Johannes Brahms is enjoying a vogue right now in Anglo-American music studies, seemingly immune to ideological concerns about perpetuating the canonic status of dead white European men. In the past five years, at least eight English-language books on Brahms have appeared.Footnote 1 Why the popularity? Perhaps because the idea of Brahms is so malleable; his apparent intellectual interests and cultural milieu resonate in ways that allow us to mould him relatively easily into a figure who reflects our own values. Moreover, the composer's self-conscious habit of censoring his letters and other written material has left us with a somewhat sanitized self-image. Therefore, it is possible to depict Brahms as standing conveniently apart from the ideological baggage of late nineteenth-century German thinking.
In Brahms's Elegies, Nicole Grimes aims to situate Brahms in an intellectual tradition stretching from late eighteenth-century German Idealism to early twentieth-century modernism. Her Brahms is a philosopher with modernist inclinations, grappling with weighty metaphysical questions in his music rather than public statements and published prose. Grimes selects three choral-orchestral pieces from the 1870s and 1880s as her prime examples, namely the Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), Op. 54, Nänie, Op. 82, and Gesang der Parzen (Song of the Fates), Op. 89, all of which address themes of fate and death in classical antiquity as mediated by poetry of Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe respectively (p. 2). Their further emphasis on loss and mourning leads Grimes to call this group ‘Brahms's Elegies’, which she argues offer a ‘mechanism for contemplating the human condition without religion’ (p. 3). Each subsequent chapter presents an in-depth analysis of each piece, taking into account the philosophical-aesthetic views of the poets as well as context drawn from Brahms's own time. In a similar vein, Chapter Four interprets Brahms's Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), Op. 121, as the composer's response to reading Nietzsche's The Antichrist. The final chapter takes us into the 1930s and the realm of reception studies; here we review Theodor Adorno's reception of Brahms, which inspires Grimes's ‘analytical vignettes’ of selected late chamber movement finales. Introducing critical theories of nostalgia, Grimes argues that although these works may in varying degrees look back towards an idealized past, they self-consciously recognize the realities of the modern condition and offer hope for a better future. Grimes thus invites us to understand Brahms's engagement with German Idealist aesthetics through a late nineteenth-century modernist lens.
In Chapter One, Grimes focuses on the Schicksalslied (1871), whose tonal trajectory from E-flat major to C major seems to contradict the despairing quality of the poem it sets. Offering a new take on this enigmatic work, Grimes argues that we should interpret the text not on its own, but rather in the full context of Hölderlin's novel Hyperion (1797−99), in which it originated. Brahms, she claims, would have ‘intuited’ Hölderlin's approach to the Bildungsroman and would have structured his piece accordingly as a narrative upward (Romantic) spiral (p. 62). In this structure we return to what once was, but in the process of leaving and returning have fundamentally changed, presumably at a higher spiritual level (pp. 39−42); in Brahms's piece, previous music is recapitulated, but now in C major rather than the opening's E-flat major. This spiral is accomplished formally through a ‘large binary structure with an introduction-and-coda frame’ (p. 47). Drawing on Christian Behler's theory of ‘nostalgic teleology’, Grimes argues that Brahms's engagement with an idealized past, like that of Goethe, Schiller and Hölderlin, looks forward in hopes of a dialectical resolution of the tension between the real and ideal (pp. 33−4).
Chapter Two addresses Schiller's theory of mourning and how it is mediated in Brahms's Nänie (1881), completed in the year following the death of the artist Anselm Feuerbach. The piece sets Schiller's poem ‘Auch das Schöne muß sterben’ (‘Even beauty has to die’), an elegy for Achilles in Homer's Odyssey. Grimes argues that the piece is a Schillerian ‘idyll’, specifically a ‘late idyll’ infused with a nostalgic spirit (pp. 66−7). Schiller's aesthetics defines an idyll as a particular form of elegy that combines the ideal and the real, which produces an aesthetic rupture. Grimes applies this notion to Brahms's Nänie, arguing that we understand the piece as a large-scale binary with a structural plagal cadence in the postlude (p. 117). In demonstrating aesthetic resonances between Schiller's poem, Feuerbach's paintings, and Brahms's piece, Grimes leads us on a rather circuitous route that includes Winckelmann's neoclassicism, Schiller's notions of beauty and loss, Reinhold Brinkmann's interpretation of melancholy in Brahms, early twentieth-century German nationalist reception of the Deutsch-Römer art movement and, finally, Brahms's musical allusions to both Beethoven and himself.
