Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Transcript (PDF)

The 19th Century
Presentation 11 of 13

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
The Personal Preservation of Art as the Balance of Revolution and Progress.
Presented by Roger Weir
Tuesday, February 14, 1984

Transcript:

The difficulty with Brahms is that Brahms is mature. The sophistication of Brahms is the sophistication of a mature human being. Brahms sticks out in the 19th century rather like John Scotus Eriugena stuck out in the Middle Ages. He is a pinnacle of integrity on a flat plane of mediocrity. Brahms in fact is one of the most amazing human beings of all time. And if I were to reiterate that during the Wagner lecture – Wagner took a lot of insight from Aeschylus – I should introduce here the fact that Brahms took his insight from Sophocles. And the difference between Aeschylus and Sophocles, the difference between the eagle-like soaring of insight and the high plain balance of intelligence and feeling together in a balance is exactly the comparison that we would derive from looking at the lives of Wagner and Brahms. They’re the two great contemporaries and they divide the music of the 19th century between them. Mozart and Beethoven belong to the Age of Revolution. Wagner and Brahms represent the lion’s share of what was done musically in Europe in the 19th century. If you subtract the achievement of Brahms and Wagner from the 19th century you have a very paltry duration of time. Just as Wagner is extremely important for the 20th century, Brahms also must be resuscitated. He must be appreciated in terms which are appropriate to the perception of his genius. And as we derive, timeless, improved sensibility from exposing ourselves to the balance of Sophocles so too the balance of Brahms is necessary.

Basically the problem with appreciating Brahms is the problem of immaturity. For Brahms never lets the musical line carry you away. He never lets the melody control your feeling. Always there is the balanced individual who has the feelings, who hears the melodic line but who is able to experience these fluid capacities of human being within a formal context of intelligence. So that Brahms always holds the melody in the palm of the hand and the palm of the hand is not a tyrant disciplining a feeling which would like to be free. With Wagner he cast the melody into the air to see where it will fly and let the subconscious powers carry it wherever it will. Brahms insists that man’s spirit is intelligent and may follow feeling because feeling itself has an intelligible quantification. So that the form of music is a form of human intelligence. And thus Brahms schools us to get off the polarity of trying to do away with feelings because they’re bad for us or trying to develop feelings and letting them carry us where they will. Brahms is the balance. We will have feelings intense perhaps more intense than we would have supposed ourselves capable of, but they will be an intensity within a formal recognition of balance.

Brahms was born in 1833 in Hamburg. His background was one of poverty. His father was a double-bass horn player. The mother was somewhat older than the father. There were eventually conditions of almost extreme poverty. And yet the sensibility of the parents was such that young Brahms had a very fine childhood. He always had the sense that happiness was not dependent upon wealth at all. And even later on when he became enormously wealthy from the income of his published music Brahms would never touch the funds except through a small stipend which he had his music publisher send him. At the pinnacle of Brahms fame in Vienna, he lived in a three room apartment in a great sparsity, personal sparsity of acquisition and Brahms, without letting anyone know, would send sums to young struggling musicians around Europe with no strings attached. Even when his musical publishing agent lost large sums of Brahms money in stock market escapades, Brahms never reprimanded the man. So the early conditions of poverty were rather to set a tone to Brahms personality.

When he was just a youngster it was observed because his father played an instrument in bands. It was observed that young Brahms was quite talented. So they began to teach him piano with an eye towards having him become a virtuoso and eventually Brahms would become quite a good performer and the small income from those performances would augment the family’s income.

However, when he was ten and he was about to be sent on to further schooling to become a super star on the stage, Brahms’s musical teacher told the family – the musical teacher, the first one was named Cossel, C-O-S-S-E-L – told the family that young Brahms was more talented as a composer than as a virtuoso that it was an extraordinary discovery on his part that the youngster could think in terms of musical structure and that what little indications and helps Cossel had been able to observe or give to Brahms he felt himself outclassed by the young boy’s capacities. So he introduced to the Brahms family the top musical instructor in the city of Hamburg, a man named Marxsen. And Marxsen, who had observed Brahms at several recital sessions, agreed to teach the boy free of charge. This was an extraordinary event in Brahms’s life and it was the first time there would be a parallel, later on. It was the first time that the young Brahms felt himself singled out by destiny. He was ten years old and he was told that he was a young genius. Marxsen instructed the young Brahms for a number of years in Hamburg. Brahms, at fifteen, tested himself. He decided to play a composition of his at a concert in Hamburg. This would be 1848. The whole escapade fell flat and it was a beginning lesson for Brahms that if one bases one’s response upon other’s responses you end up in an endless ping pong game of despair. Or if it turns out to be a triumph it very quickly explodes and evaporates.

