Judge Dennis Davis
Brahms: Following in the Footsteps of a Giant

Judge Dennis Davis - Brahms: Following in the Footsteps of a Giant

- Welcome to everybody, good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Tonight we talk about Brahms. And I suppose the topic, “Following in the Footsteps of a Giant”, really presupposes one fundamental question. Which is how do you respond if you are really supremely talented as Johannes Brahms was? To the fact that your predecessor and title as it were, Ludwig van Beethoven, was such a giant, how do you create music which ultimately can be regarded as original, can develop the tradition when you have faced with this old world of music of a genius? It’s an extraordinarily difficult challenge on all sorts of fronts. And that is what we are going to talk about tonight. I realised when I prepared for this lecture that to a considerable extent, I could have taken any one of the great Brahms pieces and spent the entire hour on it, and probably even more. So, my difficulty is that I’m not going to do that. I’ve chosen, as I did with the other composers that I’ve looked at a series of their works, not all, just a few and even then, one I’ll just dip into various aspects thereof, but I will hope that they will be of value to you as you try to puzzle out the genius of Johannes Brahms. Now, Brahms is born May 7th in 1833 in Hamburg. His father didn’t exactly come from a particularly wealthy family compared to Mendelssohn. His father, Jakob, found employment as a jobbing musician, mainly getting work from playing in a double bass and French horns, but very intermittently. The young Brahms was forced to play the piano at dances to contribute to the family’s income ‘cause they were so poorly off. He obviously showed extraordinary talent and really by the time he was 11, he was really composing and most of these compositions he destroyed, which is very interesting, and I’ll come back to that in a moment because it says much of his character.

Brahms was regarded as such a genius not withstanding the looming spectre of Beethoven, that Robert Schumann himself, hardly a shabby composer, was so impressed with Brahms’s talent, when then they met, he was inspired and wrote a famous article named “Noya Banham New Paths”, which gave Brahms a lot of publicity because it claimed that Brahms was now the custodian of the great classical and romantic tradition. Around about the same time, he also met a Hungarian refugee and violinist by the name of Edward Remény. This is in 1850, who introduced him to a range of folk and gypsy music and will see that that also was particularly influential in the compositions that he developed. Extraordinary and we’ll come back to that, extraordinary. Brahms began composing his first symphony in 1854, but it wasn’t premiered until November, 1876, 22 years later and I want to emphasise that 22 years later, 14 years of hard work, in fact, during that period to compose a symphony revised over and over again. And the emphasis is as I’ll come back to, I’m just painting the picture of Brahms as a character. Now I’ve mentioned Robert Schumann, and of course when Robert Schumann died in 1856, Brahms rushed off to be with, to comfort Schumann’s wife, Clara. It’s rather unclear precisely what kind of relationship they had. Lots has been written about this, the fact that they destroyed a large number of the letters which they had written to each other, indicates maybe they had something to hide. They were incredibly close.

Whether this was a platonic relationship or more, one does not know, but it was clear that Brahms had never married and Clara Schumann had never remarried, were terribly close. Now, what in a sense defines some of the conversation that we have to engage in this evening relates to the great debate and I am pleased that Patrick gave a lecture on Wagner on Sunday, because of course in the last quarter of the 19th century, you have these two great characters in German musical still, one of course is Wagner, the great epic opera composer and the other is Brahms, who essentially, as we shall discuss, comes very much more from a traditional which was preceded by Beethoven, Mozart, et cetera. And the debate, which in fact, Brahms got into between, you could call it the War of the Romantics, this musical argument between the Wagnerians on the one hand, this was there too, with a more radical approach to music and more conservative artists like Brahms and Clara Schumann as well. And what this was about was the fact that Brahms advocated absolute music, no other meaning than the notes on the page, pure and simple. There’s no extra musical inspiration beyond the music itself. The music is absolute, that’s Brahms’ shtick. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t engage with emotion, doesn’t engage with feeling and with context. But music is absolute, symphonies, concertos, sonatas, string quartets, all the music in traditional forms is what Brahms sought, not just to reproduce, that’s the important point but to redevelop. He was a traditionalist, but believed in the development of the tradition, not just simply a repetition thereof.

