Brahms and Beethoven

[Roehre]

...I've always thought referring to Brahms's 1st symphony as Beethoven's 10th a rather silly idea, any similarity with the Ode to Joy theme being at best superficial ...

As Brahms himself thought. But the resemblance between the Ode-theme and the main theme in Brahms 1 finale may be superficial, but was intended as such by the composer - who acknowledged this as such.

[Megan]

I think this topic could be expanded beyond Megan's original question. Brahms was often regarded as Beethoven's successor (at least by those opposed to the 'new music' of Wagner/Liszt). I've always thought referring to Brahms's 1st symphony as Beethoven's 10th a rather silly idea, any similarity with the Ode to Joy theme being at best superficial - the symphony as a whole has little resemblance to Beethoven whose own 1st symphony we might just as ridiculously describe as Mozart's 42nd or Haydn's 105th!

I've always been puzzled by this 'new music' debate between Wagner/Liszt on the one side, and Joachim / Brahms on the other.
There was a famous letter of protest from Brahms and Joachim in 1860, that didn't name Wagner but seemed to be clearly about him, in which they condemned the new German school as being contrary to the inermost spirit of music.
I have never for the life of me been able to understand what all this was about. Was it something to do with Wagner's anti-semitism and the fact that Joachim was a Hungarian Jew. Apparently Joachim and Wagner were close friends and Joachim was deeply impressed by the Ring.
Wagner later said he couldn't really understand Joachim's later hostility, but perhaps this was natural as Wagner wrote an anti semitic tract, but nobody really seems to know what the 'new, German school is or was, or otherwise known as the music of the future.
Joachim converted to Christianity, but he seems to have had doubts about what he was doing. Cosima Wagner seems to have hated everyone exept her father and Wagner, in a phrase I read in a book, regarded Joachim not just as an apostate Jew, but as an apostate Wagnerite.
Clearly Wagner fingered Joachim as an attacker of his music from the letter and he seems never to have forgiven Joachim or Brahms.

[Peter]

After the fiasco of the premiere of the 1st piano concerto in Leizig in 1859, Brahms was subjected to harsh criticism in the press and this in turn may have been related to Schumann's earlier 1853 article 'New Paths' which had heralded Brahms as a genius (much to his embarrassment).

In 1860, infuriated by an editorial asserting that there were no serious composers in Germany, outside of the “New German School,” Brahms attempted to retaliate by writing a manifesto against it. He had hoped to gather a number of signatures in support of the document, but it was leaked to the press and prematurely published, having been signed by only four names, and it became a major embarrassment for Brahms.

As to Wagner's anti-semitism it has to be put into the context of a generally anti-semitic Europe at the time. Wagner was an opportunist and his anti-semitism had its roots in his early lack of success and jealousy of composers such as Meyerbeer. I think Cosima Wagner was a most repellent character so she met her match in her second husband - the poorly treated first husband Hans von Bulow having his feet in both the Wagner and later, Brahms camps. As to her father, he was one of the kindest and most charitable of composers - she treated him appallingly at the end of his life.

[Roehre]

Not mentioned before, and therefore perhaps a bit off-topic:
the relation between Beetoven's sketches and Brahms' (or better: the lack of the latter's sketches).

The sketches we've got from Brahms are few, the only work which is relatively well documented is opus 56: the Haydn-variations. Further there are one or two from the piano quartet [no.2] in A op.26, and that's essentially all we've got.
We know Brahms did compose a lot which he later either destroyed completely, or re-composed, e.g. some dozen string quartets. The piano trios are also works which were composed, recomposed and then, eventually, after years of try-outs were published.
And he was eager not to publicly discuss his working methods (though through e.g. his pupil Jenner we know what he advised as in his opinion the best way to set op a composition).

I think we have got an early version of the trio opus 8 because it had been published already. Had this not been the case, we most likely wouldn't have had the first version.

It is only by chance that we've got an alternative version of the 2nd movement of the 1st symphony, as the parts used during the premiere in Karlsruhe survived, and the orchestral score therefore could easikly be reconstructed.

No real trace of how the scherzo from the 1st piano concerto (seems to be included in the German Requiem), or ditto from the violin concerto (completely disappeared) may have sounded, have survived.

What is the relation between Brahms' sketches being destroyed and Beethoven's having survived?
IMO a friendship in the beginning of the 1870s: Brahms and Nottebohm. They knew each other well, both were member of the committee of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, the first as its artistic director, the latter as librarian and professor in music history, and as such contributor to the Bach and Beethoven editions which began to take shape in those years.

Nottebohm published quite detailed from Beethoven's sketchbooks which were deposited in the Gesellschaft's archives (and of which at least one has since gone astray, luckily after Nottebohm assessed its contents and copied parts of it).

It is known that Nottebohm and Brahms discussed the Beethoven sketches, certainly because Brahms was interested in other (dead) composers' manuscripts. So did he possess the autographs of e.g. Mozart's symphony 40, a couple of Bach Cantatas and Schubert works and some Beethoven ones too.

