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<h2>CHAPTER IX</h2> <h2>BRAHMSODY</h2> After Wagner the deluge? No, Johannes Brahms. Wagner, the high priest of the music-drama; a great scene-painter in tones. Brahms, a wrestler with the Dwellers on the Threshold of the Infinite; a musical philosopher, but ever a poet. "Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms," cried Von Bülow; but he forgot Schumann. The molten tide of passion and extravagance that swept over intellectual Europe threescore years ago bore on its foaming crest Robert Schumann. He was first cousin to the prince of romancists, Heinrich Heine; Heine, who dipped his pen in honey and gall and sneered and wept in the same couplet. In the tangled, rich underwood of Schumann the young Brahms wandered. There he heard the moon sing silvery, and the leaves rustle rhythms to the heart-beats of lovers. All German romance, fantasy, passion was in Schumann, the Schumann of the Papillons and the Carneval. Brahms walked as did Dante, with the Shades. Bach guided his footsteps; Beethoven bade him glance aloft at the stars. And Brahms had for his legacy polyphony, form, and masterful harmonies. In his music the formulist [Pg 107] finds perfect things. Structurally he is as great as Beethoven, perhaps greater. His architectonic is superb. His melodic content is his own as he strides in stately pomp in the fugued Alexandrines of Bach. Brahms and Browning. Brahms and Freedom. Brahms and Now. The romantic infant of 1832 died of intellectual anæmia, leaving the world as a legacy one of the most marvellous groupings of genius since Athens's sky carolled azure glances to Pericles. Then came the revolution of 1848, and later a race of sewermen sprang up from the mud. Flaubert, his face turned to the past, his feet to the future, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the bourgeois. Zola and his gang delved into moral cesspools, and the world grew aweary of the malodor. Chopin and Schumann, faint, fading flowers of romanticism, were put in albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Even Berlioz, whose orchestral ozone revivified the scores of Wagner and Liszt; even mad Hector, with the flaming locks, sounded garishly empty, brilliantly superficial. The New Man had arrived. A short, stocky youth played his sonata in C, his Opus I, for Liszt, and the Magyar of Weimar returned the compliment by singing in archangelic tones his own fantasy in B minor, which he fondly and futilely believed a sonata. Brahms fell asleep, and Liszt was enraged. But how symbolical of Brahms to [Pg 108] fall asleep at the very onset of his career, fall asleep before Liszt's music. It is the new wearied of the old, the young fatigued by the garrulities of age. It is sad. It is wonderful. Brahms is of to-day. He is the scientist turned philosopher, the philosopher turned musician. If he were not a great composer he would be a great biologist, a great metaphysician. There are passages in his music in which I detect the philosopher in omphalic meditation. Brahms dreams of pure white staircases that scale the Infinite. A dazzling, dry light floods his mind, and you hear the rustling of wings—wings of great, terrifying monsters; <ins class="mycorr" title="changed from: hippogrifs" id="tnote7">hippogriffs</ins> of horrid mien; hieroglyphic faces, faces with stony stare, menace your imagination. He can bring down within the compass of the octave moods that are outside the pale of mortals. He is a magician, spectral at times, yet his songs have the homely lyric fervour and concision of Robert Burns. A groper after the untoward, shudders at certain bars in his F sharp minor sonata and weeps with the moonlit tranquillity in the slow movement of the F minor sonata. He is often dull, muddy-pated, obscure, and maddeningly slow. Then a rift of lovely music wells out of the mist; you are enchanted and cry: "Brahms, master, anoint again with thy precious melodic chrism our thirsty eyelids!" Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, the [Pg 109] choral works and chamber music—are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colourist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of thought. Ideas, noble, profundity-embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a great manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms's melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politesse of his art do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his Intermezzi. There he catches the tender sigh of childhood or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer; and virile as are few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies—true soul-tragedies—how they unearthed the core of pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer in himself, thus a believer in men and women. He reminds me more of Browning than does [Pg 110] Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic—yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric—modes of analysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared wormwood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed for the company of both giants. Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces the aches of modern soul-maladies. Bard and healer. Beethoven and Brahms. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> [Pg 111] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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