By contrast, the war of the romantics, in a sense, aside, had Brahms on the one hand as I’ve said, and the Wagnerian, Wagner, in particular, who believed in programme music, which was a direct response to a story, to an image, to a character. Of course, Wagner wasn’t the first in that. We know Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons”, Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony, which we’ve discussed before about being out in the countryside, Berlioz’ Symphony Fantastique which I’ve also discussed with you in the same particular way. And of course we can also add to that list and Robert Schumann, Richard Strauss. But at the end of the day, it was Wagner who was central to this particular debate. And for the Wagnerians, Brahms was just an antiquarian, academic, conservative musician because he returned to the old forms that were effectively in their argument obsolete. Wagner, on the other hand, Brahms’ school of thought appealed to the masses with degenerative manipulative grandiose as what they consider to be drivel. And while they were, on the other hand, fighting to preserve this venerated and sacred genre of Beethoven, et cetera. And what in effect the argument, I suppose many, was about was that Wagner said himself that Beethoven had come to the end of absolute music. And his evidence for that was the Ninth Symphony in which Beethoven had re-chorused the voices as we discussed for the first time in symphonic music. And he thought logically that meant that vocal music was where the future was. So the operas which he composed, which he considered to be musical dramas, which drew on all sorts of, whether it be art, music, speech, a range of different artistic elements, poetry, all of this and of course, it’s actually German myth, all of which were sort of carved together to develop a new kind of programmatic music.

Whereas for Brahms, on the other hand, it was the resurrection of the traditional forms of the Beethoven type music, which was absolutely crucial. So there was this huge divide between them. Interestingly enough, those who write about this particular area do concede that both of them had a respect for the other. Brahms actually bought an expensive handwritten autographed copy of one of Wagner’s scores. Wagner, is of course, far too pompous and self opinionated to give any public credits to Brahms, but there’s no question that there was that respect between the two of them. And so it’s important to understand that Brahms comes from in the sense the opposite tradition of what you would’ve listened to in relation to Wagner. So much then just to complete the picture, of course we know that after the struggle of the First Symphony, he wrote three other symphonies. Of course, there’s the German Requiem which is an extraordinary piece of work. We have the Violin Concerto, which I’ll talk about, two massive piano concertos, apart from all the other songs, overtures, et cetera. It’s interesting just to emphasise, and I want to emphasise this ‘cause I want to come back to this, that Brahms was an outdoor person, and when he wasn’t travelling around Europe for concert tours, he liked to trample around the hills of Italy for walking tours and really was very much a lover of nature. Just also that when his mother died in 1865, the grief which overcome him then was in the sense what perhaps stimulated him to compose the German Requiem. And Brahms died of some form of cancer, either pancreatic or liver, some unclear evidence on this, on the 3rd of April, 1897. Now let us get to his music.

The interesting thing about his music is that Brahms struggled to write a symphony. I’ve indicated this to you, 22 years, 14 in the writing. He had started because he had heard the Ninth and he was inspired by it, but it was extraordinarily difficult for him to actually meet the challenge, the challenge which Beethoven had posed to any composer of any kind, who is going to follow in his footsteps. And the result of which was that he struggled to this extent, that he couldn’t get down to writing or let’s say completing it. And what is interesting is he tried his hand at, if you could call it, entry into the symphonic context, without writing a symphony in two major works. If you listen to the First Piano Concerto, which I don’t have time to discuss, not a massive work, it’s very much has symphonic elements to it, particularly in the opening. It’s almost as if it was a symphony until the piano pops up. And clearly Brahms is testing the forms of symphonic music when he wrote that. The other testing of the waters, which I do want to talk about it 'cause it’s played so often in concerts, of it’s course, the variation on the so-called theme of Joseph Haydn. What had happened here was some six years before, Brahms was able to launch his piano, sorry, his Symphony Number One, his friend, the musicologist, Carl Ferdinand Paul shared a discovery with him, a peaceful woodwind octet that they believed to be an unknown work by Joseph Haydn. Intrigued, Brahms copied down the second movement, which was labelled “Chorale Saint Anthony” and he consisted of a sort of odd melody that began with two irregular five bar phrases. And, of course, we then learned later that it wasn’t a piece written by Haydn, might have been written by all sorts of other people and the label “Chorale Saint Anthony” would seem to imply that the melody was taken from some preexisting chorale as such, but certainly wasn’t Haydn’s.