So the young teenage Brahms set himself, not steeled himself but set himself, to not take the immediate response to his music to heart whether it would be for good or for ill. In order to support himself and bring money into the family Brahms had to begin giving recitals and concerts at various music halls. This in Hamburg at the time did not pay enough so he began playing in nightclubs and as an adolescent from ages thirteen through nineteen Brahms very often would play at these nightclubs late into the night and was exposed to the very seamy nightlife and underground world of Hamburg. Brahms acquired at this time a taste for cigars, a taste for dark black coffee, and a taste for young ladies.

At the age of nineteen just before his twentieth birthday a young Hungarian violinist named Reményi was going to go on a tour through several cities in Germany and ask Brahms if he would accompany him so that the two could play violin and piano together. Brahms decided that he would do this and although he later had arguments with Reményi and broke off the acquaintanceship, it pried Brahms loose from Hamburg. I say pried loose because Brahms was one of those individuals who was so extraordinarily sensitive. His feeling tones were sophisticated to a point that any undue motion or activity was very painful to Brahms. Later on in his life when he was offered a doctorate from the University of Cambridge in England his initial delight soon soured because he was told he would have to go to England in person to receive it and he was so fearful of being seasick crossing the English Channel that he actually turned down this very very coveted doctor of musicology from Cambridge.

So Brahms was pried loose at the age of 20 from Hamburg and they went south. Hamburg of course very far north in Germany. One of the Hanseatic free cities – the port quite large. Hamburg today has several million people. As they went south they met three individuals who would influence Brahms for the rest of his life. They met a violinist named Joaquim – Joseph Joaquim. Joseph Joaquim was just a few years older than Brahms but had become somewhat of a celebrity and a virtuoso on the violin since he was four. In fact, when he went to England in the late 19th century he celebrated sixty years of touring England from the continent at one of his concerts. Joaquim was one of these extraordinary individuals, very very likable, talented, musical genius able to understand what music presents to the world rather than what it represents.

Very often musicians who simply perform, give us music in its representational mode. That is to say they imitate the notation with their instrument. But different from that is a true virtuoso and musical artist who instead of imitating the music mimics the musical notation and presents the feeling.

Joaquim was one of the great artists of his day. He was perhaps the most famous violinist in Europe in the 19th century. He met Brahms, immediately liked the youngster. Brahms was twenty years old. Joaquim sensed right away the tremendous integrity. The characteristic reserve of Brahms was actually, even at the age of twenty, not so much a reserve but a self-disciplining of oneself knowing full well the depth and the heights the intensity of feeling for which one was capable. Not wanting to ex these out, not wanting to delete these feelings from oneself, Brahms already at twenty had schooled himself to experience his feelings in a ordered flow. For instance, when– excuse me– whenever Brahms would drag out of himself enormous themes he would always try to do so in pairs. That is to say when he was offered finally a doctorate of philosophy from the University of Breslau and he wrote the academic Festival Overture for it with its great comic handling of German beer drinking songs within this classical context. He also wrote a tragic overture to go along with it to balance it. Brahms’s Four Symphonies came out in two pairs. Whenever he would bring from himself some extraordinary expression he would try to balance it with another. And this is characteristic of Brahms’s whole personality.

At any rate, at age twenty he went– he met Joseph Joachim who at this time was spending part of his time in a little community called Groningen. Groningen near Marburg, in southern Germany, but he was also at this time – 1853 – just about to be appointed to the court of Hanover where he would spend about thirteen to fifteen years of his life as the personal musician for the court of Hanover. You have to understand that one was allowed to do tours but these were positions that secured your well-being. It gave you also a sense of place in European society. 19th century class distinctions in Europe were extremely well-developed. Remember now this was a society before it was shattered by the First World War so that the court appointments were the legitimizing of the talent publicly. It was just as important as for a writer in our day and age to be published by a good publisher. This sort of a– of a comparison.

