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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: The Great Composers
- Sprache: Englisch
Welcome to The Independent's new ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music. Extracted from Michael Steen's book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, these concise guides, selected by The Independent's editorial team, explore the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time. It was Schumann who first hailed Brahms as 'the natural heir and successor to Beethoven', and that is how many have seen him since, although to Brahms himself it was something of a burden. With his devotion to classical precepts, he proved himself a master of all the major forms bar one. His four symphonies, his concertos, his vast body of chamber music, where discipline underpins the wonderful romantic harmonies, remain central to the repertoire. During his own life, it was the rapturous reception of his German Requiem which established him beyond all doubt. The only form he never attempted was opera, which would have been ill-suited to his virtues as a composer. Michael Steen shows how Brahms came to be raised up as the champion of traditional values against the new music of composers such as Liszt and Wagner, in one of the most bitterly fought controversies of the age. On tour as a young man from Hamburg, Brahms met the violin virtuoso Joachim, who introduced him to Schumann. During Schumann's period of insanity and especially after his death, Brahms developed a lifelong friendship with his widow, Clara. Steen chronicles his autumns teaching in Detmold, his passing loves, and eventual move to Vienna, where he would spend his winters, escaping to a variety of resorts to compose over the summer. He died at 63, still a bachelor.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014
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Published by Icon Books Ltd,
Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]
ISBN: 978-1-84831-811-3
Text copyright © 2003, 2010 Michael Steen
The author has asserted his moral rights.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Steen OBE was born in Dublin. He studied at the Royal College of Music, was the organ scholar at Oriel College, Oxford, and has been the chairman of the RCM Society and of the Friends of the V&A Museum, the Treasurer of The Open University, and a trustee of Anvil Arts and of The Gerald Coke Handel Foundation.
Also by the Michael Steen:
The Lives and Times of the Great Composers (ebook and paperback)
Great Operas: A Guide to 25 of the World’s Finest Musical Experiences (ebook and paperback)
Enchantress of Nations: Pauline Viardot, Soprano, Muse and Lover (hardback).
He is currently engaged in a project to publish one hundred ebooks in the series A Short Guide to a Great Opera. Around forty of these have already been published' and further details on these are given at the back of this book.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to our ebook series The Great Composers, covering fourteen of the giants of Western classical music.
Extracted from his book The Lives and Times of the Great Composers, Michael Steen explores the lives of composers as diverse as Mozart and Puccini, reaching from Bach to Brahms, set against the social, historical and political forces which affected them, to give a rounded portrait of what it was like to be alive and working as a musician at that time.
It was Schumann who first hailed Brahms as ‘the natural heir and successor to Beethoven’, and that is how many have seen him since, although to Brahms himself it was something of a burden. With his devotion to classical precepts, he proved himself a master of all the major forms bar one. His four symphonies, his concertos, his vast body of chamber music, where discipline underpins the wonderful romantic harmonies, remain central to the repertoire. During his own life, it was the rapturous reception of his German Requiem which established him beyond all doubt. The only form he never attempted was opera, which would have been ill-suited to his virtues as a composer.
Michael Steen shows how Brahms came to be raised up as the champion of traditional values against the new music of composers such as Liszt and Wagner, in one of the most bitterly fought controversies of the age. On tour as a young man from Hamburg, Brahms met the violin virtuoso Joachim, who introduced him to Schumann. During Schumann's period of insanity and especially after his death, Brahms developed a lifelong friendship with his widow, Clara. Steen chronicles his autumns teaching in Detmold, his passing loves, and eventual move to Vienna, where he would spend his winters, escaping to a variety of resorts to compose over the summer. He died at 63, still a bachelor.
BRAHMS
‘SUDDENLY I SAW a man unknown to me, rather stout, of middle height with long hair and a full beard, coming towards me. In a very deep and hoarse voice, he introduced himself as “Musikdirektor Müller”, making a very stiff and formal bow, which I was on the point of returning with equal gravity, when, an instant later, we all found ourselves laughing heartily at the perfect success of Brahms’ disguise.’1 Thus it was that an English friend saw the transformed Brahms. Formerly ‘a golden youth with piercing blue eyes and with a lower lip apt to be pressed forward in moments of emotion’, he was now, although aged only 45, the ultimate bourgeois, the German traditionalist.2
The bourgeois Musikdirektor Müller is the image we have of Brahms: ‘one of quiet, inward happiness, contentment and ease’,3 the carpet slippers and open collarless shirt, in an atmosphere reeking of smoke and the odour of beer and coffee. His beloved Clara Schumann’s last words with him were: ‘What are you going to do with all that tobacco?’ His response, quite normal, given his propensity to ask others to do the same, was ‘Smuggle it’. A table was reserved for him and his bachelor friends at Gause’s beer-hall in Vienna. Tchaikovsky wrote: ‘I have been on the booze with Brahms.’ Grieg found him ‘jovial and friendly’, having taverned with him.4 Another described how Brahms ‘did ample justice to the excellent Munich beer, of which he consumed an astounding quantity before we parted, long after midnight’. 5 He also drank lots of coffee, and would brew his own in the morning.