Nonetheless, it was this theme, this piece of music that Brahms then turned into as it were, the theme behind it and eight variations. And so in a way, this piece of music is Brahms’ first real entry or second entry apart from the Piano Concerto One into trying to see whether he could compose a symphony which we will talk about a little later, but which it was central to his early attempt to overcome the struggle of how do you write a symphony that doesn’t simply repeat what Beethoven had said. And so this particular piece, the variations on the Haydn themes is called, essentially the theme is a pastoral character. It has woodwind scorings, Brahms borrowed this theme and sought to have it basically performed outdoors as there’s a kind of bucolic atmosphere, which characterises the entire piece. What I wanted to play for you, just because I wanted to move on, is just the opening theme itself and two of the variations. Variation one, which was the way in which Brahms counter poses triplets against and duplets and then changes that in the second variation, which has a character of gypsy music with very sharp, explosive contrast of sharp, soft, and loud, very much the kind of Romani music that Brahms loved and which essentially characterised much of his later work. But this gives you some idea of Brahms trying to grapple with a symphonic form without actually calling it a symphony. And we are going to listen, just to the opening and the first two variations conducted here by Dudamel, as I indicated many of you’ll be seeing much more often soon because he’s now become the Musical Director of New York Philharmonic.

So let’s hear that particular clip, Emory, that’s I think the first of the clips. Okay, I mean, I think we can move on. Thank you. I’m just anxious about time. I want now, if I may, you get a sense of how that particular theme, “Variations by Haydn”, in a sense, Mr. Brahms is trying to put his toe in the symphonic water if he would, but let’s turn then to the First Symphony. One could of course talk about all his symphonies, all four, but let’s talk about the first one. In 1854, the 21st, 21 year old Johannes Brahms heard Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony” for the first time. And he wrote to his friend Joseph Joachim, who we met last week in the context of Mendelssohn, and he said, “I’ve been trying my hand at a symphony "during the past summer having orchestrated "the first movement and have completed the second "and the third.” And of course that was the beginning, but it was only 1876, 22 years later that that particular symphony came to fruition. And when people heard that symphony, of course, for reasons that we’ll talk about a little moment, people said it was Beethoven’s 10th. And in some ways I think that’s unfair because what I wanted to argue was that ultimately what he was trying to do here was, as I indicated in my very brief and completely unsatisfactory because it’s such a complex topic, summary of the Wagner Brahms debate, which is fascinating in itself. What he was trying to do, it seemed to me, was work through the tradition, but to move on. And so there’s some remarkable features of the First Symphony. I’m just going to play the first two or three minutes to starkness to illustrate an aspect and then I want to play a three minute clip of the final movement also to latent aspect. But I’m going to say a couple of other things which I hope you might think about if you just put the symphony on yourself.

Much better recording than we can give you here and listen to it, because the thing about that symphony, which is so interesting, is just the starkness, that actual beginning, there’s an incredibly agonising beginning, opening few bars of that symphony. It really does reflect this incredible weight that Brahms felt was on his shoulders in having to produce a symphony which could be faithful to the tradition, but wouldn’t just be simply some relatively boring adaptation of Beethoven. And if you listen just to the first three or four minutes of the first movement, which we’re going to play you, in fact, it’s interesting that he doesn’t actually use Beethoven there as much as I shall indicate he does in many other parts. What he does, it seems to me is he goes back further to Bach to the music of Bach, to the earlier German music and composes a kind of chromatic counterpoint. There’s much more kind of polyphonic sound in the way in which the symphony opens. You can listen to the opening when you hear how he counterpoints rising line and the violence of cellos, descending lamented music line in the woodwinds and violas. There’s no one theme here. There are a whole series, a network of the which he’s working. In order, as it were to take the symphonic form which Beethoven had used going back earlier and trying to develop his own voice.

The agonising beginning is just how on earth difficult it could be and I want you to contrast that agonising beginning to the end, which we’ll come to presently, the triumphant end to the symphony when he’s finally done it. There’s one other aspect which I wanted to show you, but I couldn’t, it’s in the middle of the movement and was my technological ineptitude was such that I couldn’t extract it properly, but I urge you to listen, halfway through the first movement of the Brahms One, you will hear a bum bum bum bum. It’s that, it’s a replication of the opening of the baba bu bum of the Beethoven Five opening. And it’s there and it battles, the orchestra battles that bum, bum, bum against the kind of very much more lyrical music, which was very much more in keeping with Brahms. There is a furious battle going on in that first movement in which Brahms’ music is grappling with trying to get beyond Beethoven and impose his own model on the music. And so the first movement is this extraordinary struggle, which had taken him 22 years to resolve, to actually get beyond Beethoven by going to music earlier than Beethoven and creating his own voice through the same tradition which Beethoven had dominated. Let’s just listen. Emily, this is the clip two that we have. The new one will come in after this. So if we could listen to clip two, it’s the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Benjamin Zander, just the first two or three minutes thereof. That just gives you some sense of the way in which Brahms was trying to develop a whole range of themes and sounds even as he was agonising about the very task of moving beyond that of the agonising weight in which he poses right at the beginning of the symphony.

