As one of the giants of the Romantic Period and Western classical music, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) has been contradictorily labelled both as a ‘conservative’ and, more recently by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), as a ‘progressive’ composer. The traditional view of Brahms’ conservatism was prominent in the 19th century when compared to contemporaries such as Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, who pushed musical expression, form and tonality to its limits and upheld a more progressive approach to composition. In contrast to the aesthetic values and tendency towards ‘programmatic music’ of the New German School represented by Liszt and Wagner, Brahms adhered to the structuralist norms of the more absolute Classical style, continuing a lineage of predecessors from Robert Schumann back to Johann Sebastian Bach.
It was not until the mid-twentieth century when Schoenberg described Brahms as a progressive in his 1947 essay ‘Brahms the Progressive,’ and brought a new perspective on the way Brahms’ music was crafted. This essay claims that the uniqueness of Brahms’ music is predicated on a principle of composition coined by Schoenberg as ‘developing variation’. According to Schoenberg, ‘developing variation’ rests upon the idea that “whatever happens in a piece of music is nothing but the endless reshaping of a basic shape.” It is the idea that a simple thematic or motivic cell can form the basis of an entire piece of music, and any subsequent material that arises from it is merely a logical consequence of the preceding or foundational material. To create a sense of continuity, fluency and coherence in a piece of music therefore requires its structural units to be varied and transformed organically so that the musical journey unfolds in a smooth and logical manner. This method of composition was deemed by Schoenberg as artistically superior to Wagner’s direct repetition and transposition of material.
Brahms’ use of variation in composition can be traced back to the genius and structural unity of the music of J.S. Bach, most notably in his Goldberg Variations. However, according to Schoenberg, it was Brahms who maximalised the potential of this compositional technique. In Brahms’ works, transformations and variations of a fundamental unit provided all the thematic formulations of a work, as shown in two examples highlighted by Schoenberg: the Andante of the A minor string quartet (op. 51 no. 2) and the third song from Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), "O Tod." In the “O Tod” example, Schoenberg observes how the song largely contains motive forms which are seen to be derived from the basic interval of a third. Brahms’ rhythmic playfulness, harmonic adventurousness and asymmetrical phrases also contribute to his image as “a great innovator in the realm of musical language,” according to Schoenberg.
Schoenberg admired Brahms’ technique of developing variation and utilised the principles in his own serial works to create music that contained structural and motivic unity. His initial challenge was finding a way to reconcile the two seemingly incompatible techniques of his highly organised twelve-tone serialism and the musical fluidity that arises from developing variation. However, Schoenberg eventually developed various techniques to subject his ordered serialist ideas to a continuous stream of unidentical, but related, passages, enabling his music to reach larger forms of extended length. Schoenberg’s teachings and methods influenced the compositional practices of his pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern of the Second Viennese School, and shaped the aesthetic views of musicologists Carl Dahlhaus and Theodor W. Adorno in the twentieth century. Despite being from two different musical periods and possessing two contrasting sonic qualities, both Brahms and Schoenberg inhabited a similar philosophical plane in composition by absorbing the musical tradition of the past and imbuing it with new modernist directions.
Words by Yuki Goh, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music Honours student in conducting, interning at ANAM through the Music Internship elective.