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COPYRIGHT 2001 University of Nebraska Press
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)
Numerous passages in Brahms's symphonies demonstrate both how this alliance could work and the risks that Brahms took, in pursuing conflicting goals, that his inevitably mixed signals might be misconstrued. In the following brief survey of representative passages, beginning with a more thorough consideration of the metrical shift in the first movement of the Third Symphony, and continuing with discussions drawn from all four symphonies and the four basic movement types, I will demonstrate that the potential for an alliance is based in part on the circumstance that music--at any rate, this music--can simultaneously make sense from a variety of perspectives, any one of which might reasonably be taken as central. This cuts both ways, of course; thus, the centrality of my two main concerns--organic unity and revitalizing traditions--is clearly a matter of preferential focus since Brahms's procedures in this regard may easily be seen to offer support for arguably more central, or at least more immediate, concerns in particular cases; thus, for the Third Symphony, the concerns that are reflected in the substantial literature that has grown around it (all of which deals in some way with the passage in question) include Brahms's putative need to engage in some fashion with "New German" musical ideals and the programmatic tradition.(8)
The metrical disjuncture in the first movement of the Third Symphony is a critical moment for all three of these concerns. Before this shift, we are given a tight development of a relative handful of motives, involving distinctive melodic shapes, rhythms, and harmonic procedures; by the time of the shift, however, these unifying musical processes are seemingly abandoned as new textures and a decidedly different thematic basis take over. Allusively, Brahms's musical material for the first group derives with some precision from a variety of "appropriate" sources, including Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, and his own First Symphony (all shown in ex. 4.2); however, just before the metrical disjuncture, and in apparent preparation for it, Brahms alludes with even more clarity to Wagner's Tannhauser, a startling gesture even considering that Wagner had recently died when the symphony first appeared.(9) Partly because of these apparent aberrations, which conspire along with the metrical disjuncture to disrupt our sense of how a Brahms symphony should behave, it is here that programmatic explanations become most persuasive; these have ranged, most recently, from David Brodbeck's identification of a pastoral aesthetic governing the ?? segment of the exposition to Susan McClary's seduction-of-a-troubled-hero scenario (derived in part from Hermann Kretzschmar, an admirer of Brahms writing during Brahms's lifetime who described the ?? theme as "Delilah-like").(10)
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The disconcerting allusion to Wagner's Tannhauser in m. 31 also provides the fulcrum for the metrical shift and is thus a logical place to begin to inquire more closely into the nature of these "aberrations." The allusion emerges after a modulatory bridge, beginning in m. 15, that has taken us sequentially from F major to A major by way of D major; this symmetrical modulation scheme, downward by major thirds, has seemed to many reminiscent of "New German" harmonic practices,(11) As shown in ex. 4.3, the musical material for the bridge itself is also allusive, recalling, in particular, Haydn's Symphony no. 97 and Beethoven's Eroica--both particularly appropriate here, and not only because of their similar handling of the device of repeating a note over destabilizing harmonies. As shown in ex. 4.2 above, the Haydn symphony provided the basis for a double allusion in the opening measures of the symphony so that a further reminder here serves to deepen the association. Beethoven's Third Symphony, for its part, seemed almost predestined to serve as a point of reference for Brahms's Third, a connection reinforced by Brahms's "heroic" opening.(12)
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The allusion to Wagner thus forms the climax of a series of nested allusions that spans the bridge, a seemingly precise mapping of allusive processes onto formal processes. If the allusive climax seems unsuitable, given that Wagner was a noted rival who had rejected Brahms and offered his operatic work as the logical consequence of the German symphonic tradition, we may note that Brahms's apparent generosity is scarcely the departure it has often been taken to be, for Brahms's esteem for Wagner's music has been amply documented.(13) And we may also note, with Brodbeck, that, with this musical reference, Brahms may not be honoring Wagner as much as offering a pointed alternative.(14)
In any case, the allusion is no mere homage; nor, as we shall see a bit later, is the mapping of the allusive process against the background of sonata form quite so clear-cut as it appears. As shown in ex. 4.4, Brahms combines harmonic features from both Beethoven and Wagner in his climactic allusion, as if to underscore the fact that Wagner was himself dependent on Beethovenian models for one of his most characteristic passages. Thus, in the Eroica, Beethoven proceeds through a passing augmented triad to a triadic major seventh, which is then resolved into a triad. Wagner, who maintains a tonic pedal throughout, moves directly to a nontriadic major seventh that resolves into a diminished-seventh chord above the pedal. Brahms's cross-breeding of the two incorporates Beethoven's augmented triad and triadic major seventh but places them against Wagner's pedal and follows Wagner in resolving to a diminished-seventh chord above the pedal. While the overall effect is more reminiscent of Wagner than of Beethoven, the sequential passages that precede this one establish Beethoven as an allusive point of reference that continues to be relevant even after Wagner has become the allusive focus.
