Robert Haven Schauffler, in his foreword to The Unknown Brahms (Dodd, Mead, $3.50), writes: ‘Chapter XX represents the first attempt yet made by a biographer to explain, with the help of modern science, Brahms’s cryptic love-life.’ The sordid experiences Brahms went through in childhood, while playing the piano for his living in low Hamburg dives, the fact that he did not reach maturity until he was twenty-four, and his extreme fondness for his mother, who was small, crippled, and physically unattractive, all combined, in Mr. Schauffler’s view, to place Brahms in the Freudian category of men who, ‘where they love, feel no passion, and where they feel passion they cannot love.’ Or, in the author’s own words, these things kept, ‘the stream of his sensuousness from merging . . . with the stream of his tenderness.’ In short, they give us the explanation of why Brahms, who was often in love, never married. That this aspect of his constitution must have had a vital effect upon his music, Mr. Schauffler believes; that the effect is definable, he appears to hope; but he wisely refrains from theorizing as to what the precise effect was, beyond drawing the conclusion that Brahms’s music became for him ‘a substitute for love and domesticity,’ a conclusion which somehow falls short of being revealing. As for the underlying reasons for Brahms having remained single, it must he said, in fairness to Mr. Schauffler, that he presents at least as much evidence against his own explanation as he does in its favor.
So much for the ‘unknown’ Brahms. The rest of the biographical section brings out traits already familiar: Brahms’s love of children, his humility, generosity, fiery temper, rudeness, and humor. Despite a fatiguing abundance of anecdote, Mr. Schauffler vividly portrays the many-sided, contradictory character of this great man of genius. I think, if psychological analysis has any place in the evaluation of Brahms’s music, his almost morbid humility and self-mistrust, so startling in a man of his enormous vigor, would be a more fruitful line to follow than the matter of his bachelorhood.
The last part of the book is devoted to a patiently prepared and swiftly presented inventory of Brahms’s music. It is written with great zest, frankness, and impartiality. Mr. Schauffler’s musicianship is not flawless. As an illustration of what he calls the ‘trapeze tune,’ he cites the opening theme of the Bb sextet, giving A as the axis around which the other notes revolve. A being the leading-tone, it seems to me quite arbitrary to regard it in this way. The axis (while it lasts) is surely Bb.
There is much ferreting out of ‘germ-motives,’ a method of analysis which is often illuminating, but which can become trivial and misleading if carried too far. The four-note figure which Mr. Schauffler considers the germ-motive of the Third Symphony is far too characterless, too indefinite both in line and in rhythm, to be regarded in this way.
In contrast to Mr. Schauffler, Richard Specht makes no claim, as he writes in the preface to Beethoven As He Lived (Smith and Haas, $3.00, translation by Alfred Kalisch), ‘to relate what is not known, but rather to refashion what is known.’ Except for a kind of deafening moral emphasis on the ‘sublime’ side of Beethoven, a fault very common among his biographers, this new Life is an excellent one. Beethoven’s relations with his circle of noble admirers are described in a more intimately living way than has, to my knowledge, been done elsewhere. The portrait of the Archduke Rudolph, Beethoven’s frail and talented pupil, is especially fine, and so are those of Caroline Unger and Therese von Brunswick, to mention only a few. The figure of Beethoven himself, in too constant a turmoil to be more than sketched in this or that posture, is made to stand out all the more powerfully by contrast to the quiet beauty and finish with which these more predictable sitters are drawn.
What I object to is the overemphasis on the ‘ sublime ’ in writing of Beethoven’s music, especially that of his last period. To be told that Beethoven in his last works ‘solves all the riddles of existence’ does little to solve the riddles of the music. On the contrary, it may well induce a falsely ‘exalted’ approach. For much that may at first repel or baffle one in these works turns out on better acquaintance to be only music after all, music whose ‘ queerness’ was no doubt partly conditioned by the tragic isolation of their creator’s deafness; but it is in no sense necessary to invoke the universe in order to grasp their sometimes obscure, but always intrinsically musical, meaning.
From Bach to Stravinsky, edited by David Ewen (Norton, $3.75), is a collection of essays on music and musicians by seventeen critics. As may be expected, it takes the reader through a wide range of approaches to the subject: from the fine impersonal scholnrliness of Sanford Terry’s chapter on Bach, to the highly personal but not unsympathetic estimate of Mozart by W. J. Turner; from the thoughtful analysis of the cycles of musical development and their relation to present-day problems, contained in Paul Bekker’s chapter on ‘ Modern Times,’ to the frank bewilderment expressed by Carl Engel with regard to these same problems. Happily this variety is more of manner than of standard, which, if not uniformly high,maintains an excellent level.
Paul Bekker sums up the general trend of musical development from Bach to the beginning of this century as follows: he finds three different ‘dynamic impulses,’ each prevailing over different epochs. In Bach ’the main emphasis is on the progression of the bass, the bass-tone itself being the foundation from which the harmony emanates.’ In the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth ‘the main emphasis is on melody, and harmony is the structure supporting the melodic line which constitutes the leading impulse of music ; and, finally, among the later romantics ‘the main emphasis is on the middle voices and the harmony is forced apart, from the centre downward towards the bass and upwards towards the melody.’ What he calls this ‘dispersion of harmony from within’ and the resulting expansion have played themselves out in such works as the ‘ Elektra ’ of Strauss. The reactionary process of contraction and compression is apparent in Stravinsky. Mr. Bekker believes that this latter process may very well lead us back to the point of time ‘when tone was not yet harmonically divided — back, that is, to the old, the true polyphony.’
As a prophecy this seems to me to be one more likely of fulfillment than Dr. Engel’s guess that we shall have to resort to quarter-tones and other Oriental devices in order to overcome the ‘oral fatigue’ resulting from the exhaustion of the dissonant possibilities of our Occidental system. This latter theory puts too much emphasis on the purely physiological aspect of dissonance.
THEODORE CHANTER