Brahms - without influence?

[Chaszz]

It is a truism in music criticism that Wagner, the opera composer, signally influenced the subsequent development of the symphony and modern music in general, while Brahms the great symphonist ironically had no followers. Partly this observation rests on Brahms' conservative avoidance of polytonality and Wagner's embrace of it in 'Tristan und Isolde,' setting the direction of modern music.Yet I wonder whether Brahms' irrelevance is true when I hear the jagged lines in his music. He seems many times to stubbornly use the simplest, almost irritating non-melodies as the basis for his great themes. A zig-zag line of notes, virtually a throwaway, repeated with a slight variation, becomes the cornerstone of a great movement, but these short themes bear little relation to the melodies of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann. Taken by themselves, the themes, sometimes marked by very percussive writing for the piano, often sound more like proto-Schostakovich than Romantic music. They also sometimes sounds like the riffs in big-band jazz. Brahms, the great melodist, no doubt took pride in being able to erect structures of great emotion and beauty from these fragments in his symphonies. But in his chamber music the existential jaggedness sometimes persists throughout a movement, giving the impression of expressionism, cubism or abstraction, not of Romanticism, For a good example of this, listen to the thrird movement of the great piano quintet. After its hammering, almost jazz-like course, notice how abruptly it ends.

In view of a movement like this one and many others, I wonder whether Brahms didn't actually have offspring after all in the jagged polytonal and atonal melodists of the 20th century?

[Peter]

I don't think the use of short motives was unique to Brahms - Haydn and Beethoven both did the same. Just think of the most famous Beethoven example, the 5th symphony or the monothematic finale of Haydn's symphony no.103. Sibelius would extend this further in his symphonies. Schoenberg admired Brahms, but it was his polyrhythms rather than his tonality that had most influence. I wouldn't say Wagner embraced polytonality in Tristan (you don't find him writing in 2 different keys at the same time) - what he did do was obscure tonality in a way that had never been done before by a succession of unresolved dissonances (that are virtually impossible to analyse in conventional terms) taking harmonic chromaticism to the point where the next logical step was atonality. Liszt was also heading down the atonal road - his Faust theme foreshadowed Wagner in Tristan and even anticipates the tone row technique of Schoenberg. The most striking example though has to be his Bagatelle in no key written towards the end of his life.

The next generation Strauss and Mahler started off being influenced by Brahms, but rejected him once they'd caught the Wagner bug! Wagner of course had an enormous influence on his contemporaries and what followed, but primarily in the 20th century as a reaction against him. The traditionalists Elgar and Dohnanyi were influenced by Brahms but overall I think late Beethoven was more influential, especially the quartets - Stravinsky referred to the Grosse Fugue as a work that would always be modern.

So was a Brahms a great influence on the 20th century? I don't really think so - he was after all a conservative figure considered by many in his own time as a dinosaur, working the old forms to death. One wag once suggested you need to study the music of Brahms a great deal to realise there's nothing in it! I don't agree with that, but he represented the past rather than the future.

[Chaszz]

I don't think the use of short motives was unique to Brahms - Haydn and Beethoven both did the same. Just think of the most famous Beethoven example, the 5th symphony or the monothematic finale of Haydn's symphony no.103. Sibelius would extend this further in his symphonies. Schoenberg admired Brahms, but it was his polyrhythms rather than his tonality that had most influence. I wouldn't say Wagner embraced polytonality in Tristan (you don't find him writing in 2 different keys at the same time) - what he did do was obscure tonality in a way that had never been done before by a succession of unresolved dissonances (that are virtually impossible to analyse in conventional terms) taking harmonic chromaticism to the point where the next logical step was atonality. Liszt was also heading down the atonal road - his Faust theme foreshadowed Wagner in Tristan and even anticipates the tone row technique of Schoenberg. The most striking example though has to be his Bagatelle in no key written towards the end of his life.

The next generation Strauss and Mahler started off being influenced by Brahms, but rejected him once they'd caught the Wagner bug! Wagner of course had an enormous influence on his contemporaries and what followed, but primarily in the 20th century as a reaction against him. The traditionalists Elgar and Dohnanyi were influenced by Brahms but overall I think late Beethoven was more influential, especially the quartets - Stravinsky referred to the Grosse Fugue as a work that would always be modern.