The other individuals that Brahms met were Mr. and Mrs. Robert Schumann. Now Robert Schumann repeated what Marxsen had observed in Brahms. Robert Schumann at this time and his wife, beautiful excellent wife Clara, were living in Düsseldorf, down in the– the Dortmund-Essen corridor. There are four large German cities with about five mid-sized German cities all in this Ruhr area. There’s Dortmund, Essen, Dusseldorf, and then Cologne. And further south would be Bonn and they form a crescent. The Rhine River valley runs through there and my grandmother was from Dusseldorf and it’s a very tough sort of a city – industrial. Has been industrial for a long time and yet there is great patronage of the arts in Düsseldorf. Think to yourself in the United States of Pittsburgh the civic pride of having a decent symphony and so forth which was characteristic of Pittsburgh. This kind of an attitude was prominent in Düsseldorf.

Robert Schumann published an article in– and the title of the article was called New Paths and he said of Brahms that this was the new messiah of music nothing less. That Brahms was the great hero of the spirit that Europe had been crying for. That the romantic revolution that had seemed to founder in the Industrial Revolution had finally found its great protagonist, its great savior knight. That even at twenty-one could already discern in Brahms this great spiritual character of the cultural hero who had come to restore balance to the primordial art music, and with it to restore some sense of wholesomeness to the feeling tone of Europe. Nothing less. The article caused a sensation. Brahms of course initially stymied by the overwhelming application of triumph to him, premature no doubt, began to assume a very serious concerted effort. His personality began to assume the tone of a man who has a great mountain to climb because it’s been claimed that he is the one who will climb the mountain.

Brahms studied with Schumann but unfortunately, Schumann was suffering from a chronic inflammation of the inner ear and the deterioration of his inner ear began to work upon the personality of Schumann. Within six months of meeting Brahms, Robert Schumann tried to take his life by drowning himself in the Rhine River. He had six children. Clara Schumann was pregnant so Brahms decided to stay in Düsseldorf to accept musical students and to try and help his great friends. Schumann begged his wife to let him enter a lunatic asylum. He was deteriorating physiologically and the symptoms were such that he was beginning to fray in his perceptual integration. He was in fact no longer finally even able to see his wife without, as the colloquial phrase goes, “going off the deep end.” So Schumann was kept in an asylum and two and a half years later he would die and two days before he died they allowed his wife to come and see him and he hardly recognized her at all.

This rapid fire decay of a great musical talent, a man of great integrity. Robert Schumann was really an excellent man, a very fantastic musician and composer. If one listens to his Manfred Overture you can– you can sense the tremendous vitality within Schumann. But Clara Schumann was also a person of extraordinary depth. It was discovered just a few years ago I think, a decade or so ago, some of Clara Schumann’s compositions were discovered in an old trunk, the proverbial old trunk in someone’s attic. And it turns out that Clara Schumann in her own right was a very very great composer. There are in fact a couple of recordings of some of Clara Schumann’s piano works. She was a great concert pianist who toured all over Europe. She was in fact very much like the popular conception of what Cosima Wagner was supposed to be. Cosima, of course being the daughter of Franz Liszt. Clara Schumann was the most refined feminine sensitivity of the 19th century. In her capacity as a musician, in her capacity as a composer and her capacity as a mother and a wife as a full-rounded woman. To see her go through this suffering brought Brahms to the point of almost considering suicide himself for he had fallen deeply in love with her and in true romantic tradition the hero may not have a forbidden love. She was the wife of his great friend even though he was decaying in a lunatic asylum. And so Brahms held himself in this colossal balance of feeling. He stayed near her to help her. Loved her madly was unable to advance himself in any way except through the platonic kindliness which he was able to offer in terms of financial aid counseling advice being a deep friend.

