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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Nebraska Press
Johannes Brahms's compositional effort during the middle to late 1850s seems relatively unimpressive, at least when viewed against his fiery Romantic works of the early 1850s and the steadier products of his "first maturity" in the early 1860s. After the publication and first performances of the Piano Trio in B Major, op.8, in 1855, Brahms came forth with no new substantial work until early 1859, when both the Piano Concerto in D Minor, op.15, and the Serenade in D Major, op.11, received their first performances. These comparatively lean years did see the completion of nearly a dozen smaller sacred compositions, however (table 2.1). These works are rarely performed nowadays, and scholars have tended to categorize them as mere "study pieces" or else as stepping-stones on the path to the German Requiem (1868) and other greater works to come. Yet each has its own story to tell, not only about Brahms's development as a composer but about his artistic and aesthetic outlook at a certain point in time. Indeed, given Brahms's role (even at this early stage in his career) in the division of German music after midcentury into two political camps, this repertoire raises an important question: Why would one of North Germany's most promising young musicians have turned to dated, even antiquarian forms during a style-formative phase of his career? Far more progressive things had been predicted of Brahms, after all, first by Robert Schumann in his influential essay "Neue Bahnen" of October 1853, and then by advocates of Zukunffsmusik, who had received Brahms so warmly in Leipzig only a few months after the appearance of Schumann's article.(1)
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In the following essay I shall address this question by focusing on the last of the works at hand, the chorale motet "Es ist das Heil uns kommen her," op.29, no.1, composed in July 1860 as a setting of a sixteenth-century chorale by Paul Speratus and published four years later together with the motet "Schaffe in mir, Gott, ein rein Herz," op.29, no.2. Although the four-voice harmonization of the chorale with which "Es ist das Heil uns kommen her" begins is probably most responsible for its reputation as a study work (and thus for the lack of scholarly attention it has received), it is in fact this very feature of the motet that ought to draw our critical attention most strongly.(2) For here, far more than in any of his other early sacred vocal works, Brahms makes a direct bow to J. s. Bach, an important symbol for nineteenth-century Germany not only of musical tradition but also of national pride and of cultural history. This is an important point, inasmuch as the date of the composition and certain of its formal-motivic features imply a link between the motet and Brahms's brief (and ill-fated) public dispute in the spring of 1860 with Franz Brendel, editor of the Leipzig Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik. Specifically, I will argue that through its direct evocation of Bach's style, "Es ist das Heil uns kommen her" may be read as Brahms's telling response to Brendel's own appropriation of the Leipzig cantor in his critical formulation of the "New German school."
I
The city of Leipzig enjoyed a paradoxical status in the musical life of the mid-nineteenth century. As represented by Breitkopf and Hartel's launching in 1850 of the Bach Gesamtausgabe, and of the similar collected editions that followed, it continued to represent German musical tradition and historicism. Yet, as home to Brendel's influential Neue Zeitschrift, which served as a leading proponent of music by Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz, it stood also at the center of the new Zukunftsmusik.(3)
On 27 January 1859 Brahms performed his D-Minor Piano Concerto at the Leipzig Gewandhaus. Although the work had been premiered five days earlier in Hanover with moderate success, the Leipzig concert was by Brahms's own account a "brilliant and decisive -- failure."(4) Brahms was hissed off the stage at the work's conclusion, and the conservative Eduard Bernsdorf, chief critic for the Signale der musikalische Welt, penned a scathing review on 3 February, branding the work dry and totally lacking in pleasure.(5) Writing to his friend Joseph Joachim on the day following the concert, Brahms made the most of a bad situation: "I believe this is the best thing that can happen; it forces one to concentrate one's thoughts and increase one's courage. After all, I am only experimenting and feeling my way as yet."(6) Notwithstanding the stiff upper lip he maintained in the face of this fiasco, Brahms must have been greatly disappointed by his failure to impress the Leipzig musical establishment.
One day after Bernsdorf's review, Friedrich Gleich offered a slightly more favorable review of Brahms's concerto in the Neue Zeitschrift.(7) Nevertheless, before long events associated with Leipzig, Brendel, and his journal would arouse an angry public rebuttal from Brahms that ultimately proved as embarrassing as his concerto performance. The root of Brahms's anger lay in Brendel's inaugural address to the first meeting of the Allgemeine Deutscher Musikverein in Leipzig on 1-4 June 1859. In his remarks, published in the Neue Zeitschrift on 10 June 1859, Brendel traced the recent coalescing of distinct parties in the musical press, pitting his journal and the "Music of the Future," which it championed, against unnamed detractors. Among other measures that were ostensibly designed to lessen the misunderstandings between the parties, Brendel suggested replacing the problematic term "Zukunftsmusik" with the new designation "Neudeutsche Schule," which, he argued, was a more fitting designation for the progressive style of German music associated with Wagner, Liszt, and Berlioz. In attempting to justify the inclusion of two non-German composers at the head of this school, Brendel constructed a lineage from the music of the German past that surely would have raised Brahms's ire:
[Berlioz and Liszt] would never have become what they are today had they not from the first drawn nourishment from the German spirit and grown strong with it. Therefore, too, Germany must of necessity be the true homeland of their works, and it is in this sense that...
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