The Beethoven sketches must have made Brahms aware what might happen with his own sketches (and not-published compositions) after his death.
The Nottebohm-Brahms discussions re the Beethoven sketches and their eventual publication in the shape of loose articles, happened from early 1870, concentrated around 1872 and '73.

Therefore I don't think it is coincidental that the sketches and continuity drafts of the Haydn-variations have survived: these date from exactly 1872/'73.
Brahms did realise what might happen, destroyed his older sketches, made a habit of destroying sketches as soon as a work had been published, but did want to have posterity having a slight look into his workshop. The sketches for the Haydn-variations were IMO deliberately preserved.

Therefore I am convinced that Brahms' sketches have not survived because of the existence of the beethovenian ones.

[Quijote]

Very interesting post, Roehre. This was not the case for Bruckner, but that is a point for later. So, if I understand you correcty, Brahms had a "historian's view to the future", if I may put it that way.
Two questions immediately spring to my mind :
a) What exactly might he have feared about any later "use" of his sketches (if he had left them extant)?
b) Did he leave any evidence about his views regarding his sketches in particular and other composers' sketches in general?

[Peter]

I think Roehre makes a very good case for the lack of Brahms sketches, very interesting.

[Roehre]

Very interesting post, Roehre. This was not the case for Bruckner, but that is a point for later. So, if I understand you correcty, Brahms had a "historian's view to the future", if I may put it that way.
Two questions immediately spring to my mind :
a) What exactly might he have feared about any later "use" of his sketches (if he had left them extant)?
b) Did he leave any evidence about his views regarding his sketches in particular and other composers' sketches in general?

Brahms was extremely reluctant to show others how he composed.
We know that he did just like Mozart compose much in his head, writing down/sketching only the trickier pasages (transitions e.g.).
We know as well from his one pupil Jenner that Brahms used to cover the inner parts of a piece shown to him, to check whether the bass-line was in concordance with the melody. If not, then he returned the piece without looking or examining it any further, just advicing to get the principles right before composing a piece and showing it to him (in his usual ascerbic manner).

But he was in awe as soon as he had manuscripts of his revered masters (Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and of course Schumann) in front of him. As editor of the Schubert Gesamt Ausgabe he more than once opened a parcel with Schubert (song-)manuscripts in which the drying sand the composer had strewn across the music after finishing it, still was present.
that meant that Brahms was the first person to see that music after Schubert had written it: the sand was collected and Brahms kept the little container filled with this sand and revered it.

Nottebohm has shown Brahms some of Beethoven's sketches, and the friends generally seem to have disagreed about their publication. One reason might have been, that Nottebohm's opinion was, that not only the compositional process was unveiled by studying the sketches, but the interpretation of the completed score as well.

===============
One example: Some conductors, Furtwängler and Klemperer e.g.(and it is said Bülow introduced it) create a little pause in bar 16 of the 1st movement of Beethoven 9. But, with the score in front of you, apart from bar 16, and its "repeat" at bar 50, where could one insert a similar pause in the course of the development and even the re-exposition of the movement? The places to look are bars 314-320 and 430- ca.444. There a similar pause (or even pauses!) would interrupt the musical flow rather severely in a rather unmusical manner.

However: B's sketches of the first theme DO show a pause at that position.
Eventually Beethoven thought a pause in bar 16 wasn't a good idea.
But why then has this pause been introduced by Bülow et al. at that place? It is a quite natural pause.

That is one of the results of interpreting Beethoven's own sketches, as they were published in the 1870s and 1880 by Gustav Nottebohm (They stem from what's now known as the "Artaria 201" sketchbook in Berlin).

As the thought emerged that you would better understand works if you would know how they were constructed as well as how they were sketched, developed, etc etc before the actual score was written/published.
As a consequence some performers went back to "the originals" and molded their interpretations according to their findings.
This has happened a.o. to the Ninth.

B's sketches of the first theme DO show a pause at that position.
But this pause DOESN'T appear in any of the scores which have been supervised by Beethoven (which in this case are: his own autograph, two copyist copies, the published score with amendments/corrections in Beethoven's hand).
====================

This musicological thinking likely abhorred Brahms, who as interpretor/ conductor kept as near to the scores as possible.
Logically he might therefore have been afraid of future generations interpreting his scores by including studying the sketches as well. As we know he composed regularly more than one version of a work before publishing it, the thought of performing and/or publication of what he deemed to be unworthy, must be a decisive factor in destroying all that material which was meant for Brahms' own eyes only.

So, Brahms loved and revered other composer's manuscripts highly, including Beethoven's sketches, but these mad him realise that keeping incomplete scores and sketches of his own works might mean future generations might look at them in a similar way and in one way or another perform them.