Clara, sensing the incredible travail going on in Brahms, having just wrung herself with the travail of her decaying husband, was also in straits. In 1856, when Robert Schumann died early in the year, it was rumoured that, finally, Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms would marry, but the facts were these. Clara Schumann was fourteen years his senior; she had seven children; Brahms was a young musical giant, whose personality titanically struggling to balance feeling within, needed to have a sense of independence. Clara Schumann, extraordinary woman that she was, finally made the decision, I think for both of them, that they would be seen together, that they would remain friends throughout their life, but that there would be no wedding, no marriage, no involvement or complication.

Brahms wrote a tremendous Piano Sonata in C at this time and a friend of his who heard it played said, “Whatever were you thinking of when you wrote such a piece?” And he said, “If you’ve ever seen a man who has the gun to commit suicide and knows he must use it it is in that frame of mind that I have written this Piano Sonata in C.”

By 1857 it appeared to Brahms that he was going to have to put a little bit of distance between himself and Clara, and yet stay within contact distance. He accepted an appointment at a small court, a little duchy called Detmold. Detmold was exactly midway in between Dusseldorf where Clara Schumann was and Hanover where Joseph Joaquim was so that Brahms could travel the hundred or so miles in either direction and be with either of his two friends.

While he was there at the court at Detmold one of his tasks was to teach voice to the young Princess Frederica who was a spry young thing who of course fell in love with her musical teacher and tempted him with all sorts of royal coquettish ways which the 19th century seems to have excelled in. Brahms at this time, through the late 1850s, began to struggle with the idea of doing a large composition. The feelings that he had experienced with Clara Schumann had engendered in him the production of three movements of a symphony, but the complications with Frederica soon washed away. The culmination, the finale, the fourth movement, it was unable to come forth. And Brahms taught himself a lesson in balance. That one must persevere through, indefinitely, in order to bring any phenomenal form to a spiritual balance. That is to say, there is no way that a spiritual artistic creator can do it part time or episodically. He has to train himself that he must do it constantly, continuously for all time. This is the only way in which any phenomenal manifestation can come forth.

Brahms at the end of the 1850s hoped that his native city of Hamburg, which was getting ready to change its urban city metropolitan conductor, would appoint him. In order to make himself attractive for this position Brahms began to in fact compose a number of songs and works.

Brahms songs – we should talk about this for a minute – at this time became quite well known. If you look at the list of Brahms works, the songs and the choral works occupy fully half or almost two thirds of all of his works. He was a composer for whom the human voice, in its melodic mode (the song, the lyric), was a– a key element in musical consciousness in human feeling. The song, in fact, became for Brahms the– the basic atomic or molecular unit out of which all of his other compositions would be composed. When he would turn for instance to large orchestral works, in the great culminating years of his life, the melodic episodes that he would seek to suspend within the sombre classical form would be these wonderful songs played by instruments on the orchestra so that in a Brahms symphony, for instance, or a Brahms concerto one of the large orchestral works one has the display of enormous gaiety in little bits suspended within a formal classical structure that seeks to allow for the songs to appear but does not allow for the songs to sweep one away from the formal background.

The first piano concerto, the D minor Piano Concerto – he wrote two piano concertos – was written and performed at this time. It was a tremendous work. It was received of course as most of Brahms works by a certain population of enthusiastic people and a large population of unenthusiastic people. Brahms was seen by the popular mind of the 19th century as a reactionary as someone who was going back to the old-fashioned classical forms. Someone who was going back to Mozart or back to Haydn, back before Beethoven. Where the– the popular sentiment was to carry on from Beethoven. Had not Beethoven after all, with great giant steps carved out the path by which musical expression of human feeling would be able to develop, was not the new man someplace on that far horizon with this great exploration and pioneering of musical form?

So it was the haunting specter of the giant of Beethoven that dominated the 19th century. And in fact Wagner struggled mightily to become the heir of Beethoven. But Brahms is the real heir of Beethoven. Brahms, in fact, sought not to imitate but to emulate. And Brahms, in the first Piano Concerto, gives us a portrayal of a man – twenty-five, twenty-six years old – struggling mightily to balance not only his personal feeling the flamboyant, the great romantic feeling. Beethoven and Brahms could– could feel durations of human feeling that were all but invisible to most human beings. They made phenomenally manifest subtleties of feeling form that were invisible to mankind before they wrote.

