Why Is Light Given?
by Alex Ross
The New Republic, March 23, 1998.
I.
Morton Feldman, the funniest of composers, liked to tell a story. "Two guys visit Haydn, two journalists from Cologne. They ask him about literary, programmatic pieces, and Haydn says, `Yeah,' he says, `I wrote this one piece which was a dialogue between God and a sinner.' Big theme, right? And they say, `What's the name of that piece?' And Haydn says, `I forget.'" The moral is: our words and pictures for music never match, but the possibility of meaning lingers, outside the spotlight of verbal association. We can look for programs, we can apply names to abstract pieces, but we have to do it with a smile and a shrug.
Feldman's joke could have been told about Brahms. It could have been told by Brahms. Many times, in his letters and in the memoirs of his friends, Brahms did a variation on Feldman's sly little dance with meaning--feint of disclosure, quick step back. Consider a famous letter to Vincenz Lachner, a conductor who had written Brahms in a mixture of wonderment and confusion about the Second Symphony. The work is ostensibly a pastoral one, in the summery key of D, beginning with a horn call from afar and ending with an earthy dance for orchestra. But something darksome works under the surface--low chords in the trombones and tuba, passing dissonances in archaic cadences. Why such "gloomy lugubrious tones" at the outset of a light-filled piece, Lachner wanted to know? Brahms replied:
The first entrance of the trombones, that's mine, I can't get along without it. I must confess to you that I am a profoundly melancholy man, that black wings flap incessantly above us, and that in my output this symphony is followed--perhaps not entirely by chance--by a little essay on the great "Warum?" [the motet "Why Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery?"]. I will send it to you if you don't know it. It throws the necessary sharp shadows across the lighthearted symphony and perhaps explains those trombones and timpani.
At this point, Vincenz Lachner and all of us reading over his shoulder are thinking, "Aha! The Master is giving away secrets!" The Second Symphony has a subtext, and it is Job's despair, a blasphemous longing for death, quite literally a "dialogue between God and a sinner." Then Brahms laughs out loud: "But I also ask you not to take all this so very seriously or tragically, particularly that passage!" And he goes on to explain that passing dissonance in the closing bars of the movement as a "sensuously beautiful sound" that "comes about as logically as possible--quite of its own accord." In short, it's all a question of technique. Such things as black wings and light in darkness and dialogues with God are sweets thrown to musical children. When we grow up, the music will be sufficient in itself. Brahms extends the joke in a letter to his publisher about that great, dismal motet, "Why Is Light Given to Him That Is in Misery?" and its companion piece, "O Savior, Fling Open the Heavens." He proposed, in the interest of saving space, the following abbreviated advertisement: "Motets by Joh. Br. No. 1. Why? No. 2. Oh!"
But it is not so easy to forget those rustling black wings. They are rather like Dostoevsky's white bear, the one you are supposed to go into a corner and not think about. What is most interesting about this anecdote is that it mirrors a mechanism in the music itself. Not only does Brahms the letter-writer hint at, and then withdraw, meanings in his music; Brahms the composer does the same. Consider the Second Symphony. It begins with a dipping-andrising three-note figure, D-C-sharp-D, the thematic kernel of the whole piece. The opening paragraph--warm, deliberate, richly scored--establishes the symphony's dominant mood. But the music soon loses momentum: the texture thins out, the strings wend downward, and that hooded Wagnerian quartet of trombones and tuba creeps on stage. The three-note figure sounds bleakly in the woodwinds, the timpani rumbles underneath. Thus Brahms breaks the conventional narrative rhythm of a symphonic movement. He has the tone of a storyteller who launches into his tale--"Once upon a time, in my youth..."--and then immediately falls silent, under the spell of darker, vaguer memories.
