Brahms and the anxiety of allusion

Journal of Musicological Research

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-30

  Knapp, Raymond ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149423051     PISSN: 01411896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/01411899808574751     Document Type: Article

References (55)

1. Published in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, October 28, 1853, pp. 185-86
2. See his letter to Schumann of 16 November 1853, quoted in Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, 4 Vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft, 1912), 1:134. The string quartets mentioned in "Neue Bahnen" were not published
3. Regarding the transformation of the Piano Quartet, see James Webster, "The C Sharp Minor Version of Brahms's Op. 60," Musical Times 121 (1980): 89-93
4. See Oliver Neighbour, "Brahms and Schumann: Two Opus Nines and Beyond," 19th-Century Music 7 (1984): 266-70
5. See Carl Dahlhaus, Johannes Brahms: Klavierkonzert Nr. 1 d-moll, Op. 15 (Munich: W. Fink, 1965)
6. For further speculation regarding the fate of the D-minor sonata, see Christopher Reynolds, "A Choral Symphony by Brahms? 19th-Century Music 9 (1985-86): 3-25
7. See Berthold Litzmann, Clara Schumann: Ein Künstlerleben nach Tagebüchern und Briefen (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1923), 3:158
8. "Ach, Gott, wenn man wagt, nach Beethoven noch Symphonien zu schreiben, so müssen sie ganz anders aussehen!" (Kalbeck, 1:339)
9. "Ich werde nie eine Symphonie komponieren! Du hast keinen Begriff davon, wie es unsereinem zu Mute ist, wenn er immer so einen Riesen (Beethoven) hinter sich marschieren hört." (Kalbeck, 1:165)
10. Regarding the Second Symphony, for example, see Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, 16 Vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft, 1906-21
11. See Kalbeck, 3:453-54
12. With Brahms as with many contemporary European figures in America, there was an initial resistance followed by acceptance and veneration; that Brahms's music was deemed especially difficult made the curve all the more dramatic (see Alison Deadman, "Brahms in Nineteenth-Century America," Inter-American Music Review, 16 [Summer-Fall 1997]: 65-84)
13. Repertory lists for the time - e.g., H. Earle Johnson, Symphony Hall, Boston (Boston: Little Brown, 1950), 311-401 - reveal how quickly and securely Brahms became part of the American canon in the 1880s. An even more telling indicator may be seen in the symphonic interchange between Dvořák and Amy Beach in the mid-1890s; we may note especially the craving for respectability that led to Dvořák's recruitment in the first place, and the adaptation of Beach's Irish-American heritage to a respectably Brahmsian orchestral idiom in her "Gaelic" Symphony, offered as an alternative to the "New World" Symphony of Dvořák (both symphonies, like Brahms's Fourth, are in E Minor)
14. See the discussions in Andrew Lamb, "Brahms and Johann Strauss," Musical Times 116 (1975): 869-71
15. and Helmut Wirth, "Oper und Drama in Leben von Johannes Brahms," Brahms-Studien 5 (1983): 117-39. We may note especially Brahms's well-known veneration for the Blue Danube Waltz and Bizet's Carmen, his rejection of the Wagnerian Music-Drama alternative, and many of his own works that betray his affection for lighter idioms, such as the Hungarian Dances and the Liebeslieder Waltzes
16. See J. Peter Burkholder, "Brahms and Twentieth-Century Classical Music," 19th-Century Music 8 (1984): 75-83
17. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973)
18. See, in particular, Kevin Korsyn, "Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence," Music Analysis 10 (1991): 3-72
19. and Joseph N. Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990)
20. See also Richard Taruskin's review of these two contributions in "Revising Revision," Journal of the American Musicological Society 46 (1993): 114-38
21. See Bloom, 11: "The greatest poet in our language is excluded from the argument of this book ... Shakespeare belongs to the giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness."
22. Quoted in Peter Yates, Twentieth Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (New York: Pantheon Books, 1967), 41; a frequently heard variant reads, "Good composers borrow; great ones steal." The authenticity of the latter may be reasonably questioned, since a similar witticism is often credited to Picasso ("Good artists borrow; great ones steal"); presumably, theft is common among great quipsters as well
23. Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark (originally published as Kamera Obskura, 1932; English translation by the author, 1938; new edition, New York: New Directions, 1960), 7-8 (italics added)
24. Charles Rosen, "Influence: Plagiarism and Inspiration," 19th-Century Music 4 (1980-81): 87-100
25. See especially Kenneth Ross Hull, Brahms the Allusive: Extra-Compositional Reference in the Instrumental Music of Johannes Brahms, Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1989
26. Hull, for example, develops elaborate criteria for establishing the presence of an allusion, which for him presumes intent, without actually avoiding the "intentional fallacy" (see especially Brahms the Allusive, 40-91); he can scarcely be faulted in this, however, since the "fallacy" is essentially fool-proof, given that intention can never be proven, but only made to seem plausible
27. See my discussion in Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony (Stuyvesant, New York: Pendragon Press, 1997), ch. 4, especially 85-88