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This blending of allusive sources is typical of Brahms, and we may look to the very opening of the symphony for an even more impressive demonstration of his ability to combine allusions in this way, as outlined in ex. 4.2. Brahms's web-like approach to allusion, involving interwoven references to multiple allusive sources, provided an ideal means for him to pursue his agenda of revitalizing traditions, for it permitted him to situate his music within the past at the same time that he set it both apart from and above the past, as an agent of synthesis.(15) Clearly, the techniques of thematic variation, which Brahms had cultivated from an early age, lay behind his ability to do this on a regular basis. Even more important for us to observe here is that his cultivation of these techniques also sharpened his sense for thematic derivation when he encountered it in other music, making him more sensitive than many of his contemporaries--and some of them were quite sensitive--to thematic and procedural connections among works from the past. Time and again, Brahms built directly on this kind of parallel in the music of his predecessors and found justification therein for his own practice. Thus, allusion provided Brahms with both an immediate and a procedural connection to the traditions he sought to revitalize.
Yet another consequence of Brahms's cultivation of variational technique is his striking ability to accommodate allusion to internal processes that promote a sense of organic unity. For this accommodation to take place, Brahms's allusions, themselves variational constructs drawing on a variety of exterior sources, must present themselves as the logical result of internal processes of variation as well. Thus, the allusion to Wagner must take shape within thematic processes following their own, internal logic. Brahms's success along these lines, both here and elsewhere, finds indirect documentation in a persistent, widespread reluctance to acknowledge allusion, or at least to acknowledge an aesthetic function for it. But we may be much more specific than that; within the context of thematic processes native to this movement, the allusion to Wagner provides a vital logistical link, serving as a thematic mediator between the two starkly contrasting thematic groups of the exposition.
The top system in ex. 4.5 reduces the principal lines of the first of these thematic groups, consisting primarily in overlapping repetitions of the opening melodic motto--ascending F-A[flat]-F--answered by downward arpeggios, initially set off rhythmically in hemiola. McClary likens the replicating motto to a strand of DNA, and we may extend this analogy by observing that the replications cycle around each other in overlapping motto-response patterns, as if to provide a musical representation of a double helix.(16) I have abstracted these patterns in the lower system of ex. 4.5, manipulating register so as to disentangle the individual strands; as shown, the thematic complex functions rather imperfectly as a genetic carrier, mutating rapidly from one generation to the next.
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The overlapping statements heighten the conflict between the two halves of the pattern, and it is this conflict that compels the mutations. Thus, the first response, offered before the motto has a chance to interfere, is simply an arpeggiation of F major, but the repetitions of the motto soon force various harmonic accommodations--specifically, to F minor, D[flat] major, and the diminished-seventh chord of the tonic, which finally resolves, according to convention, to the dominant. The arrival on the dominant, in m. 7, launches a simultaneous diminution and augmentation of the motto, the former extended in sequence, the latter expanded figurationally from within. While the details of this working out project a surface chaos in line with the dynamic of conflict imposed by the motto, the background harmonic progression is actually fairly conventional, centered around the primary chords off major, and the thematic elaboration is rigorously logical. Yet nothing in this section may be easily seen to prepare the contrasting theme in ??, and it will fall to the bridge to establish a logic to the succession.
The logic of succession involves a type of thematic process traditionally identified as "developing variation," but it also follows an allusive logic and, ultimately, an affective logic as well.(17) As detailed in ex. 4.6, the bridge that commences with the long-delayed tonic arrival in m. 15 is based directly on the accompanimental material sustained from mm. 3-10 as an energizing background pulsation, consisting of repeated quarter notes both...
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