Utopian Agendas: Variation, Allusion, and Referential Meaning in Brahms's Symphonies.(Johannes Brahms)(Critical Essay)

Brahms has always seemed the most canonic among composers from the later nineteenth century, the composer whose music has most "belonged," not only to the traditions he aspired to extend, but also to itself, as it consistently projects an extraordinary degree of homogeneity and integration. Yet there are times in Brahms's music when this image of belonging breaks down; one such time, involving both frames of reference, occurs early in the Third Symphony, with the change in meter from ?? to ?? at m. 36 in the first movement (see ex. 4.1). At this critical moment, as the character of the movement shifts from heroic struggle to pastoral dance, Brahms also seems to step out of character, unexpectedly countenancing a breach in logical continuity inconsistent with his established musical persona.

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However we may wish to explain this metrical shift and other startling ruptures in his music, we may not simply revise our overall appraisal of Brahms, for the traditional view, however naive, is basically correct.(1) He was a composer who tried very hard to belong to tradition; moreover, his efforts were particularly strenuous when it came to the German symphonic tradition, as they had to be at his moment in history.(2) And he was also a composer heavily invested in organic unity; even if the homogeneous sound of Brahms's symphonic music is largely due to twentieth-century performance practice, organic integration is nevertheless a hallmark of his music, extensively celebrated in countless analytical discussions.(3)

In fact, during Brahms's generation, the two senses of belonging were significantly interrelated. Thanks to the legacy of Beethoven and the politicized ideals of "absolute music," part of the price of admission to the German symphonic tradition was that a work manifest an organic unity based solely on internal musical criteria.(4) There is some irony in this, to be sure, since the supposed purity of the symphonic tradition was confuted by many of its central landmarks. Thus, however logical the musical discourse of Beethoven's symphonies, the most venerated members of even this exalted group owed their success largely to a strongly stated narrative dimension based on musical evocations of fate, heroic struggle, passion, pathos, a variety of pastoral traditions, and the like--not to mention the occasional recourse to overt description or word painting. But the growing belief in absolute music had created a utopian view of instrumental musical traditions, artificially raising a standard for the symphonic tradition, in particular, that provided, not only an inaccurate account of the past, but also an inoperative prescription for the future.(5)

Moreover, achieving a pure, organic unity was but one of two utopian agendas that the tradition presented to Brahms. The apparent fading of the tradition around midcentury demanded, in addition, that its traditional elements somehow be revitalized, a task made all the more difficult, and more urgent, by Liszt's appropriation of the tradition in his symphonic poems and programmatic symphonies of the 1850s.(6) Both of these agendas--achieving a purely musical unity and revitalizing a languishing tradition--were utopian in setting out desirable, apparently plausible, yet impossible goals; even more problematic, however, is that these agendas conflicted with each other on a basic level. Thus, while revitalizing the symphonic tradition was less problematic for Brahms than Liszt's programmatic approach, it nevertheless entailed a willful misreading of those traditions if Brahms was simultaneously to conform to the ideals of "absolute music" in any meaningful way.

Even taken individually, each of these agendas required a feat of conjuration from Brahms and a leap of faith from his audience in order to sustain belief in both the feasibility of a purely musical construct and a sense of continuity within a generic tradition long since rent asunder by Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The core component of Brahms's solution involved the application of a single technique--thematic variation--within two separate frames of reference, creating referential meanings both within a work (through variation and development) and relative to other works within the extended tradition (through allusion). Thus, Brahms's technique both permitted a richly intertextual engagement with the German symphonic tradition and facilitated an understanding based on "absolute" musical logic. In pursuing his opposing utopian agendas, Brahms enforced an alignment between them on the basis of a common reliance on a network of thematic relationships.

To be sure, the alliance was often an uncomfortable one. In connecting referentially to the past, Brahms inevitably came to depend on those less abstract referential meanings communicated through seemingly "extramusical" gestures and conventional topics, a practice that could be seen to undermine his "absolute" agenda. On the other hand, an almost moralistic antipathy among Brahms's advocates to acknowledging his musical reminiscences, coupled with the widespread desire of many theorists and other absolutists to comprehend Brahms's music solely in terms of internal, musical criteria, has often blocked explorations of the more intimate ways Brahms's music connects to the past. The latter difficulty has been compounded by both our cultivated bias toward absolutist values and Brahms's somewhat anxious use of allusion; as will be argued, particularly in the later stages of this essay, it thus seems more natural and satisfying for us to engage with allusion on a more subliminal level than with internal variational processes, a circumstance that has often hobbled discourse on allusion.(7)