So was a Brahms a great influence on the 20th century? I don't really think so - he was after all a conservative figure considered by many in his own time as a dinosaur, working the old forms to death. One wag once suggested you need to study the music of Brahms a great deal to realise there's nothing in it! I don't agree with that, but he represented the past rather than the future.

Well, that is exactly the concept of Brahms I am trying to disprove, or at least weaken. Here are some quotes from the web by Schoenberg, as well as a quote from our mutual friend Prof. Charles Rosen, which go to support my points:

‘…Schoenberg regarded Brahms not as a conservative, but as a very progressive artist. In his famous 1947 article “Brahms the Progressive,” Schoenberg states:

Progress in music consists in the development of methods of presentation which correspond to the conditions just discussed. It is the purpose of this essay to prove that Brahms, the classicist, the academician, was a great innovator in the realm of musical language, that, in fact, he was a great progressive (Schoenberg, 1975, 401).

Among Brahms’s many achievements, Schoenberg emphasized asymmetry as one of the characteristic features of Brahms’s music. This idea was later further developed by Mahler, Reger, Strauss, and Schoenberg himself. Schoenberg considers such structures to pave the way for an unrestricted musical language, developmentally free—that is, paving the way for his ideal. Schoenberg believed that he had invested a great deal of effort in inventing such a language.’

‘…He loved Wagner’s music and went to see his operas repeatedly. He loved Brahms’s music as well and learned much from it. In a famous essay called “Brahms the Progressive,” Schoenberg later argued that Brahms was not quite so conservative after all, especially in the way that he manipulated small groups of notes—melodies or musical cells—so as to constantly develop into new ideas, what he called “developing variation.” Schoenberg sought to merge Wagnerian and Brahmsian traditions in his own compositions

In another article, “Criteria for the Evaluation of Music,” Schoenberg mentions the idea of “developing variation” as a means of liberating modern music from simplistic, exact repetitions that even composers like Debussy and Puccini were “guilty” of using. In Schoenberg’s opinion, Reger, Mahler and he himself had worked hard to become free of the monotony of exact repetitions of the same material. In this context, Schoenberg stresses Brahms’s contribution to innovation in musical language.'


'...There's also an article by Charles Rosen, "Brahms the Subversive," with examples of harmonic moves that he says subvert traditional practice. "Although Brahms is still dealing with almost all the traditional elements of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century music, he tends to play with them, to manipulate them, dislocating their traditional relationships with each other and setting them off one against the other for purposes that no composer before him had ever envisaged. Brahms is both subverting the Classical tradition and at the same time exploiting it with a learning greater than that of any of his contemporaries." (in "Critical Entertainments," Harvard U.P., 2000).'

I think these ideas tend to undermine the idea of Brahms as merely the dry inheritor and summer-up of the past, and accord with my own experience of his music, particularly his piano-based violin sonatas, trios, quartets and the quintet.

[Peter]

Well I don't disagree with that and interestingly Schoenberg was the 20th century composer I cited as having admired Brahms. The question though is just how much influence on later composers did he actually have? That Schoenberg felt the need as late as 1947 to spell out the characteristics of Brahms's music implies that most composers were not following his example. Looking back on Schoenberg himself, most people regard his own atonal experiments as leading to a dead end.

[Vipercat]

Brahms is one of the greats in the Romantic era, and his music cannot be put into a box or classified into a "genre". He definitely had his influences and influenced other composers after him. There is a split between the "abstract school" and the "programme-music" school - that of Wagner, Liszt etc. But for sure, Brahms was not the last of his kind. Especially if you consider the 19th century French school, including Cesar Franck, Marcel Dupre and in the 20th century I would see Brahmsian influence in the music of the Czech composer Petr Eben. The "fragments" Chaszz is referring to are called motives. Just like Bach built his music around motives, just like Beethoven did. Brahms uses a LOT of Baroque techniques and fashions them in his own way into a Romantic idiom. Yes, there are melodies, but they are built on a rhythmic/ metric foundation, which is the ground structure of all good Baroque music. One must be careful to try and put composers into genres. The geniuses are the ones who broke the rules of their time, they did not conform to them.

