Title: Musical Meaning for the Few: Instances of Private Reception in the Music of Brahms
Abstract:The received view of Brahms as a champion of music has dominated the scholarly reception of his compositional output for over a century, and with good reason.l Except in a few early works, Brahms rare...The received view of Brahms as a champion of music has dominated the scholarly reception of his compositional output for over a century, and with good reason.l Except in a few early works, Brahms rarely published his instrumental music with any of the suggestive clues that his contemporaries used in their program music, while his preference for the apparently more classical genres, forms, and procedures seems to distance him from the overtly progressive tendencies of Romanticism that eschewed reliance on classical conventions. What transpired in purely musical terms also was evident in the written word, both that of Brahms and of others. Brahms's 1860 Manifesto, for instance, seemed to denounce the aesthetic values of that group of composers to whom Karl Franz Brendel referred collectively in 1859 as the New German School (i.e., Liszt, Berlioz, and Wagner), while Brahms's eventual endorsement of Edward Hanslick (a critic seemingly notorious for his aversion to program music), and even Schumann's prophetic Neue Bahnen of 1853 (heralding Brahms as a musical messiah), served to place him squarely in opposition to the ethos of program music. 2 In the last two decades, however, a number of scholars have drawn on new evidence to argue that Brahms's output lies somewhere absolute and program music.3 Indeed, many works generally believed to be often circulated with textual adjuncts Brahms himself made available in one of three ways: through word of mouth or in personal correspondence, through the inscription of textual clues in manu script versions of his works, or through the limited distribution of literary works in connection with certain pieces that render the music in question programmatic. But the burden of the received view remains so heavy, the distinction between absolute and program music so firm, that when scholars do uncover a textual adjunct, they either dismiss it as a youthful compositional crutch,4 or use their findings to rescue Brahms from tradi tion by embracing him wholeheartedly as a composer of program music. 5 In what follows, I steer a middle ground by arguing that Brahms's music has a double reception history: within his circle of intimates, Brahms often transmitted suggestive, even programmatic, clues but in the public sphere, he refrained from stipulating any such clues whatsoever, thereby distancing the same music from the more openly specified extramusical associations that characterized program music in the latter half of the nineteenth century.Read More
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-04-10
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['doaj']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 11
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