In Chapter Three, ‘A Disembodied Head for Mythic Justice: Gesang der Parzen’, Grimes introduces an intriguing conceit through which to understand the piece: As the mythological figure of Tantalus is punished with food and water kept tantalizingly out of reach, so are we, Brahms's audience, tortured by a tonality and ‘sense of consolation’ which are out of reach (p. 122). Grimes reads this new aesthetic tone, different from the previous year's Nänie, as exemplifying the more nostalgic ‘new idealism’ of the later nineteenth century. The ‘disembodied head’ of the title refers to a bust of the Juno Ludovisi in Goethe's living room. Because the Parzenlied is a Goethe poem that appears in his play Iphigenie auf Tauris, and Grimes asks us to understand it outside the context of the play, it functions as a ‘disembodied head’. She also suggests Brahms wanted it this way; he wrote to Theodor Billroth in August 1882: ‘I read the entire poem during my work and studied it as thoughtfully as Goethe in his day regarded his head of Juno’ (p. 141). Again we return to Schiller, specifically Letter XV of On the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795/6), where Grimes claims, ‘Schiller pointed to its [the statue's] capacity to contain an irrational nature within its outward impression of calmness’ (p. 143). Grimes suggests that Brahms likewise included such conflicting elements in his piece: ‘By invoking the disembodied Juno in his declared intention to suppress any reference to Iphigenie on the title page of his score, Brahms enlisted both Schiller and Goethe in support of his aesthetic amputation … The composer seems to imply, on some level, that the “Song of Fates” is Juno’ (pp. 143−4). After surveying art by Renaissance painters as well as Brahms's friend Max Klinger − all of which support Grimes's claim that Brahms was searching for ways to juxtapose biblical and mythological subject material suggested by his continual references to the book of Job at this time − Grimes finally comes to the analysis of Gesang der Parzen. She hears the piece in rotational form, and its avoidance of strong tonal indicators speaks to the metaphor of the mythical punishment of Tantalus.
Chapter Four offers, for the first time in this volume, broader political and social contexts of Vienna, a welcome addition given that most of the pieces in this study date from after Brahms settled there. Grimes situates Brahms in a liberal milieu that tried to reconcile contemporary scientific thinking with religious faith. She argues that the Vier ernste Gesänge are a response to Nietzsche's The Antichrist. Nietzsche's attacks on German culture in that book, Grimes claims, would have irritated Brahms's sense of ‘ardent’ and ‘unshakeable patriotism’, in particular his godless, cultural Protestantism (pp. 164−5).Footnote 2 Exploring sketches and other documentary evidence remaining in Brahms's library, Grimes suggests that these songs have a long and varied compositional history stretching back to 1888, a year of great political import as Germany went through three Kaisers (p. 183). Her theory is that after reading Nietzsche's The Antichrist, and with purported exposure to Mahler's Second Symphony, Brahms originally conceived of an orchestral cantata that included poetic texts as well as the biblical texts that are in the final version for voice and piano (p. 202). This chapter began with Grimes asserting that Brahms's use of the term ‘Schnaderhüpfeln’ (‘harvesters’ revels’) was a response to Nietzsche's critique of religion and German culture; the cantata and Mahler appear as a new thesis − albeit drawn from Kalbeck − nearly 40 pages into it.
