THE MASTER BUILDER

Thus far this season we have heard the Third Symphony of Brahms three times, and once the Symphony in D, the second. These various performances were respectively given at concerts by the Symphony Society, the Philharmonic Society, and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Nor were they unusual happenings. The symphonic works of Brahms are perennial favorites in New York. There is a sufficing reason. Brahms is a transitional bridge between the mighty Beethoven and the modern men. He is the last of the classicists, though not precisely the first of the romantics. Schumann was that, not Berlioz. But Brahms is more romantic than is commonly realized. It always will be a mystery to the present generation why he was called a pedant, a dry-as-dust composer. He has his dull moments, when philosopher-like he contemplates the umbilicus of the universe. He is not dramatic when drama is not demanded by his theme, and he is occasionally drab in orchestral color, though never brilliant in the meretricious sense. He is on the side of the angels. He stands for what is sound, lofty, beautiful as opposed to shallow operatic trivialities and melodramatic effects.

It was unfortunate that almost at the outset of his career Edouard Hanslick, erudite, witty, malignant, should have posed Brahms as an antithetical man of straw to Richard Wagner. Doubtless it was a tempting contrast to make: Brahms, the serious symphonist, a reverent follower in the broad pathway of Bach and Beethoven; and Wagner, creator of the music-drama, of marvellous stage pictures—romantic, erotic Wagner. Yet what a fallacy is there. Brahms, as his songs, symphonies, piano, and violin music prove, was a poetic, a romantic, musician. He could not paint as boldly as Berlioz, but he always had something vital to say, while Berlioz, despite his grandiloquent rhetoric, like Victor Hugo, displayed more manner than matter. As for Wagner—well, he, too, absorbed as much of Bach and Beethoven as he could assimilate for his particular usage, and was quite as learned as Brahms. Von Bülow had set the pace for Dr. Hanslick and that detractor of Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner, indeed of all the New Music—whenever he saw a head pop up on the horizon he hit it, like the game of Aunt Sally—recognized his opportunity and promptly pitted Brahms against Wagner, with the result that for a long period the musical world labored under the mistaken notion that Brahms was a rusty, musty old pedagogue, with bewhiskered counterpoint and a plentiful lack of melodic invention. And he was just the reverse.

He died over two decades ago and his vogue has waxed with the years. When we consider the list of his achievements we are amazed at the slow, patient, yet fertile and versatile qualities of the man. “Their impatience,” wrote John Henry, Cardinal Newman, in condemning the major defect of heresiarchs. Brahms was ever patient. Patience might serve as his epitaph. His was a genius that grew from accretions. His first opus was far from the later Brahms, notwithstanding its potential powers. It was but the acorn which became the great oak of the four symphonies, the piano and the violin concertos, the songs, chamber music, choral compositions, the Songs of Destiny and the Requiem. This massed work is the sum total of a high ideal; stern, unyielding, betimes frostily inhuman, yet logical and consistent. The philosophic bent of his intellect extorts our admiration. For a half century he pursued the beautiful in its most difficult and elusive form, followed it when the fashions of the season mocked at such undeviating devotion, when musical structure was called old-fashioned, sober thought voted down as dull, when the theatre had invaded the tonal realm and menaced it in its very stronghold, the symphony. After all, there is something to be said in favor of the skeleton, whether concealed by human flesh or embodied in religious dogma or encased within the formal walls of musical compositions. Things must have structure to interest mankind; even the prudish oyster has a shell. Otherwise the amorphous shreds of the floating jellyfish or the primeval amœbæ would become our ideal. Brahms was homo sapiens. He stood on his hind legs, as did our common forebears, with “probably arboreal habits.” And he wrought the noblest music since Beethoven.

He is the first composer since Beethoven to sound the note of the sublime. Naturally, Wagner is excepted because he did not write absolute music, and we are now dealing only with that form. Because of this trait of sublimity Brahms has been called austere. His austerity and lack of personal profile—sometimes—have made his loftiest music difficult of comprehension. He never splits the ears of the groundlings. He never makes any concessions to popularity. Like Ibsen and Manet, he goes out of his way to displease. The facile triumph he despises. He saw musical Europe filled with second and third rate men, and he noted that their sole excuse was to give cheap pleasure to the tasteless. This professional parasitism he abhorred; with him the reaction became a species of puritanism. It is a gratifying proof of his flexible mental operations that he understood and admired Wagner, whose ideals and practice were the antipodes of his own. His workmanship is well-nigh impeccable; formal and contrapuntal mastery marks it. His contribution to the techniques of rhythm is considerable. He literally popularized the cross-relation, rediscovered the arpeggio and elevated it to an integer of the melodic phrase. Wagner did the same for the essential turn.