Even more remarkable is what happens next, and again in the movement's coda. Having shot a ray of darkness into a world of light, Brahms recovers light without struggle. He shrugs, and resumes. D major comes back, now more firmly anchored in the bass, and the three-note figure blossoms in a fluid, streaming violin line. It is a "fresh beginning," in the words of Reinhold Brinkmann; the music "conceals the unfathomable as the subterranean dimension of a seemingly secure composition...." The subterranean returns periodically; and in the coda it almost takes over, as horn and strings lose themselves in an aching, chromatic extension of the first idea. Then the winds burst in with a new theme. It is a chipper, bouncing ditty, quoting Brahms's own song "Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze" ("Love is So Lovely in Springtime"). The music is as stupid as the words: the symphony seems to be trying to cheer itself up in front of us, to cast off a nameless sadness. Perhaps this ditty is the tale that Brahms has been meaning to tell all along. But now it's closing time: the spring song whirls away in a fast diminuendo, like a group of revelers vanishing down an empty street. In the last bars, the horns come full circle with the sad-happy opening chords. The odd harmonic "twinge" in the ending, the one that pained the ears of Lachner, is produced by an overlap of elements--last chirps of the winds (a "plagal" cadence from G minor to D) brushing against D major in the horns. That dissonance indicates a simultaneity of emotional states. The shading of the scene is as fine as anything in Proust.
One could go on. The emotional world of Brahms is as infinite as it is intimate. His honesty becomes at times uncomfortable: he seems to exhibit, in cruel detail, his own hour-by-hour struggle to stave off paralyzing melancholy. I say seems, because an uncertainty still lingers. What is Brahms's precise point of regard in the scene that I have described? Is he the mournful one who is left behind? Or is he one of the laughing revelers who dance away? Are we the lonely ones, we listeners in the dark? Is the apparent sorrow of Brahms our invention?
Brahms's ability, in music and in life, to recover joy, to be at ease with himself, places him in a different category from most of the insufferably suffering Romantics. Contrast him, in particular, to Schubert. (At least two elements of the Second Symphony--rumbling standstill after lyric opening; mournful soliloquy for horn--are apparent references to Schubert, to the B-flat Sonata and the Ninth Symphony.) Schubert never gives doubt of the extreme subjectivity of his music. But Brahms is a voice always shifting, always changing. He proves richly unreliable: an immensely sophisticated literary voice in musical guise, perhaps the most sophisticated in history. Brahms will be hard to pin down. And his real self may turn out to be unimportant. Yet the effort is necessary, because it is part of his trance, his game.
II.
The "real" Brahms: he has been sought everywhere in the century since his death, and his contemporaries found him elusive even when he was standing in the room. Two books have recently arrived to shed varying degrees of light on this Sphinx-like character: Jan Swafford's ambitious, passionate, 700-page biography and Styra Avins's equally hefty collection of correspondence, which contains nearly a whole biography in its exhaustive annotations. Getting a sense of the "real" Brahms from these books requires a certain amount of triangulation. Swafford tries too hard to give Romantic glamour to a basically unexciting life, and Avins is a little too defensive of Brahms as he wished himself to be seen. It requires further effort to move from this bumptious, brittle, ruthlessly controlled personality to the more vulnerable and generous soul of the music. It may be better, in the end, to begin with the music and work backward to the man. This is the approach adopted by Reinhold Brinkmann in his obsessive, revelatory study of the Second Symphony, and by Walter Frisch in his more sober and methodical book on all four symphonies. These four books together--and a handful of new recordings--brought a cluster of illuminations in the composer's centenary year.
The first biographical mystery--and the occasion for the first interesting disparity between Swafford and Avins--is the nature of Brahms's upbringing in Hamburg. Most books, Swafford's included, state that Brahms grew up in a slum; that his father forced him to make money for the family in various unsavory ways, including playing the piano in sailors' taverns and brothels; that he must have been deeply scarred by the squalor of his youth, to the point of "shutting down," in the language of contemporary psychobabble. Avins, taking off from the work of German scholars such as Kurt Hoffmann and Kurt Stephenson, thinks otherwise. She points out that the Gangeviertel, where Brahms grew up, became a crowded slum only in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, during Brahms's childhood, it was a respectable working-class neighborhood. It would seem that Brahms had a quiet, well-protected childhood; that his parents, though far from wealthy, put all their resources into his musical training; that the circumstances under which he first played piano in public--businessmen's homes, semiprivate concerts--were not unsavory, and in fact quite flattering. Unfortunately, Swafford does not seem to have seen Hoffmann's study and repeats several long-standing errors and myths that it corrects. "Johannes was surrounded by the stink of beer and unwashed sailors and bad food," he guesses. He perpetuates some of the worst habits of Brahms's earliest biographers, who, in Avins's words, "confused lack of money with lack of morals."
