Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music

Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253033192
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, among others, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement of a work seems to resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. She highlights Brahms's ability to weave such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives, arguing that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated, sometimes conflicted, attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms's music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to emerge with his own artistic voice and to define and secure his unique position in music history.

1The Notion of Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms’s Instrumental Music

JOHANNES BRAHMS WAS possessed of an especially strong historicist sense—and lived at a time when, ironically, this made him rather modern. Up to the first half of the nineteenth century, music had a relatively short shelf life. Generally, composers wrote works for specific occasions, to fill specific practical needs, and once those needs had been met, the music had served its purpose and was put aside to make room for the new. Brahms’s profound preoccupation with the music of his predecessors must be understood not only against the backdrop of the inspiring and intimidating precedent set by Beethoven, but also within the broader context of the increasing awareness of and rise of interest in preserving music history that took place during Brahms’s lifetime. The latter was a phenomenon that caused Brahms great anxiety as he became one of the first of the “great composers” to self-consciously attempt to carve out a unique and lasting artistic voice for the ages. Austro-German intellectual society played a leading role in establishing the field of modern musicology in the nineteenth century, with such fundamental contributions as the pioneering historical writings of Forkel, Kiesewetter, and Ambros;¹ biographies of Bach, Mozart, Handel, and Haydn by Otto Jahn, Philipp Spitta, Friedrich Chrysander, and C. F. Pohl, respectively;² and the work of such influential figures as Beethoven scholar Gustav Nottebohm, theorist Hugo Riemann, and Adolf Bernhard Marx with his theory of sonata form. This was the milieu that produced a thriving culture of music criticism, for which the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, founded by Robert Schumann, was among the most influential vehicles, as well as the first serious scholarly music journal, the Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft (1885), edited by Guido Adler, along with Chrysander and Spitta. The same environment also produced such fundamental resources for music research as lexicons, bibliographies, indexes, and thematic catalogs (e.g., Ludwig von Köchel’s 1862 catalog of the works of Mozart), as well as government-sponsored Denkmäler editions and the first critical or “collected-works” editions (Gesamtausgaben) for several major composers, including Bach, Handel, Palestrina, Mozart, Schubert, and Beethoven. German and Austrian universities began formally to recognize the field as a full-fledged academic pursuit by creating university faculty positions in music, beginning at Bonn in 1826; the first full professorships were awarded in Austria, at the University of Vienna in 1870, to the critic Eduard Hanslick, a great supporter of Brahms, and in Germany to Gustav Jacobsthal at Strasbourg in 1897.³ All of this activity naturally corresponds to the laying of foundations for the development of a canon of “great works” of Western music—a canon which, in large part by consequence, prominently features the works of German and Austrian composers.

Brahms has been considered by many to be a conservative artist, particularly in comparison with the more formally and harmonically adventurous composers of the New German School, such as Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz (Joseph Kerman, for instance, characterized Brahms as a composer “out of joint with his times”)—and yet, Brahms’s historical awareness as a composer actually was thus a rather modern trait.⁴ In recent decades, there has been a growing realization of the ways in which Brahms’s historical self-awareness links him and his music to composers and music of the modern and postmodern eras. Peter Burkholder, for example, has suggested that in fact “Brahms is the single most important influence on twentieth-century classical music—not in the way it sounds, but in how we think about it, how composers think about it, how music behaves, why it is written, and how composers measure their success.”⁵ Kenneth Hull elaborates: “modernism in music has not to do primarily with the development of new musical techniques but with aspects of the composer’s preoccupation with his relationship to music of the past. In this respect, Brahms may be considered the first musical modernist.”⁶ Furthermore, Kevin Korsyn suggests that, “what appears modern—or rather postmodern—in Brahms is his recruitment of a plurality of modern languages. By mobilizing a number of historically differentiated discourses, Brahms becomes ‘both the historian and the agent of his own language.’ Thus, he knew the very modern anxiety . . . of having to choose an orientation among languages.”⁷

Historicism in Brahms’s Music

A strong historicist tendency in Brahms’s work has been noted consistently by critics and scholars from Brahms’s time to the present. Brahms’s interest in music of the past, a fascination encompassing repertories from folksong to sacred music to secular “art” music and spanning from the medieval Minnesänger to the nineteenth century, is reflected in a wide variety of ways to be explored in detail throughout this volume.⁸ At a time when the field of musicology was just getting “off the ground,” Brahms’s historicist sense appears not only in his own music—through his use of passé or “archaic” genres and forms (e.g., the serenade and the chaconne) and style elements (e.g., modality) and through his employment of motivic allusions to or employment of structural models from the works of earlier composers—but also in his personal music library; in his activities as editor, compiler, and arranger of historical repertories; and in his other musicological pursuits. Brahms also played an active role in the process of canon solidification not only as a composer, but also as a musicologist engaged in editorial work on music of C. P. E. Bach, Couperin, Handel, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, and others.⁹ Brahms’s other musicological activities include, for example, his exchange of counterpoint exercises with Joseph Joachim, his collection of historical examples of parallel octaves and fifths (see chap. 3), and his examination of the Beethoven manuscripts made available to him by Gustav Nottebohm (see chap. 5).

Scholars such as Christopher Reynolds and Kenneth Hull, respectively, have dubbed Brahms “one of the most adroit fashioners of allusions,” and “a master of allusion.”¹⁰ Apparent allusions in many individual works of Brahms were identified in print and by Brahms’s friends even during the composer’s own lifetime, with at least one instance dating from as early as 1858.¹¹ Not surprisingly, Brahms draws with special frequency on the works of his greatest hero, Beethoven, and it is clear that at least sometimes, as with the evocation of the “Ode to Joy” in the finale of his First Symphony, he expected his audience to recognize the references. Hull points out that, among Brahms’s instrumental works, “there is scarcely an opus for which at least one quotation or allusion has not been cited somewhere in the literature”; that Brahms’s friend and early biographer Max Kalbeck “alone suggests at least one instance of thematic resemblance for each of about half of the instrumental works”; and that, in several cases, multiple sources of allusion have been cited for a single work.¹² In short, as generations of critics and scholars have demonstrated, “Brahms’s knowledge of the music of the past was extensive, and his use of that knowledge in his own compositional activity . . . more pervasive, varied, and self-conscious than that of any previous composer.”¹³

And yet despite the long-standing recognition of the role of allusion in Brahms’s music on a localized level and a similarly well-established awareness of motivic connections that Brahms draws between different movements of individual instrumental works, scholars have not explored thoroughly the way in which these two phenomena interact. I will suggest ways in which Brahms’s strong historicist concerns, his fascination with music of the past—which, his writings and biography would suggest, represented some combination of tendencies toward reverential homage and a “Bloomian” “anxiety of influence”—played an important and hitherto largely unappreciated role in his handling of broad formal structures and his weaving of musical narratives in multimovement instrumental works.¹⁴ Furthermore, I will demonstrate how these works consequently may be interpreted as the composer’s responses ...