Brahms Bashing Down the Ages

[Zeitblom]

Well, I love both Brahms and Wagner, which may just make me indiscriminate ...

But what I cannot understand is the accusation that Brahms was stodgy and unemotional. To my ears (and it's inevitably a personal response) Brahms is full of emotion - admittedly emotion tempered by a profound classical sensibility. I find it hard to believe that one can really listen to, for example, the first piano concerto, the Alto Rhapsody or the slow movement of the Third Symphony without sensing that combination of emotion and rigour which makes Brahms such a compelling and, to my ears anyway, authentic composer?

But, of course, such reactions are personal.

[Herodotas]

"I find it hard to believe that one can really listen to, for example, the slow movement of the Third Symphony without sensing emotion"

Quotation carefully edited by yours truly! You have reminded me of when I first encountered the music of Brahms - as a young adolescent: there was a film on one Sunday afternoon - someone will tell me the title - a love story set, I think, in Rome or Paris (the guy had an open top sports car)........the romance was set to Brahms' main theme of the slow movement. I think it struck a lasting chord in me, and played its part in awakening my potential for romance! The melody has stayed in my head ever since.....who can seriously say Brahms was not a melody man! (What about the First Symphony?).

[Alpha Centauri]

Originally Posted by Herzeleide

Such a puerile, witless response can only ever mean one thing.

Yes, Herzeleide, it means I have put you back on my list of blocked members.

I gave you a chance to behave like an adult and took the block off - your response has been the usual ad-hominem stuff.

So this is the end of the line for you and I. Post what you like - but don't expect a response, as from today I will no longer be viewing your messages. Nor - from what I've seen - do I think I'll be missing anything by doing so!!



Now prove me right by writing another pile of drivel in response to this?

They should call you "The Daily Telegraph"... because you have decade's-worth of issues.

[Herzeleide]

Originally Posted by Despina41

Re: Brahms 4, first mvt--

said when he first heard Brahms and a friend play through the four-hand version, "I had the impression I've just been beaten up by two really smart people!"

I was lucky enough, a few months' ago, to attend a lecture by Professor Robert Pascall about the Fourth Symphony - mainly editorial issues. I was wise enough to keep the handout, and it seems Brahms himself and Hans von Buelow recognised its originality:

Around the 15th October, 1885, Brahms to Buelow:
'I'm not much interested in a premiere. Rather a performance in 10 or 20 years - which is our version of immortality.' Kalbeck III/2, 456.

22nd October, Buelow to Hermann Wolff: 'Just back from rehearsal. No. IV gigantic, absolutely original, completely new, robustly individual. Breathes incomparable energy from A to Z.' Buelow Briefe VI, 385.

[Herzeleide]

Here's an interview with Pascall:

02/12/2006

Leeds International Concert season talks to leading Brahms scholar Robert Pascall about his passion for the composer

Can you recall the first Brahms work you ever heard?
Vividly. As a young teenager in the 1950s, huddled over our old valve radio I heard Reginald Kell play the Clarinet Quintet on the Third Programme: life-changing! I remember thinking, music does not get more beautiful than this, and I went on to catch all I could - on radio, on the new 33rpm vinyls, at concerts in town: David Oistrakh playing the Violin Concerto, Josef Krips conducting the Fourth Symphony, Andor Foldes playing the variations op.9 and op.21 no.1 are particular memories.

What draws you to his music particularly - textures? forms? genres?
What I treasure is that extraordinarily potent combination of sensuous beauty – melodies, harmonies, textures – with a persuasive musical logic in which every step is so new yet so right; he explores what Schoenberg called ‘the remote possibilities’ of his themes. This has something to do with forms and genres, since they suggest distinctive ways of elaboration, but whatever form, whatever genre, the ear – or mine at least – is held in absolute thrall from the first note to the last.

Do you think the music-loving public has an accurate view of the composer as a person - ending up as the proverbial grumpy bachelor??
Probably not! I think the key to getting near to him as a person, across the time gap, is to appreciate his intensity and focus. Almost all accounts testify to his living life to the full at every moment. In his creative life, this led to the kind of aspiration and dedication which drew him into the years of study after meeting Schumann, when he made himself surely the most historically aware and knowledgeable composer of his times, and to the utter seriousness of purpose which kept him working at his music until he was completely satisfied with every last detail. As pianist, the immediacy and individuality of his interpretation led Richard Specht to say ‘the whole person was in this playing – and also the whole work: one seemed to possess it from that moment on, inalienably so.’ As a person – well, there is no doubt he suffered depressed moments, as he himself confessed, but in the main he enjoyed life: company, food, walking, joking, making music with friends. The grumpy reputation comes, I think, from his dislike of the more empty formalities and courtesies. As he said on leaving a party ‘if there is anyone here I have failed to insult, I beg their pardon’, which surely well captures both this aspect of his personality and his sense of truly impish fun.