Still, we have to wonder where these stories of sleaze and degradation came from. It seems possible that Brahms himself told some version of them, perhaps elaborating on an accident of his youth or on a situation that he observed in passing. He may have looked in a window on his way to a lesson, and later fantasized himself on the other side of it. Brahms as a young man had a wild imagination. He steeped himself in E.T.A. Hoffmann's tales and, like Schumann, he used them to invent alternate artistic personalities (in his case, "Young Kreisler," the solitary, half-mad Kapellmeister). Even if the stories of playing piano in sailors' dives and being fondled by prostitutes are the invention of others, they remain interesting. They remind us how much speculation the young Brahms inspired, this beautiful young man with the flowing blond hair. He enjoyed his sense of mystery, and his mysterious innocence allowed him to float farther off the ground.
Brahms was blessed, lucky. His exit from the potentially constricting musical world of Hamburg was almost absurdly easy. Through the minor violinist Remenyi he met the major violinist Joachim, who noticed his talent at once and encouraged him to visit Schumann. In 1853, when he was 20, he set off on a walking tour of the Rhine, wandered into Schumann's home, played some pieces on the piano, and found himself a few weeks later a famous man. After hearing him, Schumann sat down immediately to write an article entitled "New Paths," in which Brahms was hailed as a "young eagle" who would save German music. As Swafford amusingly points out, Schumann had written this kind of prophecy before: Ludwig Schunke and William Sterndale Bennett, among others, had been hailed as godlike youths.
Schumann's slightly premature panegyric made Brahms famous. It also aroused a great deal of skepticism, envy, and outright hostility in various corners of the musical world. He had his failures early on, notably the fiasco of the First Piano Concerto in Leipzig in 1859; and he was never given the full acclaim he desired from his home town. (Vienna, which he first visited in 1862 and made his permanent home in 1871, always seemed, as Swafford writes, a "place of exile.") But Schumann had given him a very considerable opening through which to move, and he was able to devote time to composing that might otherwise have been squandered on workaday performing. That short path to Schumann's side made possible the extraordinary refinement of Brahms's output. It bought him time.
Schumann departed from the scene with shocking swiftness. Just five months after that initial meeting, he attempted suicide by jumping into the Rhine. Two years later, he died in an asylum. The cause of Schumann's insanity, we know from recently published medical diaries, was syphilis. (More scholarly bulletins that did not reach Swafford.) Although Avins thinks otherwise, it seems possible that Brahms was aware of Schumann's syphilis and took it into account. A year after Schumann's death, he wrote to Joachim in praise of a book called Self-Preservation, a Medical Treatise on the Debilities and Diseases of the Generative Organs Resulting from Solitary Habits, Youthful Excess, or Infection, and a few months later he wrote to the widow Clara Schumann with the advice that "passions are excesses" and that "passions must be driven off." (No doubt he was speaking more to himself than to her.) The wreck of Schumann's life may have come as a warning not to let sex come in the way of music. That is what I glean from a passage such as this in the letters, from January of 1873: "The memory of Schumann is holy to me. The noble, pure artist ever endures as my ideal and I will probably never be allowed to love a better person--and will also, I hope, never witness the progress of such a dreadful fate from such ghastly proximity--nor have to share so in enduring it."
Proximity: that's the crucial word. Schumann came his way, came very close; then was torn away. Brahms was not a witness to the awful travesty of the suicide attempt, but he seems to have felt himself present at the event, almost as a participant. Swafford puts his finger on something vital when he talks about the peculiar fury of certain of Brahms's openings, particularly the low screaming that is heard at the outset of the First Piano Concerto and the First Symphony. Various writers have suggested, with a rumor of authority from Brahms himself, that the opening of the concerto is a depiction of Schumann's plunge into the water. Swafford speaks in musical terms of why this picture is convincing: the sound is literally "vertiginous," with the orchestra beginning on a low D that turns out to be not the expected tonic of a D minor chord, but the middle pitch of a B-flat-major triad. In technical terms, the chord is an inversion; in programmatic terms, it is tumbling head over heels. Swafford might have added something else: a few days before his suicide attempt, Schumann was assaulted by sonic hallucinations, by a loud sustained tone or a series of iterated pitches. That event might account for the monotone obsessions of the First Concerto, the First Symphony, the "All Flesh Is As Grass" movement of the German Requiem, even that soft low D on the timpani in the Second Symphony.