We talked when we gave the lecture on Mozart how Mozart was the great pioneer of individual personal feeling in music. That for the first time ever in human history, East or West, Mozart was the first to make musical form a personal expressive mode and how Beethoven had taken that and had written these beautiful beginnings of Mozart onto vast canvases. It was the legacy of this gallery of possibility from Beethoven that stymied the 19th century in terms of feeling and in terms of its artistic expression, especially in music. And it was music that was the primordial art of the 19th century. The parallel to Beethoven in music was Goethe in literature and the same kind of influence was felt. But it was clearly Beethoven whose giant steps had set up an almost impossible task for those who would imitate him. And so Brahms realizing that one would verge upon the megalomania of Wagner if one sought to expand Beethoven. So expansion was not the key, was not the note but rather to take the formal structuring of feeling which Beethoven had explored and to bring it back into balance where Beethoven had flung the capacity for man furthest out in the Ninth Symphony. Feelings in the Ninth Symphony were expressed that had never before been felt. So Brahms’s First Piano Concerto echoes the themes of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and one has the feeling of the young master bringing in these vast gestures that had gone out in almost splayed like conditions wholly in the musical consciousness of Beethoven but become strident in the imitators that had progressively populated the 19th century so that by 1860 most romantic music was predictably tragic-triumphant.

The wonderful parody that Prokofiev would write when he would write the classical symphony with a little smile and in Prokofiev’s wonderful Russian sense of humor that one had to have a dashing theme, a very down movement where everybody was hoping that you’d get back to the action, and then a triumphant finale where the action and the feelings all came in and everyone felt really great because you were able to indulge yourself in these triumphant feelings of ultimate universal value. Brahms brought back that stridency to a center, to a balance. And already in the first Piano Concerto in 1860 you see Brahms surveying the field.

He was not given the position in Hamburg and so, at the age of twenty-nine, Brahms went to Vienna. Vienna– Vienna was the home base for the musical consciousness. It was the place that Mozart loved, it was the place that Beethoven had been in. And those long walks through the countryside around Vienna were just what Brahms needed. He began to hold himself in great– greater esteem. His capacity began to manifest itself. He went on tours, you know, conducting orchestras and so forth. And in the– in the summers he went to various spas. In fact during the middle 1860s he went to Baden-Baden which is just off the Rhine River down in southern Germany near the– near to the French border, somewhere between Karlsruhe and Basel.

All through the 1860s Brahms struggled to pull in the excessive redundancies of the imitators of Beethoven into a new musical harmony. He in fact experienced again and again the need to do some major work. After all, had he not been hailed by his friend, now deceased, Robert Schumann as the new musical Messiah, the new musical messiah of the European feeling tone sensibility of the age? And he had not produced a major work. Had produced the first Piano Concerto. Had produced a lot of songs. Had produced a number of chamber pieces. Had produced a number of piano solos, many of them for Clara Schumann to perform to make money at. But Brahms had mooted to himself a work which would bring back the Beethoven sensibility into a harmonic structure. By the mid of the 1860s he had found his mark. He brought back sketches which he had done at the point of the death of Robert Schumann. In those months of travail where he had wavered between asking for Clara Schumann’s hand and realizing that he couldn’t do it. Then the death of Brahms mother triggered off in 1866 and Brahms began to bring the work together in the form which it enjoys in our day – the German Requiem, a German Requiem.

That is to say this would be a Mass but it would not be a Catholic Mass but a Protestant Mass. Further it was to be a Mass in the sense that it was to be a transformative ritual of spiritual import and it was to be that for the German people. For the German mind. For what had begun to haunt Brahms was the comparison that was introduced by a conductor named Hans von Bülow. The three B’s: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. And so Brahms was beginning to be held up as the great inheritor of this tradition.

Remember now that Bach’s music for several hundred years had languished had not been performed had been the property of– of little tiny Lutheran churches and communities and that it was Felix Mendelssohn who had brought the idea of redoing old classics in contemporary concerts, had revived Bach in the 1850s. It was Mendelssohn who had done this. So that the giant that was Beethoven in the present, the revived giant of Bach in the past, and the future giant Brahms who was yet to do something. All this was haunting the young man. By now he was thirty-five years of age. And where were the great works?

