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Late Brahms, Ancient Modes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 June 2018

R. Larry Todd
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Abstract

History has often viewed Brahms as a Janus-faced composer who turned his gaze backward to contemplate the accumulated riches of music history even as he sought late in his career to exploit new means of musical expression. On the one hand, he habitually collected passages from a long line of composers that breached the traditional prohibition against parallel fifths and octaves; he exchanged ideas with musicologists such as Nottebohm, Mandyczewski and Adler, and read early issues of the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft; and he indulged from time to time in a distinctive musical historicism. But on the other hand, his music was embraced for showing a way forward for a number of next-generation composers who would contend with twentieth-century modernism, most notably of course Schoenberg, in his essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’, but also Anton von Webern, whose transitional Passacaglia op. 1 was unthinkable without the precedent of Brahms’s op. 90, and whose aphoristic miniatures betrayed the concentrated expression and opening up of register in Brahms’s late Klavierstücke.

This essay considers one still relatively little-explored facet of Brahms’s historical gaze – his use of modes in his later music, and their potential for creating alternative means of musical organization that challenged, and yet were somehow compatible with, tonality. Examples considered include the first movement of the Clarinet Trio op. 114 and slow movement of the String Quintet no. 2 op. 111. Unlike Brahms’s earlier compositions that treat modes as signifiers of a style of folk music or simulated folk music, the later instrumental works seem to juxtapose principles of modal organization within the context of tonal compositions. Thus, in the first movement of the Clarinet Trio, eerie passages in fauxbourdon impress as allusions to a distant, archaic musical other, as if Brahms the historian were searching for the distant roots of his musical aesthetic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Nineteenth-Century Music Review , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , December 2018 , pp. 421 - 442
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

1 See Hugo Riemann, ‘Einige seltsame Noten bei Brahms und anderen’, in Präludien und Studien (Leipzig: 1901; rep. Hildesheim: G. Olms, 1967), vol. 3, 109–23, and the thorough treatment of Riemann’s approach in Notley, Margaret, ‘Plagal Harmony as Other: Asymmetrical Dualism and Instrumental Music by Brahms’, Journal of Musicology 22 (2005): 90–130 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The stimulus for Riemann’s study was Brahms’s modal use of the minor subdominant in the slow movement of the Fourth Symphony op. 98, and finale of the Double Concerto op. 102.

2 See, for example, Notley, Margaret, Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 93 Google Scholar.

3 See, for instance, Hancock, Virginia, Brahms’s Choral Compositions and His Library of Early Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983)Google Scholar, and ‘Brahms and Early Music: Evidence from His Library and His Choral Compositions’, in Brahms Studies: Analytical and Historical Perspectives, ed. George S. Bozarth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 29–48; and Christoph Wolff, ‘Brahms, Wagner, and the Problem of Historicism in Nineteenth-Century Music: An Essay’, in Brahms Studies, 7–12.

4 See David Lewin, ‘Brahms, His Past, and Modes of Music Theory’, in Brahms Studies, 25–26.

5 Lewin, ‘Brahms, His Past, and Modes of Music Theory’, 13.

6 Lewin, ‘Brahms, His Past, and Modes of Music Theory’, 13, 24.

7 Philipp Spitta, ‘Johannes Brahms’, in Zur Musik (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1892), 390.

8 See, further, Notley, Lateness and Brahms, 108ff., 125ff.

9 Haberl, Fr. X., ‘Wilhelm du Fay: Monographische Studie über dessen Leben und Werke’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 1 (1885): 397–530 Google Scholar, Koller, Oswald, ‘Versuch einer Rekonstruktion der Notenbeispiele zum elften Kapitel von Franco’s Ars cantus mensurabilis’, Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft 6 (1890): 242–267 Google Scholar.

10 Cited here from the fourth edition of Heinrich Bellermann, Der Kontrapunkt (Berlin, 1901), 85.

11 Krones, Hartmut, ‘Zu Johannes Brahms’ Verständnis der Kirchentonarten’, in Musik und Musikforschung: Johannes Brahms im Dialog mit der Geschichte, ed. Wolfgang Sandberger and Christiane Wiesenfeldt (Kassel, Bärenreiter, 2007), 99 Google Scholar.

12 See, in particular, Virginia Hancock, Brahms’s Choral Compositions and His Library of Early Music. A helpful survey in this regard may be found in Thalmann, Joachim, Untersuchungen zum Frühwerk von Johannes Brahms (Kassel, Bärenreiter, 1989), 13–29 Google Scholar: ‘Überblick über die in den Jahren 1892 bis 1980 erschienene musikwissenschaftliche Literatur zu Johannes Brahms’ musikhistorischem Interesse’.

13 See further, Siegfried Kross, ‘Die “Abschriften alter Musik” in der Bibliothek von Johannes Brahms’, in Musik und Musikforschung, ed. Sandberger and Wiesenfeldt, 123–32.

14 Brodbeck, David, ‘The Brahms–Joachim Counterpoint Exchange; or, Robert, Clara, and “the Best Harmony between Jos. and Joh”’, in Brahms Studies, ed. David Brodbeck (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 30–80 Google Scholar.

15 For facsimiles of the 11-page autograph (now preserved in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna), including a translation of Heinrich Schenker’s annotations from 1933, and additional commentary by Paul Mast, see Paul Mast, ‘Brahms’s Study, Octaven u. Quinten u. A.’, Music Forum 5 (1980): 1–196.