Brahms spent his musical rage quickly. In the 1860s, in works such as the String Sextets, the Horn Trio, and the Requiem, he found a free-floating lyric voice, the result of an immersion in Schubert. This he joined with a Beethovenian method of arguing short motives--the principle of "developing variation"--and an original set of rhythmic techniques--syncopation, blurring of the bar line, jaunty polyrhythms of three against two or three against four. With his classicism and his muted tone, Brahms set himself off from the dominant Romantic mode of Liszt and Wagner.
Still, it is easy to make too much of the difference between the young Brahms and the mature one. Swafford is often carried away with the urge to give biographical direction and momentum to a largely static life; and in one of his typical flourishes, he writes that "ruthlessly, [Brahms] had sunk the fair features and moonstruck soul of Young Kreisler under the patriarchal beard and forbidding bark of Herr Doktor Brahms." But surely the remarkable change in Brahms's outward appearance should not lead us to imagine that some great inward transformation accompanied it. (On the matter of the beard, Avins notes that nearly all of Brahms's friends had full bourgeois beards, and that Brahms had resisted the fashion for some time.) In terms of compositional tone, Brahms grew, if anything, more lyrical, more dream-besotted, more "youthful" as he grew older. His early works are the most academic, his late works are the most fantastic. A fine epigraph to his career may be found in the aphorism by Novalis that Brahms entered in his notebooks: "Our life is no dream, but ought to be and perhaps will become so."
Brahms did not conform to social type, either the conservative or the bohemian. He believed in the German nation and in the wisdom of the middle class, but he had a tendency toward vagrancy for much of his life, a sympathy for outcasts (at one dinner he raised his glass to toast the Indians at Little Big Horn), and an outspoken contempt for anti-Semites. "Anti-Semitism is madness!" he exploded when it became evident that Karl Lueger was going to be mayor of Vienna. In musical politics, it is true, he proclaimed the supremacy of the past, and he gave little encouragement to young composers. But he was responding to a musical market that had already turned in favor of a "classical" canon.
Even as a young man, in the 1850's, Brahms had experienced the growing bias against new music. A remarkable review of the premiere of his First Piano Concerto began: "New works do not succeed in Leipzig. Again at the fourteenth Gewandhaus concert a composition was borne to its grave." By the 1850s, more than half of the repertory of the Gewandhaus consisted of works by dead composers; by the end of the next decade, the fraction would be three-quarters. The sun shines on the nothing new. Brahms was aware of his audience's love of the past, and he composed with its literacy in mind. His music plays off the canonical models, follows their contours, yet it also goes against their grain. He was never a "progressive," as Schoenberg claimed in a famous essay, but he was sometimes a subversive.
The complexity of Brahms's historical position can be seen in his relationship with Wagner. It is hard to judge who was more responsible for the famous quarrel between them. Brahms fueled the fire in 1860 by signing a manifesto against the "music of the future," which protested "new and outlandish theories contrary to the very nature of music." But Avins points out that Wagner made a conciliatory gesture toward Brahms several years after that episode, inviting him to a party in Vienna. It was Brahms's possibly calculated contact with Mathilde Wesendonck, the woman who inspired Tristan, that finally incited Wagner to his usual spewing of bile. By 1879, Brahms was being attacked in the pages of the Bayreuther Blätter for dressing himself up as a "Jewish czardas player."
Still, Brahms made a point of praising Wagner, occasionally to his face. One of the treasures of Avins's book is the four-item correspondence between the two, concerning a manuscript of Tannhäuser that Brahms had acquired and Wagner wanted back. Brahms agreed to return it if he could have another score as a replacement. Das Rheingold came in the mail, and Brahms wrote back a cryptic masterpiece of a letter in which the praise stops a few crucial steps short of effusive. Picture Wagner puzzling over passages such as this: "I give the best and most appropriate thanks daily to the work itself--it does not lie here without being utilized. Maybe this section is not, at first, such a great inducement to the thorough study that your great work demands; this Rheingold did pass through your hands in a very special way, however, and so let the Valkyrie radiate her beauty brightly, so as to outshine its accidental advantage." (Read: the Ring turns out to be sublime, though one would never guess it from opening up the score and seeing nothing but E-flat-major chords.)
