Review of three books on Brahms, Margaret Notley, Lateness and Brahms (Oxford), Inge van Rij, Brahms's Song Collection (Cambridge), and Barbara Owen, The Organ Music of Johannes Brahms (Oxford), at TLS (07.11.2007) :
These three volumes prompt thoughts again on what it is to write scholarly
books on music, especially difficult today when university departments have
to struggle on two fronts. On the one hand, they need to keep “classical
music” alive in an age when cultural chit-chat constantly interferes with
it, and when young musicians, barely able to harmonize a scale on the piano,
are wizards at composing electronically. On the other hand, musicologists
heavily influenced by literary theory, particularly in American
universities, still find themselves having to face up to music’s ageless
incorrigibility, and the fact that it is more than a sociopolitical
manifestation. Indeed, how does one write about it? Notley’s solution is to
discuss previous authors’ ideas about “lateness”, to sketch in aspects of
Viennese society (including its anti-Semitism) and to discuss other relevant
music. These general matters are interspersed with lengthy
technical-analytical details about Brahms’s fondness for certain kinds of
counterpoint, similarities between themes, grammatical rules, types of
adagio, etc. But the deep link between culture and music is not as apparent
as Notley assumes it to be; moreover, the technical detail itself seems to
me not very advanced, and derived from passive, partial reading rather than
experience “from the inside” of as much music as possible.
Van Rij’s survey of the songs is rather more straightforward. It tends to look
at concepts (musical organicism) and people (Schlegel, Coleridge) as if they
haven’t been looked at before, but a certain freshness results. Again, I am
not convinced by the handling of technical details, such as the
illustrations of “harmonic ambiguity”, or thematic similarities, or those
effects the author calls “chromatic” and “Neapolitan”. More importantly, I
am not sure that in considering what a song-cycle ought to mean she has
properly acknowledged a basic fact of musical life: that composers will do
almost anything to have their music performed, whether in sets, cycles,
one-offs, or pieces that are transcribed, transposed, put in one order, and
then another.
Just as Notley draws on other authors of Brahms’s time and her own, so van Rij
draws on a “graphic artist”, Max Klinger, to whom Brahms dedicated his final
set, the wonderful Four Serious Songs. But was there really in Klinger’s
nightmarishly erotic and mythological images something that matched Brahms’s
“increasingly dark songs of maturity”? Anything more than a certain heavy
density, common to so much artistic production of the period? If there is
anything in Klinger that can truly be shown to be relevant to Brahms’s
conceptions – the way, for instance, so many of his works move from “sorrow
to comfort” (the Requiem, the First and Third Symphonies) – well, I don’t
see it. And is there not a risk that for readers of the book, performances
of the late Clarinet Quintet will for evermore bring to mind Klinger’s
horrible drawings?
Owen’s answer to the problem of writing about music is more traditional and
practical. She discusses the pieces one by one, the personnel (not many
people know that Clara Schumann pumped organ bellows for Robert) and organs
from Brahms’s early days in Hamburg to late on in Vienna, and she offers
advice on performance. Other composers, including Leipzig’s Reger and
Gloucester’s Parry, are neatly involved. It would be a pity if readers took
one look at the book’s lists of organ stops and thought the book had nothing
to say to them about Brahms. Such books on music are becoming increasingly
rare, at least at this level,so vulnerable has the (tiny) market become to
cultural theory.
Aimez-vous Brahms ?