[Peter]

Brahms is one of the greats in the Romantic era, and his music cannot be put into a box or classified into a "genre". He definitely had his influences and influenced other composers after him. There is a split between the "abstract school" and the "programme-music" school - that of Wagner, Liszt etc. But for sure, Brahms was not the last of his kind. Especially if you consider the 19th century French school, including Cesar Franck, Marcel Dupre and in the 20th century I would see Brahmsian influence in the music of the Czech composer Petr Eben. The "fragments" Chaszz is referring to are called motives. Just like Bach built his music around motives, just like Beethoven did. Brahms uses a LOT of Baroque techniques and fashions them in his own way into a Romantic idiom. Yes, there are melodies, but they are built on a rhythmic/ metric foundation, which is the ground structure of all good Baroque music. One must be careful to try and put composers into genres. The geniuses are the ones who broke the rules of their time, they did not conform to them.

But he did not have a great influence on the major developments in 20th century music - Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok for example. Chaszz has mentioned as you do Brahms's use of motives, but Beethoven admired this very quality in the music of Handel so it wasn't a new discovery by Brahms.

[Chaszz]

But he did not have a great influence on the major developments in 20th century music - Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok for example. Chaszz has mentioned as you do Brahms's use of motives, but Beethoven admired this very quality in the music of Handel so it wasn't a new discovery by Brahms.

Well, by his own testimony we have seen Schoenberg was influenced by Brahms. You call Schoenberg's music a dead end -- well, the loosely defined 'school' he 'founded' still has some adherents and his own music -both pre-twelve-tone and twelve-tone - is obviously sometimes great though of mixed quality. But I don't see how he cannot be called an important 20th C. composer, and his 'method' is the most notorious of the century, for good or ill. So in this sense Brahms did undoubtedly have some influence, IMO.

My purpose is not to present Brahms as a very important influence, but just to dispute and modify the rote characterization of his music as a dead end. I cannot see it that way.

I would not be surprised to hear that Shostakovitch was also influenced by Brahms' rhythmic motives but cannot prove or support this assertion!

[Peter]

Well, by his own testimony we have seen Schoenberg was influenced by Brahms. You call Schoenberg's music a dead end -- well, the loosely defined 'school' he 'founded' still has some adherents and his own music -both are-twelve-tone and twelve-tone - is obviously sometimes great though of mixed quality. But I don't see how he cannot be called an important 20th C. composer, and his 'method' is the most notorious of the century, for good or ill. So in this sense Brahms did undoubtedly have some influence, IMO.

My purpose is not to present Brahms as a very important influence, but just to dispute and modify the rote characterization of his music as a dead end. I cannot see it that way.

I would not be surprised to hear that Shostakovitch was also influenced by Brahms' rhythmic motives but cannot prove or support this assertion!

Well you may be right Chazz, Brahms may have been more innovative than he has generally been given credit for - certainly the most striking element to me is his use of cross-rhythms. As for Shostakovich I'm not that familiar with literature about his style and influences but Mahler was certainly amongst them. It is interesting that both Mahler and Strauss were initially influenced by Brahms but apparently broke away from this with their discovery and idolisation of Wagner. I would have thought that Wagner and Mahler were the stronger influences on Schoenberg - certainly Brahms was not heading down the atonal road hinted at by Liszt and Wagner and this surely is the most characteristic element of the second Viennese school and the origins of the Tone Row technique? At any rate I think we can be fairly certain Brahms would have been appalled by Schoenberg's music and horrified at any suggestion that his own music had influenced it in any way - even Mahler (though admiring Schoenberg) was baffled!

[Sorrano]

Well, by his own testimony we have seen Schoenberg was influenced by Brahms. You call Schoenberg's music a dead end -- well, the loosely defined 'school' he 'founded' still has some adherents and his own music -both pre-twelve-tone and twelve-tone - is obviously sometimes great though of mixed quality. But I don't see how he cannot be called an important 20th C. composer, and his 'method' is the most notorious of the century, for good or ill. So in this sense Brahms did undoubtedly have some influence, IMO.

My purpose is not to present Brahms as a very important influence, but just to dispute and modify the rote characterization of his music as a dead end. I cannot see it that way.

I would not be surprised to hear that Shostakovitch was also influenced by Brahms' rhythmic motives but cannot prove or support this assertion!

Indeed, the Schoenberg method has influenced a great deal of 20th Century composers including Stravinsky and Copland (his Connotations for Orchestra is a 12-tone piece, I believe). To this date there are variations of the 12-tone system; I've used it somewhat in my own music in taking cells of a row and embellishing them as themes in a sonata allegro form, for example. Berg and Webern are important composers that were pretty much disciples.