Brahms is being impish in this letter; he is also being honest. By not making himself clear, he is conveying his mixed feelings about Wagner's music. Again and again in the letters Brahms passes up the chance for the easy, problem-solving phrase: as a result, his correspondence caused countless misunderstandings and strained several friendships. His closest relationships--with Clara Schumann, with Joseph Joachim, with the musicloving surgeon Theodor Billroth--were fraught with tensions and temporary breaks. He could be cruel, callous, unthinking, unfeeling. It is painful to read him berating Joachim for failing to fulfill his promise as a composer, as if such words could help matters. It is painful to read him offhandedly lecturing Clara--one of the great pianists of the age--on the direction and the pace of her career.
Yet his integrity is never in question, and personal gain was never his motive. "He knew his own worth--what great creator does not?--but in his heart he was one of the most profoundly modest men I ever met," wrote the English composer Ethel Smyth. In an age of Wagnerian megalomania, Brahms had a democratic view of the artist's role. "Art is a republic," he wrote to Clara. "Do not confer a higher rank upon any artist, and do not expect the minor ones to look up to him as something higher, as consul." Out of many passages in the letters that give a sense of his down-to-earth worldview, my favorite is a note that Brahms sent to his elderly father in 1867, giving touchingly pedantic instructions on travel from Hamburg to Vienna (with a change in Berlin): "If you continue on right away in Berlin you must take a hackney to the other station. A policeman hands out the voucher at the exit. Before you travel the night through, as is practical in the heat, drink a glass of grog so you sleep well. But take along very little.... No cigars, nothing new, nothing that is taxable. You'll find every conceivable thing here with me." There, basically, is the Life of Brahms.
In his later works Brahms makes a point of relinquishing control, even as he develops his small ideas with obsessive care. Like Wagner, he had read Schopenhauer on the renunciation of self. And where Wagner's renunciations always seemed a bit of a put-on--one is always aware of the vast power being held in check--Brahms's renunciations came as second nature. In the remarkable coda of the Third Symphony, the emphatic first theme from the first movement is given a quiescent, pianissimo reprise, as if representing the obliteration of will. Brahms's dominant mode became a melancholy from which self-pity and even self-consciousness were excluded. In a virtuoso tour of the types of bourgeois melancholy, Brinkmann draws attention to the impersonal side of Brahms's sadness: his sense of his own "latecomer" status in tradition, his awareness of the impermanence of the Viennese idyll, his empathy with the lonely crowd. Late Brahms may be summed up in Wallace Stevens's phrase, "the celestial ennui of apartments."
Seeking a larger role for the hero of his biography, Swafford hears in Brahms's silences a foreboding of twentieth-century catastrophe. As often, Swafford's rhetoric goes astray--"Austria was succumbing to a ferocious mythology of blood and authoritarianism," and so on--but he is right in urging us to think through the implications of the Biblical texts in the valedictory "Four Serious Songs," and in particular the words, "Who shall bring him to that place, where he may see what comes after him?" (That is Swafford's translation, based on Luther's German.) In Ecclesiastes, the words ask a rhetorical question: man should rejoice in work, he cannot see what comes after. But Brahms became his work, and the work is in our midst. We have brought him to this place.
III.
A century on, do we still speak Brahms's language? I have been listening to performances and recordings throughout the funerary-centenary year, and wondering. A couple of things are clear. First, Brahms is just as widely played, but not quite as deeply loved, as certain other composers in the firmament. His anniversary year overlapped with the bicentennial of Schubert, and it was Schubert who made the masses swoon. At the same time, Brahms is obviously close to the hearts of musicians, as repetitions of his works in chamber concerts show.
Chamber music is the heart of Brahms's achievement. The peculiar freshness and vibrancy that can come through even in an ordinary performance of, say, the Sextet in B-flat is, paradoxically, the result of studied preparation on Brahms's part. Just the scoring of these pieces shows him working at his "republican idea," his conception of music as an affair for inspired amateurs. He often chose nonstandard, ad-hoc ensembles--string sextet, clarinet trio, clarinet quintet--and thus guaranteed that his works would not become the practiced fare of professional groups. And although the amateur musical culture of nineteenth-century Vienna and other cities has largely vanished, performances of the Brahms chamber repertory still tend to be marked by uncommon enthusiasm, by the spontaneity that comes from seeing fresh faces across the music stand.