Brahms became aware of the need to be careful what he wrote in personal letter as well at approximately the same time (i.e. the early 1870s). History from then on seems to have been always on his mind: the very first time he heard of someone buying a letter of his for the autograph, he vowed to suppress intimate details in his correspondence. "A person has to be careful about writing letters. One fine day they get printed". (See for that an interesting article: Arthur Holde, Suppressed Passages in the Brahms-Joachim Correspondence, published for the first time, in Musical Quarterly 45/3, 1959.). Brahms parcelled out his life to future generations in all sorts of ways, e.g. by witholding information as well as by dis-inform potential biographers with "discreet" facts.
This all fits brilliantly within the picture why we haven't got many Brahms sketches.

[Roehre]

No-one taking this any further (and this is the 50.000th message on these boards, btw)

[Peter]

No-one taking this any further (and this is the 50.000th message on these boards, btw)

Congratulations we present you with a special BRF award Roehre! 3 Gold Smilies!

I'm not sure how much further we can go with this one - I think you have presented us with a very plausible argument regarding Brahms. Brahms of course not only destroyed sketches but completed works as well.

I wonder why Elgar didn't destroy the sketches for the 3rd symphony as he was adamant it should not be completed by anyone else? Sibelius made sure of it with his 8th!

[Roehre]

Congratulations we present you with a special BRF award Roehre! 3 Gold Smilies!

I'm not sure how much further we can go with this one - I think you have presented us with a very plausible argument regarding Brahms. Brahms of course not only destroyed sketches but completed works as well.

I wonder why Elgar didn't destroy the sketches for the 3rd symphony as he was adamant it should not be completed by anyone else? Sibelius made sure of it with his 8th!

The special BRF award is much appreciated .

Elgar's instruction was much more easily said than done, and there is the high probability that is was meant not to stop anyone else completing it, as long as it wasn't Eric Fenby tinkering with his (i.e. Elgar's) sketches.

Why more easily said than done?
Have a look at Elgar's sketchbooks (e.g. Robert Anderson Elgar in manuscript, Amadeus Press, 1990).
You'll discover -as Anthony Payne did- that many scratches eventually meant for the 3rd symphony are literally spread over many pages, dotted down over many years, and interspersed with many other unrelated ones, as well as sketches for otherwise completed works.

Payne in his book on his work on the symphony (Faber, 1996) shows what he has used from these sketches after puzzling with the indications as Elgar left them in the folder specifically marked Sym III.
Among these of course the first two full score pages of the 1st mvt, as well as a kind of continuity score, but -as sais- riddled with indications and pointers to sketches to be fund elsewhere.

Destroying sketches for Sym III was therefore either a near-impossible task, or would have meant the loss of all of his unused sketches.

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Sibelius 8 is a complete other story, as there is more than sufficient evidence that we are talking not about one symphony no.8 only, but two different ones (so two complete symphonies composed following the Seventh, including the Kullervo making that Sibelius eventually composed ten complete symphonies ).
His severe self-criticism, and the feeling that his music didn't connect with the musical world around him anymore, seem to be the main reason why he eventually destroyed both scores. Mind you, of the first of these works at least the first movement was already sent to the publisher to be prepared for publication. Sibelius requested the score to be returned as he wanted to make some amendments. Jorgenson duly obliged before a copy had been made....

[Peter]

The special BRF award is much appreciated .

Elgar's instruction was much more easily said than done, and there is the high probability that is was meant not to stop anyone else completing it, as long as it wasn't Eric Fenby tinkering with his (i.e. Elgar's) sketches.

Why more easily said than done?
Have a look at Elgar's sketchbooks (e.g. Robert Anderson Elgar in manuscript, Amadeus Press, 1990).
You'll discover -as Anthony Payne did- that many scratches eventually meant for the 3rd symphony are literally spread over many pages, dotted down over many years, and interspersed with many other unrelated ones, as well as sketches for otherwise completed works.

Payne in his book on his work on the symphony (Faber, 1996) shows what he has used from these sketches after puzzling with the indications as Elgar left them in the folder specifically marked Sym III.
Among these of course the first two full score pages of the 1st mvt, as well as a kind of continuity score, but -as sais- riddled with indications and pointers to sketches to be fund elsewhere.

Destroying sketches for Sym III was therefore either a near-impossible task, or would have meant the loss of all of his unused sketches.

===========

Sibelius 8 is a complete other story, as there is more than sufficient evidence that we are talking not about one symphony no.8 only, but two different ones (so two complete symphonies composed following the Seventh, including the Kullervo making that Sibelius eventually composed ten complete symphonies ).
His severe self-criticism, and the feeling that his music didn't connect with the musical world around him anymore, seem to be the main reason why he eventually destroyed both scores. Mind you, of the first of these works at least the first movement was already sent to the publisher to be prepared for publication. Sibelius requested the score to be returned as he wanted to make some amendments. Jorgenson duly obliged before a copy had been made....

What makes you say that about Fenby? I know Elgar was friendly with Delius but why was he so anti Fenby and how can we be so sure that his remarks regarding the 3rd were directed solely at him?

[musicatthestart]

The Brahms are much more demanding aside from the Emperor in terms of physical power that is required. Listen to the first movement of the D minor.