The Bard Music Festival

Revised Edition

Walter Frisch, Kevin C. Karnes, Walter Frisch, Kevin C. Karnes, Walter Frisch, Kevin Karnes

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400833627
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music History & Criticism

Since its first publication in 1990, Brahms and His World has become a key text for listeners, performers, and scholars interested in the life, work, and times of one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated composers. In this substantially revised and enlarged edition, the editors remain close to the vision behind the original book while updating its contents to reflect new perspectives on Brahms that have developed over the past two decades. To this end, the original essays by leading experts are retained and revised, and supplemented by contributions from a new generation of Brahms scholars. Together, they consider such topics as Brahms's relationship with Clara and Robert Schumann, his musical interactions with the "New German School" of Wagner and Liszt, his influence upon Arnold Schoenberg and other young composers, his approach to performing his own music, and his productive interactions with visual artists.
The essays are complemented by a new selection of criticism and analyses of Brahms's works published by the composer's contemporaries, documenting the ways in which Brahms's music was understood by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century audiences in Europe and North America. A new selection of memoirs by Brahms's friends, students, and early admirers provides intimate glimpses into the composer's working methods and personality. And a catalog of the music, literature, and visual arts dedicated to Brahms documents the breadth of influence exerted by the composer upon his contemporaries.

PART 1

ESSAYS

Time and Memory: Concert Life, Science, and Music in Brahms’s Vienna

LEON BOTSTEIN

How can one grasp the nature and impact of Brahms’s musical language and communication in his own time? In the first instance one has to guard against an uncritical sense of the stability of musical texts, their meaning, and how they can be read and heard. The acoustic, cultural, and temporal habits of life of the late nineteenth century in which Brahms’s music functioned demand reconsideration if the listener in the early twenty-first century wishes to gain a historical perspective on Brahms’s music and its significance. A biographical strategy and the history of critical reception themselves are insufficient.

Brahms’s considerable success and notoriety, in Vienna and in German-speaking Europe as a whole, can be approached by a speculative effort to understand better the making of music, the thinking about music, and the listening to music during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In reconstructing the world in which Brahms worked and trying to reimagine the exchange between Brahms the composer and the various publics to which his music was directed—the meaning of musical discourse in Brahms’s era—one aspect of nineteenth-century life and culture on the periphery of musical life can be useful: science and the philosophical and psychological speculation related to it.¹

Understanding Brahms, his ambitions as an artist, and his impact on his contemporaries requires a grasp of the centrality of science and technology in Brahms’s world. His friend the Swiss writer J. V. Widmann described Brahms’s own perspective: “Even the smallest discovery, every improvement in any sort of gadget for domestic use; in short, every sign of human reflection, if it was accompanied by practical success, delighted him thoroughly. Nothing escaped his notice … if it was something new, in which progress could be discerned.” Except for the bicycle, Brahms “felt himself lucky that he lived in the age of great discoveries, and could not praise enough the electric light, Edison’s phonograph, and the like.”² For example, Brahms welcomed innovations in the design and manufacture of pianos.³

This widespread late nineteenth-century fascination with scientific progress was sufficiently pervasive to influence the conception of music and the musical experience. The enormous body of writing about the physics of sound, the psychology of hearing, the design of sound-producing instruments, and the aesthetics of music from the latter half of the nineteenth century mirrors the intersection of the intense enthusiasms for both music and science. The application of varied scientific and philosophic methods to the nagging questions of beauty, memory, time perception, the nature and meaning of music, consonance, and the historical evolution of musical communication illuminates habits of musical expectation, listening, and judgment. Systematic thinking, talking, and writing about the lure and consequence of music in themselves were important aspects of the musical experience, particularly in Brahms’s Vienna. The writings of such diverse individuals as Hermann Helmholtz, H. A. Koestlin, Heinrich Ehrlich (Brahms’s colleague in the 1850s), Theodor Billroth, and other members of the university faculties of Vienna and Prague (e.g., L. A. Zellner, Richard Wallaschek, and the great Ernst Mach) provide evidence of conceptions of music that both mirrored and influenced the contemporary evaluation of the experience of music. In order to make this connection, however, dimensions of the musical world Brahms inhabited require clarification.

I. The Character of Viennese Musical Culture

The salient dimensions of Viennese musical life during Brahms’s years were (1) the existence of an active amateur choral tradition; (2) the broadening, redefinition, and domination of music education (as well as the transformation of the ideal of musical sound) by the modern piano in the form it took after the late 1860s; (3) the evolution of musical connoisseur-ship through reading about music in newspapers, journals, and books; (4) the slow extension of concert life until the 1890s and the gradual formation of a canon in the repertoire; and (5) the professionalization of music history as an aspect of historicism in musical taste.⁴

When one thinks of Brahms’s public, particularly in Vienna between 1862 and 1897, one can distinguish among three discrete generations. The first was composed of those who had come of age before 1848: a cohort that included individuals of the ages of Franz Grillparzer (1791-1872), Felix Mendelssohn (1809-47), and Robert Schumann (1810-56). The second was made up of Brahms’s exact contemporaries, those born between 1825 and 1848: individuals who had reached full maturity during Brahms’s lifetime. The third and last group included those who were young in comparison to Brahms: the generation around Gustav Mahler, individuals born in the 1850s, ’60s, and early ’70s.