The symphonies and the concertos are another matter. A year and a half ago, I heard a rendition of the First Piano Concerto by Daniel Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado, in which the pianist ran amok with jerky tempos, muddy textures, and general crudity. In the same series of Carnegie Hall concerts, Peter Serkin made a fastidious mystification of the Second Concerto, reading every other phrase against its grain. Abbado's cycle of the symphonies was more satisfying than the concertos, but it demonstrated the grandeur of the orchestra more often than the grandeur of Brahms. At the beginning of this season, Kurt Masur led the New York Philharmonic in a symphony cycle that emphasized sinewy strength at the expense of singing lyricism.
On recording, again, each survey frustratingly seems to possess certain qualities others lack and certain flaws that others correct. The one essential survey of the symphonies may now be had in a new boxed set of Wilhelm Furtwangler's Brahms, on the painstaking Music & Arts label. Furtwangler had the gift of "presenting" the music, its surface narrative flow, while at the same time intervening to show counterintuitive layers underneath. To see what I mean, listen to the opening of the Second: measure by measure, you can hear the wave of melancholy that Swafford felicitously describes as a "chilly shadow falling across a summer meadow." Yet Furtwangler seldom gives us a glimpse of Brahms's serenity; he is hungry for tension, much like his supposed arch-rival Toscanini.
The chase after the perfect recording is always doomed to failure, but the exercise is peculiarly infuriating in the case of Brahms. And what is most elusive in the symphonies is clarity. Brahms's instrumentation was, for the most part, thick; he produced what was called in his lifetime a "Brahms fog." Very often the fog is simply the result of poor playing, of an incomplete articulation of tricky rhythmic structures. Gunther Schuller, in his recent jeremiad The Compleat Conductor, writes: "The opinion held in many quarters that Brahms's music is heavy and turgid, rather square, even `academic,' exists primarily because so many performances of his music are `heavy' and `turgid,' emotionally overladen."
Moreover, as Schuller observes in comparative studies of dozens of recordings, performances of Brahms are simply imprecise. This is a technical problem, and it can be solved by thorough rehearsal. Two conductors who have seriously addressed it on recordings are Charles Mackerras, leading the Scottish Chamber Orchestra on Telarc, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, leading the Berlin Philharmonic on Teldec. They prepare rhythms with care, and their avoidance of a swamping string sound means that wind and brass counterrhythms come through crisply. In terms borrowed from art restoration, Harnoncourt refers to a process of "stripping away." The problem, as art historians will tell you, is that cleaning often takes away a layer of shadow and mystery. Furtwangler, whose beat was designed to thwart precision, gets a kind of dark withdrawing roar out of his orchestra that Mackerras and Harnoncourt cannot match. Brahms creates a vicious circle for interpreters: it is not easy to achieve both precision and mystery.
Brahms had a difficult habit of thinking privately in a public medium. He indulged sometimes in intellectual constructions that seem to be written "over the players' heads" and directly for the listener. Germans call it Augenmusik, or music for the eyes. I'm thinking not of the inaudible games with pitch and harmonic structure that are beloved of academic analysts (though they are there, too), but rather of a game of expectation, of thoughts interrupted and then resumed. The Second Symphony is infiltrated by such moves. The Fourth Symphony, that strange and wonderful work with which Brahms ended his short engagement with the symphonic medium, shows the game at its height. The very opening is an aural trick. The first theme, a violin figure arranged around falling cycles of thirds, is so casual as to seem pedestrian: it's as if Brahms pulled back the curtain on a symphony already in progress. How do you conduct that? It's almost impossible. Conductors lean in to that first phrase, trying to give it some heft, trying to break into the audience's preliminary coughing and shuffling. But I think Brahms wants the audience almost not to notice the symphony, at first. Here is another of his anti-Beethoven effects, the reverse of the famous attention-getting E-flat chords of the Eroica.
The deliberately plain material in the Fourth--one Viennese wit wrote under the first theme, "Once more ... I have ... not much ... to say"--becomes a foil, of course, for much developing variation. But Brahms transforms the main theme most incisively not by altering it, but by altering its context. In the recapitulation, at the point where we expect the theme in thirds to return, we hear it first in muffled, slowed-down, "frozen" form (to quote Walter Frisch's excellent book); and between each halting phrase is an arpeggiated shudder in the strings, like wind through a ruin. Sonata form has fallen apart--not a swift collapse, as in Mahler, but some kind of vegetable decay. And then the first theme resumes--in the original ambling tempo, in the original laid-back scoring, and in the middle of the phrase. It is a cinematic coup, a jump cut to the humdrum song that is still in progress. And this effect really does seem to be impossible to play. To adopt Schuller's pedantic-paranoid style, I have listened to a dozen recordings and found not one in which the violins give this impression of a "cut." Always they impose a ritardando--"alright, now here's the theme"--where no such inflection is indicated in the score. Brahms has scissored the natural phrase, and violinists are naturally disinclined to follow him.