Returning to a broader view of Brahms's place in the German intellectual tradition, the final chapter focuses on Theodor Adorno's reception of Brahms, which Grimes relates to the earlier Idealism through the theme of nostalgia. Adorno's utterances on Brahms are limited to fragments, some comments in an unfinished Beethoven book and a short essay he wrote in 1934, ‘Brahms aktuell’, which Grimes translates in the appendix (although, curiously, never the title of the essay). Grimes maps Adorno's dichotomy of ‘logic’ and ‘tone’ onto that of objectivity and subjectivity, in reference to Adorno's own Mahler reception rather than to earlier Brahms criticism (p. 208). Adorno's comments on Brahms situate the composer as a proto-modernist aware of his historical lateness after Beethoven, but as a necessary precursor to Schoenberg. Exploring Adorno's description of the best Brahms finales ‘as if a return to the land of childhood’, Grimes offers three formal analytical vignettes of the first two violin sonatas, Opp. 78 and 100, and the C Minor Piano Trio, Op. 101. The endings of these finales function as sonata failures (Hepokoski's term), to which Grimes applies Adorno's aesthetics of failure. In Adorno's system these endings would be considered ‘inauthentic failures’, referring to an affect of resignation, which ultimately ‘declines to dignify Brahms's failure’ (p. 239). Grimes attempts to restore dignity to Brahms by applying Svetlana Boym's theory of ‘reflective’ nostalgia, in which any pretence of retrieving an idealized past is abjured (p. 241). Adorno himself focused too fixedly on lateness to recognize this modernist aspect of Brahms, Grimes suggests.
Grimes's musical analyses are generally thoughtful and well-supported. The application of various literary models is thought-provoking and provides satisfying explanations of moments which have resisted hermeneutic analysis. Grimes tends to rely on formal and harmonic analysis, at times discussing allusions, motives and topics. Some of these proposed allusions are convincing, such as Grimes's analysis of Nänie's allusion to the Beethoven ‘Lebewohl’ Sonata (Op. 81a) and its formal and hermeneutic significance. But some are less so: the proposed allusion in Nänie to Brahms's own German Requiem in a descending tetrachord in F-sharp major hidden in the bass voice (p. 104) is more tenuous.Footnote 3 This obscure tetrachord supposedly carries an intertextual significance because of the Requiem's ‘Ich will euch trösten’ (‘I will comfort you’) text. This is a minor point, as Nänie undoubtedly draws on the soundworld of the Requiem. Along these lines, one might wish for more attention to the timbral quality of the music − for example, the piccolo solo towards the end of Gesang der Parzen is a very unusual instrumentation for Brahms, likewise the proposed vocalise (!) for the coda of the Schicksalslied.
The ambitious goals of Brahms's Elegies, including the interpretation of archival material of interest to Brahms scholars, are unfortunately hampered by a difficult prose style. The chapters are long − or at least, feel long because of the many digressions and lack of strong connective thread (e.g., Chapter Four). Vague language is partly to blame: we find that elements are simply ‘united around their varying relationships to German Idealism’ (p. 81); one element ‘finds a further intertextual resonance with’ another (p. 121), etc. The music analysis occasionally includes confusing descriptions such as ‘plagal texture’ (p. 117) and ‘organ-like orchestral texture’ (p. 154). Another round or two of editing would have helped address these issues; inconsistent citational practice and distracting details also hinder clarity.Footnote 4 More significantly, many terms are left partially defined or entirely undefined, as I explain below. Despite the potential appeal to a broad range of readers interested in the music under examination, the book seems suited primarily for other Brahms scholars.
The concept that underpins the entire book, German Idealism, could use clarification from the start where it is presented variously as a ‘philosophical movement’ (p. 3), an ‘aesthetic category’ (p. 8) and a ‘literary movement’ (p. 8). A clearer statement of intent emerges in Chapter Two, where Grimes writes that ‘Idealism is a synonym for “idealist aesthetics”’ (p. 65), but this is complicated by the assertion that Idealism and new idealism co-existed as ‘temporalities’ later in the nineteenth century (p. 68). Unfortunately, the intellectual-historical explanation for this development is limited to a few sentences here and there (pp. 8, 66, 174 − each of which offers a different reason involving further terms that are not defined, i.e., ‘materialism’, ‘positivism’ and ‘realism’). In discussing the intellectual climate of Brahms's Vienna in Chapter Four, for example, Grimes mentions that a generation of mid-century thinkers including David Friedrich Strauß, Ludwig Feuerbach, Charles Darwin and Ludwig Büchner ‘shaped intellectual thought’ (p. 176). An engaged reader may then wonder whether these developments influenced the shift from Idealism to the new idealism of the late nineteenth century, but the claim is not pursued in relation to Idealism. Thrice Grimes mentions that the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune made Idealism seem like a long-lost utopian project (pp. 8, 66, 117), but this would seem to conflict with Brahms's so-called ‘ardent patriotism’, which receives no critical explanatory treatment.