The first group witnessed the great expansion of musical culture. The piano, although the subject of steady technological change between 1820 and 1860, became the leading instrument of musical communication. The first great period of virtuosity and concert life occurred between the years 1815 and 1848. Central to this first generation, however, was the voice and singing. The piano still played a secondary role in music education, in the cultivation of a mode of musical expression that linked words and music. Furthermore, amateur proficiency on string instruments competed and held its own against keyboard amateurism. This was the generation for whom Beethoven remained the towering presence. The rediscovery of the musical past, beyond the occasional Handel oratorio, was begun by Mendelssohn and his contemporaries. This generation fought the first-battle for the attention of a wider public on behalf of serious music, past and present, and for music as a Romantic art expressive of the poetic and the spiritual. The fight was against the philistine tendencies of theatricality evident in virtuosity and the puerile sentimentality of efforts to entertain a rapidly growing public for music.

It is instructive to speculate about the impression the Viennese from this first musically informed generation might have had when Brahms arrived in Vienna in 1862. Apart from the legendary article Robert Schumann wrote about Brahms in 1853, an article on Brahms published in 1856, in perhaps the leading encyclopedic musical lexicon of the era, revealed the extent to which Brahms was regarded as unformed and a radical new spirit, possibly and ironically at odds with a Classical aesthetic. The author, Julius Schladebach (1810-72), a trained physician who composed church music but worked primarily as a journalist, wrote that apart from the enthusiasts who agreed with Schumann’s assessment, there were those

moderates who found certainly talent and much courage, but also much rawness, lack of skill, and complete immaturity. The courage was not attributed by them as deriving from Brahms’s uncanny artistic powers but, to the contrary, from a lack of skill in formulation, and therefore courage appeared to them rather as presumption, one that overrides arrogantly the laws of beauty and perpetrates lawlessness, without having sufficiently understood and recognized rules and laws; in other words, without having climbed to that level of artistic training from which one can distinguish freedom from licentiousness. Which of the two camps is right cannot yet be decided today.⁵

This judgment possesses a dimension of irony, considering Brahms’s later reputation as a conservative and a Classical master, a reputation best demonstrated by the ceiling painting of the Zurich Tonhalle, which opened in 1895. Brahms was placed next to Beethoven and on a par with Gluck, Haydn, Bach, Handel, and Mozart. Wagner was also depicted, but in profile and slightly obscured.⁶

This early criticism is also significant in view of Brahms’s severe self-criticism regarding his command of musical form and materials. Brahms’s drive to conquer and extend Classical procedures in his work may have been spurred by the awareness of such criticism from an older established generation. Those contemporaries of Schumann who did not share Schumann’s enthusiasm did so not because they followed the path set by Liszt but because they maintained a sensibility far more traditional than Schumann’s. Historians have a tendency to overlook dominant tastes and aesthetics that seem not to play themselves out through some progressive and teleological historical narrative. Schumann, after all, generally was not viewed by his contemporaries as a conservative.

It was in the second generation, however—Brahms’s exact contemporaries—that the piano advanced substantially over all other mediums of musical activity. Among amateurs, solo singing was overshadowed by the intense interest in choral singing. In this generation the professional musician came to dominate musical life. In Vienna, for example, only in the later 1850s did the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde place all activities under the direction of professionals and systematically begin to eliminate all amateur instrumentalists from official concerts open to the public at large.

In the midcentury, between 1860 and 1880, music education experienced an explosive growth, fueled by the piano, a stable, cheaply produced item of modern engineering and industry. The piano’s growing eminence began to direct the mode of musical education away from techniques of ear-training and pitch recognition to rote methods for training dexterity so that individuals could play finished works. But in this generation amateur musical literacy remained high by today’s standards. Billroth, for example, possessed exemplary skills and was able to play several instruments and read scores.⁷ Brahms valued his judgment. Amateur composers existed. But during the midcentury musical education increasingly depended on reading about music and the teaching of repertoire and an historical canon, usually beginning with Bach and ending with contemporary composers.

Nevertheless, the overwhelming character of musical culture was one that underscored musical communication as a mode of contemporary expression. New works by living composers took central stage, making music publishing a thriving business, fueled by new works for home and concert hall. The skills of professional and amateur were directed at a vital art form. Perhaps the most important aspect of these years was the phenomenal growth in numbers of individuals engaged in music. This engagement, however, was still tied to the conceit of active playing and singing; and to the conception of hearing, as it related to one’s capacity to anticipate, follow, recall, and reproduce what one heard. But it was also in this generation that a tension was felt between the widening of the audience and future standards of taste. Musicality and the appreciation of music were clearly understood to be matters of education and training and superior discernment; emphasis was placed on a high order of cul...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Preface and Acknowledgments from the First Edition
• Permissions and Credits
• Part I - Essays
• Part II - Reception and Analysis
• Part III - Memoirs
• Part IV - “Dedicated to Johannes Brahms”
• Index
• Notes on the Contributors