The German Requiem was the first great work of Brahms. It is without a doubt one of the finest spiritual musical compositions ever made. For in it, Brahms fully takes into consideration all of the elements that I have outlined for you the tremendous themes of Beethoven; the tremendous structural developments of Bach; the great development of personal feeling with Mozart and Haydn; the tremendous excesses that had been done by imitators of Beethoven; the tremendous excesses that had been so successfully put forth by Wagner. All of this Brahms brought together in the late 1860s in The German Requiem. It is a work which does a sacred transformation for the German people of the mind which has been exploded by feeling expectation.

We have Bach, we have Beethoven, we have Mozart, we have Wagner, now we have Brahms. We are the great German race. Brahms brought all this back and instead of getting rid of the notion of the German sensibility, brought it back into a sophoclean harmony in The German Requiem. In fact the Catholic Mass which has a five-part of seriation to its process. Brahms was having trouble with the – excuse me – with the fifth part and so changed the structure of the mass, and its final presentation – it was presented several times in smaller forms – but its final seven-part form was presented in 1869. This seven-part mass of Brahms is really the first indication that we have of the maturity of secular culture surpassing the religious culture of the authoritarian church. That is to say, specifically, the secular sacredness had passed the authoritarian sacredness of the church structure with Brahms’s German Requiem. It was an indication of the maturing of the human individual that he no longer needed to be in an authoritarian church structure to experience the highest transformative qualities of spirituality. He could do it in a concert hall as a private citizen as an individual who had gone there with his friends and family and still had, still had, the effective transformation of the spiritual experience.

Brahms’s German Requiem in its seven-part structure was absolutely tremendous. He had all kinds of offers from almost everywhere in Europe. He finally decided that he would take a post in his, by now beloved, Vienna. There was a group called the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (the Society for Friends of Music) and Brahms, for three years, was the head conductor and the head of this in Vienna. He was the Social Lion of Vienna of the 1870s and in order to demonstrate his capacity to them of his masterfulness. Just as for Wagner his sense of mastery was writing and being able to complete the master singers of Nuremberg, that the meistersingers of Nuremberg, especially Hans Sachs, was the symbolic manifestation of Wagner’s mastery of form. So too Brahm’s presentation of his mastery of form was in a work called Variations on a Theme by Haydn, which is one of the most extraordinary orchestral works ever done. If you get a chance to listen to it you will see the absolute mastery of form that Brahms has. In fact Brahms who was his own deepest critic could find nothing to criticize in the Variations on a Theme by Haydn. But the theme is not by Haydn. The theme is from an obscure work by some contemporary of his in Vienna, some man who we have lost track of. Why Haydn? Why would Brahms say such a thing? Because Brahms was declaring, in the title, that this was a mastery of form going back to Mozart and Haydn, back to the beginnings of the Viennese musical consciousness, before Beethoven but after Bach at that juncture where it was just coming out and that Brahms was going to show, not only the theme, but all the variations the carefree dancing of using the whole orchestra to pirouette around a theme. And in fact, the theme is an old religious chorus taken from something called the Saint Andrews Chorus that I’ve been unable to trace down and locate exactly. But it was an old religious folk song for a choir for a chorus which Brahms had brought into orchestral mastery and had dazzled the Viennese audiences with. So the Variations on the Theme of Haydn is alongside The German Requiem a sign of Brahms coming of age.

He was now nearing forty years of age and after conducting for three years the Society for the Friends of Music, he decided to resign. He had brought extraordinarily interesting programs, but Brahms had a need to be independent. He yearned as a young man for stability, for that home, for that position that he could stay in for the rest of his life. And now that he had it he realized that he couldn’t stay with it. He couldn’t use it. He could not maintain the pioneering fine edge of his exploration of further balances in human feeling. If he were to be ground up by the committees, by the– the workaday tasks that would have to be shouldered by staying in one place in one position. Clara Schumann had seen very accurately years before the true heroic character of Brahms. Love him as she did. She loved him as the heroic exploring composer more than as an object for her own personal satisfaction and feeling – she let him go. And now Brahms had learned that he must also let himself go.

