24 Even closer to my project, though, is the work of Peter Smith as represented in an analysis like that of the first movement of Brahms’s Horn Trio, Op. ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Theoretical and Repertorial Contexts
• 2 The Early Minor-Mode Scherzos: Ghosts of Schumann and Beethoven
• 3 Minuets, Scherzos, and Neoclassicism
• 4 The Pastoral Scherzos
• 5 Some Intermezzos
• 6 The Late Minor-Mode Scherzos
• 7 Waltzing Away with the Minuet
• 8 Three Imposters
• 9 The Case of the Fourth Symphony and Some Concluding Thoughts
• Appendix: Piano Trio in A Major
• Bibliography
• Index