Would you agree with the assessment that he was one of the greatest composers of variations from any period?
Absolutely. Brahms worked hard at understanding the form. His composition teacher made him write variations; his first work performed in public (now lost) consisted of variations on a folksong; and during that period of study in the mid 1850s, he paid particular attention to the form, writing to his friend Joachim: ‘I have been thinking about variation form… we rummage around over the theme, as it were. We anxiously retain the melody, but don’t treat it freely, don’t make something really new out of it, just weigh it down.’ Here we have the intensity of focus, the aspiration and dedication, the interest in music where persuasive newness is based on given material. The St Anthoni Variations are particularly interesting from this point of view, with their Haydnesque counterpoint and scherzos, their characteristic melodies (what a sheerly wonderful flute solo that is in variation 7), and the most original, yet strict, final chaconne. He wrote the work quite quickly in the midst of his long struggle with his First Symphony, and it forms the very first set of free-standing variations for orchestra, starting a tradition eagerly taken up by Dvorak, Reger, Elgar among others.

How important were his personal/professional musical relationships to him in terms of his compositional output - Joachim, Mulhlfeld &c?
Fundamental for him were his relationships with Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Renaissance masters of course, and, by virtue of that intensity of focus he was able to assimilate what he needed from them to enrich his own creative voice. But your question is really about the living. The impact of his meeting with the Schumanns in 1853 was decisive, launching him into national fame and causing also the self-doubt which made him study afresh. Joachim remained a special friend until the split over Joachim’s divorce. Brahms sought his views on his latest compositions, as he did the views of Clara Schumann and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg also, and he relied on Joachim’s advice in shaping idiomatic figures in the Violin Concerto. But in some ways what happened at the end of his life is the most interesting. Brahms had decided to retire in 1890, and the works coming from after then are really of three types: collecting together and publishing pieces already finished, turning to religious themes, and composing because he met players whose beauty of sound and interpretation he couldn’t resist. The story of Richard Mühlfeld and the four great clarinet works is well-known, that of Ilona Eibenschütz and the last piano pieces less so; both testify to the intimate connexion of playing and composing, the recreative inspiring the creative. Just thank goodness he met those two wonderful artists!

http://www.leedsconcertseason.com/MO...iews&itemid=66

[Chi_town/Philly]

Originally Posted by Reiner Torheit

... the Middle Class religious right will always support it...

Self-assessment-
Middle Class- check (well, I'm what they call in ad-speak a "white-collar professional," but I'm the son of a Working Class Dad, and have been Working Class meself for most of my employed life... so I'm comfortable with the descriptor "Middle Class.")
Religious Right- yeah, that's me!
I should be crazy about Brahms, I guess- but somehow, I'm not.

There have been those who would place Brahms among the top three composers of all time. I'm not sure he'd be among my uppermost twenty.

Originally Posted by Zeitblom

Well, I love both Brahms and Wagner...

Among folks who've made a few hundred (or a few thousand) posts in Classical Forums, I'd say that yours is a more common attitude than liking neither Brahms nor Bruckner! [N.B.: I LOVE most Bruckner symphonies...]

Still (to recycle one of my rhetorical 'set-pieces') as sage Hans Sachs says, the value of a rule can be gauged by its occasional allowance for an exception, and to me, the great Brahmsian exception is the Violin Concerto! Immediately appealing, excellently crafted (of course) and rewarding upon repeated listening... if anyone wants to call it the greatest of its kind, I will not argue with you.

[otterhouse]

To take this topic thread literary, here IS Brahms bashing through the ages...:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DILubIRIgX4"]YouTube - Brahms himself at the piano 1889 my restauration[/ame]

Rolf

[Florestan]

[Chilperich]

Originally Posted by Herzeleide

Here's an interview with Pascall:



http://www.leedsconcertseason.com/MO...iews&itemid=66

Robert Pascall was my original PhD supervisor, in the days when I seriously cared for such foolishness. (I later went on to play guitar and double-bass in blues and jazz groups.)

He is one of the most remarkable musical personalities that I have ever met. I despaired of ever meeting his high standards (although he was infinitely encouraging). His successors were not a patch on him, which is why I gave up my postgraduate studies (for the time being).

[Herzeleide]

Originally Posted by Chilperich

He is one of the most remarkable musical personalities that I have ever met.

Ditto. I've also attended lectures given by him about Schenkerian, semiotic and Schoenbergian analysis, which were absolutely fascinating. One of those rare occasions in a lecture when I've felt the kind of knowledge, wisdom and musical nous he was displaying could not be found in a book!