It comes as a surprise that this was the man who moulded his music on the example of Robert Schumann, whose focus was on the unsentimental, unshowy beauty of Romanticism. This was the man who brought ‘the classical and romantic technique of expression to complete and fruitful union; it was an amazing marriage’.6 This was the man who showed that something new can be created with classical forms, that it was still possible to write sonatas, trios, quartets and even fugues.
Beware of the cosy, stolid image. Although he helped those he admired, such as Dvoák, he was capable of exploding into colossal rows with many of his best friends, including Clara Schumann and the celebrity violinist Joseph Joachim; he was objectionable to many others. He could be contentious and undiplomatic. He created a major controversy about the ‘New German School’ of music: he disliked Wagner, for whom it did not matter, and he hated Bruckner, for whom it did. But all of that is for later. First we must chronicle his early life in Hamburg, his help for Clara Schumann when Robert was in the lunatic asylum, his autumns teaching in Detmold, his passing loves. He would enjoy idyllic summers in Baden-Baden near Clara. A tentative move to Vienna became permanent. The success of the Requiem provided financial security and enabled him to live comfortably, to be ‘Doktor Müller’ and to spend summers in the mountains around Bad Ischl. He had many friends in Vienna, but also made enemies, such as Bruckner. Time moved on: in his last years, he made a recording using Edison’s phonograph.
HAMBURG YEARS
Johannes Brahms was born on 7 May 1833 in anything but bourgeois circumstances, in a cramped tenement building in part of old Hamburg known as Gängeviertel. The streams traversing it were flooded with the tide. As the water crept up, the residents would escape with their belongings, returning later ‘like rats to their oozy and dripping abodes’.7 Later in the century, a warning telegram would be sent from Cuxhaven, nearly 100 miles down the Elbe at the North Sea; three shots would then be fired at the harbour entrance, with a further three shots being fired if the progress of the tide indicated danger.
The botanist Linnaeus compared Hamburg to an open sewer.8 In the year before Brahms was born, more than 1,650 people had died in a cholera epidemic and, when he was seventeen, another 1,765 people died similarly. It was not much better at the end of the 19th century: in 1892, when Mahler was there, some 17,000 people fell ill with cholera and 8,600 died. Robert Koch, the bacteriologist who ‘discovered’ the causes of cholera, visited the squalid quarters in the Gängeviertel. He noted: ‘I have never so far seen such unhealthy living quarters, dens of pestilence and breeding grounds for all kinds of infection.’9 Disease was not the only threat: when Johannes was nine, had it not been for a change in the direction of the wind, he would have been among the 20,000 made homeless when a catastrophic fire destroyed over 4,000 buildings.
Instead of joining the family business, a combination of grocery and pawnbroking, Brahms’ father Jakob played the double-bass and wind instruments* in the dance halls and dives of Hamburg.10 He married his impoverished landlady, who was seventeen years older than him; she was formerly a seamstress, and then a housemaid. Marriage did not stop him carrying on with the daughter of the previous house where he had been lodging. He was an old rogue, whom Brahms adored. When, many years later, Brahms was honoured with the Freedom of the City of Hamburg, he wrote: ‘My first thought in such a situation is my father, and the wish that he had lived to see it; fortunately, he didn’t depart dissatisfied with me, even without this.’11
From his mother, Brahms, his brother and sister heard the horror stories of the Napoleonic occupation under the ruthless and taciturn Marshal Davoût,12 the occupation which the Mendelssohns managed to avoid. The suburbs were destroyed to improve the line of fire, forced labour was used on the fortifications, 25,000 useless mouths were expelled into the winter cold. It was not surprising that Brahms had no love for the French.13
In the 19th century, Hamburg was the ‘first of all the seats of commerce on the Continent’,14 an accurate description given that, if one looked across the Channel, the ports of London, Liverpool and Glasgow were larger. Hamburg’s imports and exports were more than those of Holland, of Belgium or of Spain. It was also an important banking and insurance centre. It saw phenomenal growth in Brahms’ life: just before he was born, it possessed 146 ships totalling 25,722 tons; by 50 years later, it had grown almost 800 per cent. Accordingly, in mid-century, its prosperous burghers rebuilt the church of St Nicholas to the design of Sir Gilbert Scott: the spire was the second highest building in the world, after the cathedral at Rouen, until Cologne supplanted it.15
