![]() ![]() 'He wasn't someone who was stuck in the mid-nineteenth century slavishly copying the model of Beethoven or Bach. That's the aspect people often overlook when they talk about Brahms.'Įmanuel Ax is also sensitive to any implication that Brahms's music is somehow diminished by its references to both recent and far-distant idioms. That's what's interesting about it not what it echoes, but what it creates not what can be found elsewhere, however diluted, but what can only be found here. 'If you look at the first theme of the first movement of the C major Sonata it's very Beethovenian. Idil Biret, who has recorded all three sonatas and much of the solo repertoire for Naxos, argues that such idiosyncrasy is a strength in the writing. Brahms would never willingly have allowed himself to be a hostage to posterity just as he never submitted to the stylistic fetters of fashion. Yet, paradoxically, it's the very ambivalence of this stance that enabled him to look forward, to explore new possibilities in his music with such freedom. The future for Brahms, as for few other composers, is left to take care of itself. Right from the start the characteristic conundrum that informs all of Brahms's music is revealed: that the present has no real definition for him unless it is as an amalgam of the past and the personal. Though Liszt, arch advocate of Weimar progressivism, had played some of the sonata to its composer's approval (the E flat minor Scherzo particularly appealed) it is likely that the general intent of the writing - most immediately its emphatically classical first subject and the almost Schubertian exploration of keys in the second subject - would not have been sufficiently 'modern' or forward-looking enough to merit Brahms's wider acceptance amongst Liszt's more hard-line cronies. It was through Reményi that Brahms was to meet another violinist, Joseph Joachim, the dedicatee of the Op 1 C major Piano Sonata, completed and published in 1853. His own prowess at the keyboard was well known and had been honed by adolescent employment in dubious dancehalls and taverns and in later and less ignominious engagements as an accompanist to the violinist Eduard Reményi. It is probably no accident that the first two works with attributed opus numbers that Brahms allowed to survive are piano sonatas. In an age of musical drift where time and fashion were transfiguring the classical into the romantic, Brahms adopted an attitude that would not have been out of place in the latter part of our own century: he determined to be concerned only with himself, his own musical attitudes and, such as they were, his own ambitions. Difficult though he found it living in the great man's shadow, how impossible it would have been had he had to share the limelight with 'that giant whose steps I always hear behind me'. It has been a matter of both good fortune and historical inconvenience for Brahms that he came after Beethoven. And while he was to destroy more work than he consented to publish, those chamber compositions he did commit to posterity - a mere two dozen pieces in all - all court the accolade of 'masterpiece'. Although Brahms was to show himself a master of every musical form save opera, it was in the intimate domain of the chamber and solo repertoire that he was to achieve genius. Still, to be presented with an image of Brahms the man apparently contrary to the icon that Brahms the composer has become seems useful prior to a discussion of his chamber and instrumental music - a body of work which proves to be every bit as robust and full of life as the young athlete whose prodigious musical talents made him heaven-blessed and, at least in the eyes of the Schumann family, heaven-sent. The image is a startling one, not for the portrait of athletic prowess it paints (impressive though that is), but rather because it is so powerfully at odds with the abiding image of Brahms that has been handed down to us: the older, gruff, grizzly bear of a man, 'rather taciturn and jerky as a rule, and notoriously difficult to carry on a conversation with', as Dame Ethel Smyth once observed. The young man', she finally reveals, 'was Johannes Brahms, the children were the Schumann family.' Finally he swung himself up until he was balancing on his hands, stretched out his legs and leapt down into the hall below, landing in the midst of the admiring children. There a young man with long, fair hair was performing the most hair-raising gymnastic exercises, hanging by his arms and swinging backwards and forwards, from one side to the other. Towards the end of Ronald Taylor's Robert Schumann, His Life and Work (London: 1982), the composer's daughter Eugenie recalls, 'as though I were looking at a picture, a hall in a house in Düsseldorf, with a group of children gazing in amazement at the banisters on the landing above.
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