When he resigned, he realized that he had matriculated himself into the final school of life, the school of mastery of expression. And so Brahms, sensing the seriousness of the moment, went back to the first three movements of the symphony of twenty years before and sat down to complete it, to finish it. And through the 1870s, the late 1870s, Brahms would do this again and again. He would go back to musical problems that had been unsolvable for him when he was younger and he would solve them. And it was not simply the triumphal dilettante who was finally able to finish the crossword puzzle. It’s the master who goes back to the origins of his own quandaries and personality, his own knots and feelings, and open them up. And as he opened them up he realized that he was in position finally, as a man, as an artist that he had been able to bring his balance of feeling to a high enough level, a high enough plateau, like that aerie place from where the spiritual Eagle’s Eye surveys the all that the world itself becomes a pattern to be understood in its unity.

Brahms finished the First Symphony and as he finished it wrote the final movement for it. He also began the Second Symphony and within a matter of months had finished the Second Symphony. And so the first two symphonies by Brahms came out. And when you hear the First Symphony the first movement begins with such a driving Beethoven-esque movement you wonder how could anyone resolve this? Is there any coda in music that could handle such a piledriver of a theme? The orchestra comes in and all the major violins just spiral in this– this driving, thrumming theme which is more of a rhythm than a melody. And yet he solved that musical problem. He was able to bring that form to conclusion.

But the Second Symphony to balance that is an extraordinary work. It’s full of gentleness and delight. It’s full of cheerful explorations on the edges of triumph never once letting one get carried away until the finale, the final fourth movement where the audience and the composer have earned the right to strut a little bit, to parade a little bit. And so Brahms like a master opens up the final doors of the form and allows for the triumphant theme to finally emerge. Something which had been in suspension for twenty-two years, finally pulls itself out and the final bars of the Second Symphony in the fourth movement are a joy to behold. One senses the Olympian triumph of the human spirit being able to fly free because it knows that it has developed wings to fly free. It’s not a triumph of romantic speculation. It is a triumph of classical understanding.

And so, Brahms’s Second Symphony is one of the world’s great musical pieces. In fact, if we listen closely to the fourth movement of the Second Symphony and the fourth movement of the Fourth Symphony you notice the parallel. Brahms was a master when he wrote the Second Symphony and the fourth movement was the best triumph he was capable of then. When he wrote the Fourth Symphony, Brahms had transcended all categories was a universal genius. And the finale of the Fourth Symphony is one of those works, like Beethoven’s Ninth, there isn’t language to describe the capacity that is demonstrated there. Not reached for, not struggled for, but presented without effort.

By 1880 Brahms in fact was becoming the Lion of Europe. Brahms and Wagner had met in 1863 outside of Vienna. At this time Wagner was living a dissolute year. He was at a place called Penzig and he had decided that his life was so messed up that he was just going to take in a beautiful mistress and– and live a wild life. A year later he would be taken in by Ludwig the Second – the mad Bavarian king – and his financial problems would be solved and Wagner would set himself then to seriously finish his musical works in life.

Wagner and Brahms divide the musical sensibility of the 19th century. Brahms had signed a petition declaiming this tremendous worship of excess. While those critics from the Wagnerian standpoint decried Brahms who was an old fashioned stick in the mud who was trying to turn the clock back and was actually some kind of reactionary. Both views obviously are wrong. They’re mis-assessments of the tremendous triumph that each of them had acquired in their own form. But realize Wagner’s work is almost all in the opera, the musical drama as he called it. Brahms never once wrote an opera. Never once thought of it. Two completely dissimilar musical sensibilities exploring the 19th century. Both of them coming to realize that whatever form was to be manifested the content could not dominate the form. That there had to be a formal understanding on man’s part ultimately and not one of contextual feeling. That is to say, the material aspect of the world had to take second place. It was the materiality of the world which could not be pursued to the ultimate. It was only the formal aspect of the world that could be pursued to its ultimate.