If the first movement of the Fourth is so sophisticated as to be unperformable, the finale is something else again: a display of pure power that seems to contradict the quietistic trajectory of Brahms's career. Where the Second and Third had told a story in opposition to heroic Romanticism, the finale of the Fourth adopts again the raging tone of Brahms's youth. Yet it is not the same as before. To take another phrase from Stevens, this is music in motion and not in motion. At its base is a grand chaconne, in 30 variations. The Baroque form is overlaid, as Frisch demonstrates, with a sonata form. Form upon form, layer upon layer: the music gives the impression not of a ranting individual but of a ranting architecture.
At the center of the movement, there is a respite: a soft, halting funeral procession for flute and brass. This is also, in Frisch's scheme, the second theme of the sonata form. The brass choirs irresistibly remind one of Tannhäuser, the work over which Brahms and Wagner had their epistolary fight. Wagner died not long before this symphony was written, and Brahms may been bowing his head to his great rival. If so, his gesture, like his last letter, might have been partly sardonic: Wagner is the contrasting, "feminine" theme. And the solemnity is soon disrupted by a more vehement statement of the main theme. One imagines an outdoor funeral ruined by a storm.
There are probably other jokes in this furious farewell. The Baroque structure has always made commentators think that Brahms is musing on the past, but I think he is also speaking to his contemporaries. He is donning the garb of the ancients to deliver a sermon on the music of the present. The movement could have had the same scathing inscription as the Rondo Burlesque of Mahler's Ninth: "To my brothers in Apollo." It is no coincidence that Mahler at his most sarcastic quotes Brahms: compare the downward-stabbing figure in the second movement of Mahler's Fifth with the first theme of the Brahms First, or the up-and-down figure in the Rondo Burlesque with the finale of the Piano Quintet in F Minor.
The savagery of the Fourth's finale might seem to confirm Brinkmann's reading of the movement as an exercise in philosophical negation, as an act of creative destruction. Brinkmann goes so far as to compare it with the fictional works of Adrian Leverkuhn in Mann's Doktor Faustus, especially the famous idea of the "taking back" of Beethoven's Ninth. Yet the music does not support this view. Brahms may be lashing out at his contemporaries, but he is at the same time standing firmly on the ground of tradition and keeping a tight hold on the symphonic ideal. Any new sound, he implies, can be filtered through the inherited language. The movement's premonitions of the spectral scoring of the Second Viennese School--its atomization of orchestral sound into floating timbres--show the necessity of a negotiation between past and future. And the tone is not quite tragic. There is a joy in darkness here, an animal pleasure in the exercise of force. In the second variation, the brass and timpani make a curious noise--rrrrrRUH! rrrrrRUH!--like the growl of a sleepy dog.
What is this movement "about," if not the triumph of darkness? I wonder whether it is in some way a final answer to the question posed in the agonized years after Schumann's death. Why is light given? What do we have that is better than death? In all of the late works, Brahms may be contemplating that problem. In the late piano music, in such spells of sadness as the Intermezzos Opus 117, he extols solitude. In the chamber works for clarinet, he values companionship, long conversations into the night. In the "Four Serious Songs," the memorial to Clara, the final word is "love." But in the Fourth Symphony he speaks in tones of rationalized thunder, as if reading aloud from the text of God's own contemptuous answer to Job: "Where is the way that light dwelleth? and as for darkness, where is the place thereof?... Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail?"
The radiant terror of God's works finds an analogue in a tour de force of all musical history and all musical possibility. Around and around they go, Wagner and Bach, chorale and folk tune, village band and Klangfarbenmelodie. At the center is nothing, the gray void that the first movement revealed in two or three shivering shots. The whole of it seems to be demonstration of Nietzsche's dictum that "without music, life would be a mistake." The demonstration is convincing.