16 Wilhelm Ambros, August, Zur Lehre vom Quinten-Verbote (Leipzig: Matthes, 1859)Google Scholar; Friedrich Weitzmann, Carl, Die neue Harmonielehre im Streit mit der alten, mit einer musikalischen Beilage: Albumblätter zur Emancipation der Quinten, Anthologie klassicher Quintenparallelen (Leipzig: C. F. Kahnt, 1861)Google Scholar. For a consideration of the debate, see in particular Laudon, Robert T., ‘The Debate about Consecutive Fifths: A Context for Brahms’s Manuscript “Octaven und Quinten”’, Music and Letters 73 (1992): 48–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17 J. C. in Times Literary Supplement (6 November 2015), 36.

18 Probably a reference to Nicolas Poussin’s painting of 1637 now in the Louvre, Les bergers d’Arcadie.

19 Ambros, Zur Lehre vom Quinten-Verbote, 45, as translated in Mast, ‘Brahms’s Study, Octaven u. Quinten u. A.’, 178.

20 Ambros, Zur Lehre vom Quinten-Verbote, 45, 43.

21 See further Alexander Rehding’s Riemannian analysis of the first movement in ‘Dualistic Forms’, in The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Riemannian Music Theories, ed. Edward Gollin and Alexander Rehding (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 218–45.

22 Notley, ‘Plagal Harmony’, 94.

23 Mendelssohn Bartholdy, Felix, Werke, ed. Julius Rietz (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1874–1877)Google Scholar. Concerning the chorale fugue, see van der Linden, Albert, ‘Un fragment inédit du “Lauda Sion” de F. Mendelssohn’, Acta musicologica 26 (1954): 48–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and my edition of Lauda Sion (Stuttgart: Carus Verlag, 1996), 64–77.

24 See, for instance, Lewin, David, Studies in Music with Text (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 169–179 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nicole Biamonte, ‘The Modes in the Music of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms: Historical Context and Musical Function’ (PhD diss., Yale University, 2000), 179ff.

25 See, for example, Die Trauernde, op. 7 no. 5 (Aeolian), and Sehnsucht op. 14 no. 8 (Dorian).

26 Biamonte, ‘The Modes in the Music of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms’ and Thalmann, Untersuchungen zum Frühwerk von Johannes Brahms.

27 Biamonte, ‘The Modes in the Music of Beethoven, Schumann, and Brahms’, 214.

28 Thalmann, Untersuchungen zum Frühwerk von Johannes Brahms, 149.

29 See, in particular, Thalmann, Untersuchungen zum Frühwerk von Johannes Brahms, 159–92.

30 Gade had successfully entered the work in a prize competition of the Copenhagen Musikforeningen. Mendelssohn was to have served as one of the judges, but withdrew, owing to his workload. He subsequently met Gade in 1843, and the Dane became one of his deputy conductors at the Gewandhaus.

31 Apart from the overture, he would have known Robert Schumann’s Nordisches Lied from the Album für die Jugend (1848), an homage to Gade based on a cipher drawn from his name, and a piece displaying a modal ambivalence between D minor and F major.

32 Curley, Thomas M., Samuel Johnson, the Ossian Fraud, and the Celtic Revival in Great Britain and Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 1 Google Scholar.

33 See R. Larry Todd, ‘Mendelssohn’s Ossianic Manner with a New Source – On Lena’s Gloomy Heath’, in Mendelssohn and Schumann: Essays on Their Music and Its Context, Jon W. Finson and R. Larry Todd (Durham: Duke University Press, 1984), 137–60; and Daverio, John, ‘Schumann’s Ossianic Manner’, 19th Century Music 21 (1998): 147–173 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Harwell Celenza, Anna, The Early Works of Niels W. Gade: In Search of the Poetic (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 128–129 Google Scholar.

35 See Todd, ‘Mendelssohn’s Ossianic Manner’, 149–51.

36 ‘Weep on the rocks of roaring winds, O maid of Inistore, bend thy fair head over the waves’. In 1815 Schubert had set a different German translation of the same text in his solo Lied, D. 281, but chose not to employ modal materials.

37 ‘Ancient Tragedy and Anachronism: Form as Expression in Brahms’s Gesang der Parzen’, in Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning, ed. Heather Platt and Peter H. Smith (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 112, 135.

38 All three are discussed and analysed in Krones, ‘Zu Johannes Brahms’ Verständnis der Kirchentonarten’.

39 The first edition (Johannes Brahms, Messe) was published by Otto Biba in Vienna in 1984.

40 Johannes Brahms im Briefwechsel mit Joseph Joachim, ed. Andreas Moser (Berlin, 1921; Tutzing, H. Schneider, 1974), V, 151.

41 In a letter of 29 July 1861. See Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms, Briefe aus den Jahren 1853–1896 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1989), vol. 1, 327; see further Robert Pascall, ‘Brahms’s Missa canonica and Its Recomposition in His Motet “Warum” op. 74 no. 1’, in Brahms Studies 2: Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies, ed. Michael Musgrave (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 111–36.

42 Schoenberg, Arnold, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 427 Google Scholar.

43 Webern edited the second part of the Choralis Constantinus for the series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, published as vol. 32 in 1909.

44 Anton von Webern, The Path to the New Music, ed. Willi Reich, trans. Leo Black (London: Universal Edition, 1963).