28. Highpoints of this ongoing discussion have been Donald Tovey's description of this passage as "catastrophic" and Susan McClary's terming it "one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music"; see Donald Francis Tovey, "Beethoven: Ninth Symphony in D Minor, Op. 125 - Its Place in Musical Art" (1935-39
29. reprinted in his Essays in Musical Analysis: Symphonies and other Orchestral Works, London: Oxford University Press, 1981), 100
30. and Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 128-30
31. In an earlier discussion of the tendency (and capacity) for music to play out different modes of sexual identity, McClary hears the enormous frustration of this passage as specifically male, with the denied goal specifically sexual in nature; see her "Getting Down Off the Beanstalk: The Presence of a Woman's Voice in Janika Vandervelde's Genesis II," Minnesota Composers Forum Newsletter (January, 1987)
32. reprinted in Music/Dance/Theatre Journal (Summer 1990)
33. See Maynard Solomon, "The Ninth Symphony: A Search for Order," in his Beethoven Essays (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 3-32
34. (originally published as "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: A Search for Order," 19th-Century Music 10 [1986]: 3-23)
35. Many of these purported allusions have been noted before; thus, the first segment of Example 4c is noted in Michael Musgrave, The Music of Brahms (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 221-22
36. the relationship of Example 4c to Example 4b, in further connection with Schumann's C-Major Fantasy, in R. Larry Todd, "On Quotation in Schumann's Music," (in Schumann and His World, edited by R. Larry Todd, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994, 80-112), 94-95
37. the motivic relationship between Examples 4c and 4d in Musgrave, The Music of Brahms, 134
38. Examples 4f and 4g, second segment, in Musgrave, 222-23
39. and Example 5d in Julius Harrison, Brahms and His Four Symphonies (London: Chapman & Hall, 1939, reprinted, New York, 1971), 217
40. For speculation on the familiar claim that the opening motto is derived from "Frei aber Froh," itself a variation of Joachim's motto "Frei aber Einsam," see Michael Musgrave, "Frei aber Froh: A Reconsideration," 19th-Century Music 3 (1979-80): 251-58
41. and A. Peter Brown, "Brahms' Third Symphony and the New German School," Journal of Musicology 2 (1983): 434-52
42. the earliest known reference to Brahms's supposed musical motto is in Kalbeck, 1:98-99
43. Example 5d achieved early notoriety as a seemingly inappropriate homage; see, e.g., J. A. Fuller-Maitland, Brahms (London: Methuen, 1911), 149
44. and Edwin Evans, Handbook to the Chamber and Orchestral Music of Johannes Brahms (London, 1912; reprinted New York: B. Franklin, 1970), 124-25 . The allusion to Wagner is supported contextually by a harmonic environment in both Wagner and Brahms that employs modulations spanning a major third, and historically by Brahms's extended (if contested) possession of the autograph score for the "Venusberg" music to which he alludes
45. In a letter to Brahms of 27 January 1884, Joachim elaborates his program at some length, beginning with his identification of the "kühne, brave Schwimmer" in the C-major theme of the exposition; see Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel, 6:197-98 (1908)
46. See Susan McClary, "Narrative Agendas in 'Absolute' Music: Identity and Difference in Brahms's Third Symphony," in Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, edited by Ruth A. Solie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 326-44
47. See Hermann Kretzschmar, Führer durch den Konzertsaal: 1. Abteilung: Sinfonie und Suite, fifth edition (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1919), 753
48. ("Die verführerischste in dieser Gruppe von Dalilagestalten ist das zweite Thema"); a condensed version of his discussion is translated in Brahms and His World, edited by Walter Frisch (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 135-39
49. See Walter Frisch, Brahms and the Principle of Developing Variation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984)
50. A. Peter Brown, "Brahms' Third Symphony"; and David Brodbeck, "Brahms, the Third Symphony, and the New German School" (Brahms and His World, pp. 65-80)
51. Robert Bailey sees the overall form as a three-part structure, almost in the manner of Mahler; see his "Musical Language and Structure in the Third Symphony," in Brahms Studies: Analytical and Historical Perspectives, edited by George S. Bozarth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 405-21
52. Thus, Hanslick approves and expands on a comment by Hans Richter, the first conductor of Brahms's Third Symphony, who had dubbed it Brahms's "Eroica"
53. Theodor Helms's review shortly thereafter, however, discounts the connection in favor of what he considers more palpable connections to Schumann's "Rhenish" and Beethoven's Eighth. See Eduard Hanslick, Concerte, Componisten und Virtuosen der letzten fünfzehn Jahre. 1870-1885. Kritiken von Eduard Hanslick (Berlin: Allgemeiner Verein für deutsche Litteratur, 1886), 361-366
54. and Theodor Helm, "Musikbrief. Wien," Musikalisches Wochenblatt 14 (1883): 111. Hanslick refrains from elaborating an actual program for the work, and, indeed, points out obvious differences between Brahms's Third and Beethoven's. Nevertheless, he implicitly endorses a two-fold referential quality, to the 19th-century musical rhetoric of heroism, and to a specific work - another Third Symphony - that might serve as a useful point of reference, possibly but not necessarily reflecting the intentions of the composer
55. See Straus, Remaking the Past