And it’s remarkable when you listen to that opening and to almost as if it were, it’s Brahms’ fate to move beyond Beethoven and the struggle which he embarks on in that first movement with clearly a different sound to the Beethoven. When we come to the end, the Fourth Movement, we reached the point that he’s resolved the problem. His major problem as he thought was that if you looked at 19th century, sorry, 18th, 19th century symphonies, by the time they’d finished the opening allegro, almost all the major structural tensions had been resolved by the end of that first movement. And for him that couldn’t be, you had to find a way to, as were explore way beyond the first movement until you get to the final movement of the Brahms One. And just before the little clip I’m going to play you, there is the famous horn part of that symphony. It is unbelievably moving. ♪ Ba ba bom bom ♪ ♪ Da da dee ♪ That, it’s Brahms says, “I’ve made it.” And in fact, he did talk about the fact that that reflected as it were, the mist clearing from the heights of the alphorns of Switzerland. For Brahms, that horn part was finally the mists, which had, which essentially clouded his mind for 22 years, which had actually been preventing him from resolving this problem of how did you develop music which was in the tradition, but was beyond Beethoven, how could you do that?

And when that horn part comes out, he, as he himself said, it’s the mist clearing from the top of the mountains and we are there. And what does he then do? He then does the most remarkable thing. He adapts the “Ode to Joy” theme. It’s not quite the “Ode to Joy”, but it’s an adaptation of the “Ode to Joy”. And Brahms himself, when asked about it, of course, he said, “Well, any ass can hear that.” And what he meant by that was I wasn’t trying just sort of just copy Beethoven. He was, if you listen carefully, he’s trying to adapt that. He’s showing to some extent in his first symphony that the end isn’t with Beethoven. That you can take Beethoven and do more. And there’s an extraordinary triumph in that last, and I’m just going to play three minutes of it, an extraordinary triumph of a composer who for 22 years felt he could not write a symphony, notwithstanding the early attempts because he could not get beyond Beethoven. And in the last movement of the first he’s done it. It’s an incredibly moving reflection of a great creative mind finally resolving the existential crisis which had confronted him for all that period. Let’s listen to one of my favourite conductors, Simon Rattle, just with a three minute clip if we can get it, Emily. You heard at the end, which I wanted to play at the beginning of the clip, that horn part which comes up earlier and then precedes the adaptation of the “Ninth”, of the “Ode to Joy”. But it does appear to me that if you listen to that, even at the end, that triumphant end, how do you get 40 minutes later from that opening, that agonising existential opening to this triumph at the end? It’s the struggle of creativity and Brahms feels that he’s now put Beethoven, as it were, aside because he can adapt him and he can develop the tradition in his own way.

And he’s not been an anachronistic composer. He’s a composer who has made the tradition richer and more profound in his view, which is why it ends in this wonderfully triumphant fashion. Now, it was as a result of that, of course, having now finally after 22 years, having produced as wonderful symphony ‘cause he produced three more, but he was now able to turn his attention to other complex areas and of course one of them is the famous “Violin Concerto” composed in 1878, 2 years after the “First Symphony”. And here of course, Brahms himself, as I indicated, was a pianist. He relied very heavily on his friendship with Joachim to discuss and debate how the “Ninth” was to take place. Apparently there were all sorts of letters that was exchanged between them as Brahms puzzled out how to prepare his “Violin Concerto”. And in many ways, as you, as I indicated last week, it’s sort of one of the four great German violin concertos. It’s very lyrical, seems to me, it’s as if Brahms had, as it were, used all of these lyrical, so much of his lyricism to develop a wonderfully new form of, sound in “Violin Concerto”. I can’t, I’m not going to play the first movement, although it’s wonderful, begins with a phrase which is really made up of five notes. And then there are two more groupings of five and then of course there is the entry of the violin in the most dramatic of fashion. What I wanted to play for you, 'cause it’s so famous, is the Adagio. Because in the Adagio what we hear is the great oboe melody. It’s the centrality of it. And as you listen to the oboe, also notice the winds which surround it. There’s a kind of forming various harmonies create the most wonderfully serene atmosphere. Here is a composer who’s got beyond that existential crisis of the earlier period.

