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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Nebraska Press
I
Almost everyone counts the Alto Rhapsody, op. 53, among Brahms's most moving and successful works. It received considerable attention during the Brahms year, 1983, which witnessed the publication of a fine facsimile edition of the autograph as well as several analytical and interpretative essays.(1) And of course there are extended discussions of it in general works such as Siegfried Kross's 1958 monograph on Brahms's choral music.(2) Nevertheless, the Rhapsody does not loom large in overall accounts of Brahms's career, especially in comparison to the more or less contemporaneous German Requiem and First Symphony.(3) My thesis is that, notwithstanding its relatively modest dimensions and slightly ambiguous generic status, the Rhapsody can play a larger role in our reception of his music. This is so, not merely because of its quality (which nobody disputes), or merely because of its supposed status as a rare "confessional" statement on Brahms's part regarding (take your pick) his feelings of loneliness or his unrequited love for Julie Schumann.(4) Rather, I will argue that the Rhapsody played a crucial and hitherto underappreciated role in Brahms's artistic development.
The customary interpretation is that Brahms, following his "first maturity" of large-scale chamber works during the first half of the 1860s, turned to
vocal music both sacred and secular, notably choral works: the German Requiem, premiered in 1868, as well as the Alto Rhapsody, the Song of Destiny, the Song of Triumph, and Rinaldo, all completed between 1868 and 1871.(5) Thereafter, he resumed instrumental composition, completing a number of works that he had begun earlier (in some cases much earlier): the string quartets op. 51, the Piano Quartet in C Minor, op. 60, and the First Symphony; he also composed entirely new works, notably the Haydn Variations. Most writers have taken genre as the primary determinant and have explicitly or implicitly treated this ten-year span as comprising two separate subperiods, a choral half decade (ca. 1866-71) and an instrumental one (ca. 1871-76). The latter is seen, often in unmediatedly teleological fashion, as having culminated in the First Symphony.(6) (In some accounts, this point of culmination is seen as comprising both the First and the Second Symphonies; this does not affect the larger issue.)(7) I will argue instead that the entire span can be understood as a single period; that, although this period indeed ends with the First Symphony, that work is not a culmination; and that the Rhapsody proved more fruitful than the symphony for Brahms's further development as a composer.
Following a conspectus of the Rhapsody's construction and meaning, I will set the stage for this argument (presented in sec. IV) by exploring two intertextual aspects of the work: its psychological progression from C minor to C major (sec. II) and its topical and motivic relations with music dramas by Wagner and with other works by Brahms himself (sec. III).
The Rhapsody is outwardly straightforward in construction. The text, as is well known, consists of three stanzas (nos. 5-7) from Goethe's Harzreise im Winter (see fig. 2.1). These comprise, first, vivid images of the misanthrope lost in the wilderness; second, a psychological depiction of his misery, loneliness, and selfishness; and, finally, a twofold prayer to the "Father of Love": that the unfortunate one be granted a pleasing melody that will "refresh" or "restore" (erquicke) his heart and that his senses be opened to the "thousand springs" of human contact near to him, even in his desert of loneliness.(8)
Figure 2.1: Brahms, Alto Rhapsody Aber abseits, wer ist's? But, apart there, who is it? Ins Gebusch verliert sich sein Pfad, He loses his way in the thicket, Hinter ihm schlagen Behind him Die Strauche zusammen, The undergrowth closes together, Das Gras steht wieder auf, The grass springs up again, Die Ode verschlingt ihn. The wasteland swallows him. Ach, wer heilet die Schmerzen Ah, who will heal the torments Des, dem Balsam zu Gift ward? Of him to whom balsam became poison? Der sich Menschenha[Beta] Who drank hatred of mankind Aus der Fulle der Liebe trank! From the fullness of love? Erst verachtet, nun ein Verachter, Once despised, now a despiser, Zehrt er heimlich auf He seceretly consumes Seinen eigenen Wert His own worth In ungnugender Selbstsucht. In fruitless selfishness. Ist auf deinem Psalter, If upon thy psaltery, Vater der Liebe, ein Ton Father of Love, there is a tone Seinem Ohre vernehmlich, Audible to his ear, So erquicke sein Herz! Then refresh(a) his heart! Offne den umwolkten Blick Open his clouded vision Uber die tausend Quellen To the thousand springs Neben dem Durstenden Near the thirsty one In der Wuste. In the desert. (a) Or perhaps "restore"; cf. n. 9.
The three sections of Brahms's setting correspond to these stanzas. The first two, both in C minor, are for the alto soloist; in the third, in C major, the male chorus joins in the concluding prayer. The first section, Adagio ?? (see exx. 2.2 and 2.4), lies somewhere between arioso and coherent melody (it is not really a recitative, as is sometimes claimed, except for its initial phrase). It is dissonant and wanders tonally, as does the protagonist, before closing on the dominant. The second section (see exx. 2.6-2.8), in a free A B A form, is somewhat faster and in a flexible triple meter (featuring Brahms's characteristically complex rhythmic overlappings), but it remains despairingly dissonant and unsettled. The third section, again Adagio and ??, adopts an entirely new tone, that of prayer; the "psaltery" of the text is suggested by a triplet pizzicato figure in the cellos. Its musical language is basically diatonic, although chromatic elements remain on the word erquicke and in the remote keys of the contrasting middle section. A unifying feature is the emphasis on the lower register and dark tone colors, even in the refrain passages of the final section.
II
Arguably, the most important fact about the Rhapsody's overall construction is its through-composed progression from minor to major. (In this context, I use the terms through-composition and progression to denote a large-scale, suprasectional organizing principle governing an entire multisectional movement or multimovement work.)(9) My interest centers not so much on the fact of this progression, which after all was common coin in nineteenth-century music, as on its particular quality in this composition. In the first place, it can scarcely be accidental that the Rhapsody moves specifically from C minor to C major rather than from minor to major in any other key. From Haydn's time on, resolutions into C major had constituted by far the most important class of this topos; a move to C major, the notationally simplest and perhaps conceptually "purest" of all keys, retained a...
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