More often than not we find Idealism associated with a nostalgic ‘philhellenism’ (pp. 128−9), ‘New Humanism’ (p. 8) and ‘Hellenic Humanism’ (p. 19). Grimes's argument that German Idealism is fundamentally nostalgic relies in part on this narrow definition of Idealism as a process of aesthetic engagement with an idealized past, particularly classical antiquity. However, the concept of ‘Romanticism’ also appears throughout the book; for example, Chapter One relies on the ‘Romantic’ concept of the spiral as an analytic lens. The slippage in terminology, especially without any explanation of the relationship between German Romanticism and Idealism, could be confusing for readers without previous knowledge in this area.Footnote 5 In short, the book would have been stronger with a more fully developed historical narrative that brought more nuance when interweaving discourses of Idealist philosophy, intellectual history and cultural politics.
The book exhibits a methodological tension between the expressed intent ‘to investigate Brahms's place within the rich matrix of aesthetics and modernity that extends from German Idealist thinkers to the Frankfurt School’ (p. 10) and the more traditional approach of marshalling evidence to reconstruct the composer's intentions. Perhaps ironically, the close reading of every potentially relevant item resonates with the late nineteenth-century positivist work of those musicologists in Brahms's circle. In an attempt to assimilate every detail into a coherent explanation of what Brahms may have intended, the line of argument is sometimes lost. For example, in Chapter Four we learn that Brahms copied the text that would become the first of the Vier ernste Gesänge into his biblical notebook in 1888. Scrutinizing the notebook, Grimes suggests that because other biblical texts appear ‘in different ink and handwriting’, Brahms therefore returned in 1895 after reading Nietzsche's The Antichrist and copied two additional texts into the notebook: one from the Wisdom of Solomon, ‘to which he [had] alluded in the fateful year of 1888’, and the other from the first letter of St Paul to the Corinthians, which became the fourth song (p. 189). Soon we learn of a musical sketch of the fourth song, which includes fragments of poems by Rückert and Keller as well as the Corinthians text. It is unclear, after Grimes lists all of Brahms's Rückert and Keller settings, whether the particular Rückert fragment he jotted on the sketch was ever set to music. In another stretch, Grimes notes that in ‘the fateful’ three-Kaiser year of 1888, Brahms set two Rückert lieder in the keys of E-flat major and B minor, ‘global tonalities that would later hold great significance for the fourth of the Serious Songs’ (p. 196). This array of detail is meant to support the claim that Brahms originally intended an orchestral cantata along the lines of Mahler's Second Symphony.
This monograph certainly speaks to the current trend of Brahms-focused scholarship, and it does deepen our understanding of the composer's intellectual engagements and the rich source history of the choral works at hand. But seen in light of critical approaches in other studies of nineteenth-century music culture − notably those dealing with opera, gender and social identities, and music as performance − the project has a somewhat retro quality. The focus on work-related details comes at the expense of particular social contexts, leaving an intellectual history of famous male thinkers in timeless dialogue with each other. Grimes does not address the apparent conflict between her positioning of Brahms as an atheist modernist and her uncritical acceptance of Brahms as an ‘ardent admirer’ of fundamentally conservative nationalist figures such as Bismarck and Wilhelm II − a glaring contrast with the politically resistant writings of Nietzsche and Adorno. Not all modernists need to be (or were) politically progressive, but the lack of critical interrogation of Brahms's German nationalist views is conspicuous. Nonetheless, the insights into Brahms's music and its resonances with the German literary tradition make this an important new work of Brahms scholarship.