And when the soloist enters with a variation of the oboe tune, the violins and the orchestra’s intertwined. It’s a wonderful combination of course. Well, one of the conductors had once said that Brahms had written the concerto not for the violin, but against it. But it does seem to me that’s wrong. What he’s done is in a sense have this extraordinarily interspicable link between the oboe and the violin. Here is Julia Fischer. The second movement of “Brahms’ Violin Concerto reflects, in my view, just how beautifully constructed it is and how lyrical this particular concerto actually is. You have also noticed the conductor, also one of our musical heroes, very ill, of course, Michael Tilson Thomas, a wonderful, wonderful conductor. I turn now to the finale and now Brahms changes dramatically. He kind of basically assimilates this kind of gypsy type spirit. There is in the middle some more poignancy interlude, but at the end, this is Brahms in total joy. The concerto ends joyously in a kind of a whole range of kind of gypsy and other themes which come through to bring the concerto to a triumphant end. It’s wonderfully in contrast to movements one and two. Let’s just hear the first three minutes again of Julia Fischer opening the third movement of "Brahms Violin Concerto”. So that was Julia Fischer and Michael Tilson Thomas, wonderful recording of just the beginning, the first part of that wonderfully effervescent aspect of the Brahms “Violin Concerto”. There’s so much other Brahms I could talk about and each of them I’ve not done justice to. But in order to end, I wanted, if I may, to come to the “Second Piano Concerto”, which Brahms composed. He wrote in 1881, the time when his concerto was going to come out, to a friend and former student, Elizabeth VonFurstenberg, as follows, “I don’t mind telling "you that I’ve written a tiny, tiny pianoforte concerto "with a tiny, tiny wisp of a scherzo.” Well, of course he could hardly, he must have had a sense of humour. We’re talking about a 50 minute, four movement concerto.

It came 22 years after his first piano concerto, which of course had not gone down particularly well, was a very young person’s piece. It is upon reflection, a wonderful piece of music. But in the second which arrived, as I say 22 years later, it was described by a critic at the time, Edward Hunsick, as a symphony with piano obligato. Stephen Hough, that wonderful British pianist, has described this particular concerto as “Like a massive chamber work where the musical ideas "are an exchange rather the confrontation.” And I want to talk a little bit about that, but just talking about the beginning because I can’t do more, running out of time as I am. I want to play the first few minutes and I want you to just think about the following. We start this concerto again with a favourite instrument of Brahms, the horn. It’s interesting that the horn opens up the second piano concerto. I often think of it as the mist as it were, which was just lifted off the mountain as you hear that horn, it’s a beautifully, beautifully serene few bars opening the opening the concerto before, in fact, it moves on. Of course, at the very same time that he wrote that, parallel to that is very much the second symphony. And those of you know, the second Brahms symphony will know, it also begins with a whole lot of horn playing. What I wanted to play to come back to is the relationship between Beethoven and Brahms that I’ve spoken a lot about this evening. Because if you think about this concerto, think about Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. There’s some interesting parallels. In the first place, the orchestra in both of these introduces the piano. They’re kind of quite interesting.

Secondly, in both the Beethoven Fifth and the Brahms Two is a very early cadenza by the piano, much earlier than normal. Thirdly, in both the first movements of the Beethoven Five and the Brahms Two, there’s an intricate search through the piano for the appropriate home key, which takes some time, somewhat more complex in Brahms but it’s there. And then what we get is we get an orchestral tutti, which essentially reveals to a large degree what the piano will now be required to negotiate throughout. But what is important is that when you listen to the way the orchestra lays it out, the piano then responds. There is how I said, a dialogue and it therefore is a almost a grand chamber piece of music, which essentially does nod in the direction of Beethoven through the Beethoven Five and the parallels that I’ve drawn, just as I wanted to indicate to you the way in the first movement of the Symphony One is that interesting battle between the sounds of the fifth, opening sounds of the Fifth Beethoven Symphony and Brahms is more lyrical spirits. But listen here to the opening little bit of the Piano Concerto Number Two, just to pick up these themes that I’ve highlighted. In this case, the pianist is Grigory Sokolov who really is an unbelievably brilliant pianist and is well worth listening to whenever, not many recordings of his are left, but he’s great. But here we go with the opening part of the “Piano Concerto Number Two” Of course, this leads on to magnificent second movement, the famous cellos engagement with the piano in the third movement and the flamboyant rondo in the fourth movement but you can pick up already the way in which musicologists talk about the dialogue that Brahms constructed between the piano and the orchestra. Unbelievably more sophisticated in many ways, concerto to the one that he wrote 22 years ago. So, I hope that you appreciate from all of this, some of the engagement that Brahms had to move beyond the shadow of Beethoven and create music in that tradition, but which is unique to himself. Thank you very much for listening and goodnight to everybody.