The progressive revelation by Wagner and by Brahms in their successive works in their respective ways demonstrated that the feeling maturity of the 19th century was verging upon maturity by the 1880s. And in fact we will see at the conclusion of this series that the 1880s was in fact a watershed in European consciousness. For Brahms he was lionized. He had written towards the end of the 1870s not only another piano concerto and the Second Piano Concerto was an enormously spry work. In fact if we listen to it today you will hear some of the themes of Star Wars that John Williams took from the second piano concerto of Brahms. You’ll hear them played. It’s almost like a weird deja vu to hear something like that from our time lurking around in the Second Piano Concerto? One of the really tremendous works in the repertoire. And at the same time as he wrote this concerto for piano he wrote a great Violin Concerto in D for violin and orchestra both in the same year. Another paralleling. In the Violin Concerto, one of the really great works. In fact, if you play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and then Brahms Violin Concerto you realize that Brahms had matured his style to the mastery of Beethoven at that juncture.

And then, with 1883, Brahms found in himself a Third Symphony. And the Third Symphony came out and was an extraordinary work. Unbelievable work. But to balance it he wrote the Fourth within months. Again pairing these. And the Fourth Symphony, like Wagner’s Parsifal, was the ultimate statement of the way in which feeling transmutes itself from content to form. That the human being exists not as a colored patchwork of melody but exists as an eternal harmony of form. And if he can transmute himself to that level, to that horizon of perception, his feeling becomes intelligence – universal, abiding and no longer wavering. Brahms’s Fourth Symphony places man there that God’s eye view of his own feeling capacity.

It’s interesting that Brahms gave the Fourth Symphony to Hans von Bülow to conduct in the small town where he was. Von Bülow of course had lost his wife to Wagner. Wagner had become world famous and his wife had taken over the collecting of funds for the building of Wagner’s great theater at Bayreuth. Brahms, understanding balance, being the great gentleman delivered into the hands of this von Bülow as the consolation for having lost so much. The sacredness of the position of performing his own final work. Even though Brahms would live a dozen years after the Fourth Symphony he never wrote another major work. He wrote songs. He wrote piano works. He wrote some sacred choral works, but he let rest what he had achieved. He had understood in himself what had happened.

In the last month of Brahms life, he was dying of cancer of the liver. The once great proud manly stance of his just curled into a hovel. The beautiful hair just but strings hanging down. The city of Vienna held a memorial concert with Brahms in the balcony and they played the Fourth Symphony. And at every movement there were standing ovations and calls for the maestro. Brahms would stand shakily in the balcony and the tremendousness of the realization of what he had achieved because by now a dozen years later the great Fourth Symphony of Brahms had become apparent to the growing sophistication of European audiences what in fact he had been doing, what in fact the world had been participating in, when it listened to his music when it was presented by this transformative musical form and seeing the shell of the man brought tears to the eyes of the audience of Vienna. And reports at the time said that after the fourth movement and the standing ovation while the voices were cheering him the eyes were pouring tears because they could see that this was the last farewell for Brahms. He never again surfaced in public. He died at the age of sixty-four in 1897, April 3rd.

Brahms’s legacy has been forgotten in the 20th century, because the 20th century has run screaming pell mell for more. The 20th century has become like a gangster or a whore crying only for more. It has forgotten the lesson. The great 19th century had to finally learn that balance is more important than more. Once you have balance you can pioneer for more. But if you try to have more on top of more you will fall. There is no doubt of that whatsoever. In fact, the little volume of Sophocles that Brahms thumbed through while he was writing the Great Fourth Symphony, shows the master two thousand three hundred years later, understood very well the lessons of the master before. That in fact when one has transcended the temporal limitations one does not just follow one’s errors. One is not just an inheritor of Beethoven but one joins that sacred chorus of the human spirit, Sophocles and Brahms alike, who remind us if we pursue the material world for more we will fall into an abyss. The only hope for us then is to be clear about our vision into the darkness to be able to see the patterns of the stars reflected therein. That is our only saving grace.

We will see next week one last genius before the final one. We turn finally to science. We turn to James Clerk Maxwell because he found what all of our individuals that we have given found – that the material world vanishes as you become adept at codifying it. As you become adept at seeing it and understanding it it vanishes before your eyesight and what is left is nothing but pure energetic form. And James Clerk Maxwell’s great volumes on a Treatise on Electromagnetic Energy, set the stage. It was a culmination of science that– such as the world had never seen and it was the platform on which Einstein stood, finally, to make sense of a vanishing world in a relative universe by being able to follow the form through to the starry patterns within – there he is.