His trait of fidelity, his spiritual obstinacy, are characteristic. There seems to be a notion because Brahms refused to swim the current tendencies that he held himself aloof from humanity, a bonze, a Brahmin, and not, as he really was, a bard chanting its woes and full-blooded aspirations. It is platitudinous nowadays to say that his music throbs with the rich, red blood of humanity. He is the greatest contrapuntalist since Bach (pace Richard Strauss and Max Reger), and the supreme architectonist since Beethoven. Nevertheless, in his songs he is as simple and virile as Robert Burns. His topmost peaks are remote and gleam in an atmosphere too rarefied for dwellers on the plains, but how intimate, how gracious are the happy moments in his chamber-music. Following the romantic side of Schumann, untouched by the fever of the footlights, a realist with imagination, both a classicist and a romanticist, he conducted music to its normal channel by showing that a formal service and a mastery of polyphony are not incompatible with the utterance of new ideas in a new way. Brahms is not reactionary any more than is Wagner. Neither found what he needed in contemporary life and art, so one harked back to the Greeks and Gluck, the other to Beethoven. All progress is crabwise. In the past of the arts may be found the germs of their future.

Study the massiveness of the Brahmsian tonal architecture; study those tonal edifices erected after years of toil, consider his fertility in invention, his patience in developing his ideas; consider the ease with which he moves, though seemingly shackled by the most exacting of forms, a form not assumed for the sake of overcoming difficulties, but because it was the only form in which he could fully express himself. The narrative-tone of the symphonic form—and this includes all its practitioners from Haydn to Tschaikovsky—is like blank verse, it has been the chosen field of the greatest masters; and who shall say that either Shakespeare or Beethoven has suffered from its adoption? Even such a Romantic, mad and morbid, as Charles Baudelaire employed as his vehicles of expression forms as restricted and rigid as the sonnet and the alexandrine. Note the leaven of genius which militates against pedantry, scholastic aridity, academic music-making, and music arithmetical. Consider the intellectual and emotional brain—for the seat of the emotions is in the head, not the heart—of this composer, and then realize that all art is the arduous victory of great minds over great imaginations. Recall the introductions to the first and last movements of the Symphony in C minor by Brahms. That magnificent work makes by comparison other men’s efforts like facile improvising. Its bases are laid for the brief “eternity” accorded to all things fashioned by mortal hands.

Brahms ever consciously schooled his imagination. He was his own severest critic. He worked slowly, produced as slowly, and, being of the contemplative rather than of the dramatic, dynamic temperamental type, he incurred the reproach of heaviness. There is enough sediment in his collected work to lend truth to this accusation, but from the very cloudiness of the ferment has come the richest of wines. And how refreshing is a draft of this wine after the thin, frothing stuff concocted at the vintage of every season! He has his metaphysical mood when he wrestles with abstract speculations, as did Pascal or Spinoza. It cannot be said that Brahms, the cryptic philosopher, is as interesting as Brahms of the symphonies, the F minor piano sonata, the quintet for piano and strings with the same key signature, or the fragrant lyrics. He has the glorious simplicity of Beethoven, and, like that Master of masters, he does not fear to employ such an elementary modulation-bridge as the chord of the dominant seventh.

A full chord for his orchestra has not the rainbow tints of the first or major chord in the Prelude to The Mastersingers, yet it can sink a shaft into our consciousness quite as profound. He is a thinker, his chilliness is rather in his manner than in his discourse, which often is thrice eloquent. This plodder, at times without Promethean fire, possesses shoulders wide enough upon which to drape the symphonic mantle of Beethoven. He reminds us of a mediæval architect whose life was a prayer, in marble; who patiently built Gothic cathedrals which majestically flanked upon mother earth, whose thin pinnacles pierced the vasty blue, and in whose marmoreal naves an army terrible with banners could worship; while through the stony forest of arches music flowed as the voices of many waters. Brahms is the master-builder of modern music.