Brahms and Schenker: A Mutual Response Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mts/article/16/1/77/1068547 by guest on 24 September 2021 to Sonata Form Peter H. Smith Within the music of Johannes Brahms and the analyses of kinship even has a biographical basis. Brahms recommended Heinrich Schenker, we find a mutual response to sonata form, the aspiring composer Schenker to his publisher, and Schen- a result of shared historical positions, musical inclinations, ker later declared Brahms the "last master of German and esthetic values. The composer and the theorist were both composition." 2 Yet despite their apparent conservatism, concerned with the perpetuation of traditional compositional Brahms's and Schenker's response to the music of the past procedures at a time in which untraditional approaches to has a distinct late-nineteenth-century stamp. composition were gaining status in musical circles. Despite A tension between conservative and progressive yearn- the influence of Wagner and the New German School (and ings is revealed in Brahms's and Schenker's attempts to rec- later, for Schenker, the even more radical changes in com- oncile the sharply articulated musical surfaces of the late- positional technique in the early twentieth century), Brahms eighteenth-century sonata style with the esthetics of the late and Schenker still regarded species counterpoint and figured nineteenth century, which in contrast favored continuous bass as essential foundations for composition, were commit- ted to traditional forms as opposed to program music, and ton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 83-87. Brahms's reaction to Mahler's revered the great composers of the German tradition.' Their Second Symphony is quoted in David Brodbeck, "Mahler's Brahms," The American Brahms Society Newsletter 10 (1992): 1-5. The enthusiasm for Wag- ner in the second half of the nineteenth century had a strong influence on An earlier version of this paper was read at the Annual Meeting of the Schenker's theoretical work even though his major writings did not appear Society for Music Theory, Kansas City, 1992. The author wishes to thank until the early decades of the twentieth century. See, for example, his his- Michael Friedmann, Ethan Haimo, Robert Morgan, and Pieter van den Toorn torical sketch of the supposed decline of musical culture in his essay "Organic for their helpful critiques of a preliminary draft. Structure in Sonata Form," trans. Orin Grossman, in Readings in Schenker 1Though Brahms was interested in Wagner's music, he regarded Liszt as Analysis and Other Approaches, ed. Maury Yeston (New Haven: Yale Uni- a mediocre composer, advised the young Wolf that he first had to study versity Press, 1977), 38-53. For Schenker's reaction to modernism in music counterpoint before his potential as a composer could be evaluated, and, after see his comments on the Stravinsky Piano Concerto in Das Meisterwerk in reviewing the score of his Second Symphony, dismissed Mahler as "king of der Musik, vol. 2 (Munich: Drei Masken Verlag, 1926), 37-40. the revolutionaries." On Brahms's attitude toward Liszt and the New German 2Heinrich Schenker, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: A Portrayal of Its School see Karl Geiringer, Brahms: His Life and Work, 3d, enlarged ed. (New Musical Content, with Running Commentary on Performance and Literature York: Da Capo Press, 1981), 30-32, 84, and 340-41. Wolf's interview with as Well, trans. and ed. John Rothgeb (New Haven: Yale University Press, Brahms is reconstructed in Frank Walker, Hugo Wolf: A Biography (Prince- 1992), v. 78 Music Theory Spectrum motion and highly evolutionary formal relationships. With they provide evidence of the new ways Brahms may have respect to recapitulation, the most significant element of sec- been thinking about sonata form generally, despite the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mts/article/16/1/77/1068547 by guest on 24 September 2021 tionalization in sonata form, Brahms and Schenker strove to charges of epigonism leveled against him by some of his con- subsume the elements of division and repetition within a con- temporaries. tinuous and dynamic unfolding. While they remained com- On the other hand, it is also important to acknowledge that mitted to a historically validated formal type characterized by a tension between articulation and organicism is part of the the restatement of large blocks of material, they refused to original fabric of the sonata idea, and precedents for many sacrifice the romantic ideal of an unbroken, goal-directed of Brahms's procedures can be found in earlier music. This flow. They both struck a compromise between a strong or- is certainly the case with other nineteenth-century composers, ganicist impulse and their sensitivity to the realities of a for- in particular Beethoven and Schubert, who have long been mal type based in part on the dramatic delineation of a par- recognized as important influences on Brahms. Nevertheless, allel thematic design. Haydn and Mozart also took great care to invest their re- The similarities, however, are more than incidental. A capitulations with signs of developing variation, and all these close examination of the paradigm for sonata form that composers occasionally wrote sonata forms with continuous Schenker presents in Free Composition, the division of the middleground structures. 4 Therefore, rather than viewing the Ursatz through interruption, reveals the difficulties he has in issue as a dichotomy between continuous evolution in Brahms its derivation from a continuous background. Yet these very versus large-scale parallelism in earlier music (or even con- difficulties evaporate when his method of analysis is applied tinuous evolution in the nineteenth century versus large-scale to some of Brahms's more unusual sonata forms, for example, parallelism in the classical period), it would be more appro- the first movement of the C-minor Piano Quartet, Op. 60, priate to characterize Brahms's approach as an intensification which we shall explore in detail shortly. In its most extreme of the organicist component embedded in the sonata forms form, Brahms's creative appropriation of sonata-form pro- of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. cedures gives rise to an overarching tonal structure that cuts Moreover, the present study is hardly intended as a final across the parallel division, much the way Schenker attempts pronouncement on the subject; future research might explore to derive classical-period sonata forms from a single Ursatz. In a select group of sonata forms, Brahms achieves creatively 4See, for example, the first movements of Haydn's Farewell Symphony, the specific type of organic unity that Schenker has difficulty Mozart's Piano Sonata in C Major, K. 545, Beethoven's Piano Sonata in D demonstrating in his analyses of late-eighteenth-century mu- Minor, Op. 31 No. 2 (Tempest), and Schubert's Trout Quintet, as well as his sic. Though they represent extreme cases, these movements Quartetsatz. For a highly stimulating analysis of the Haydn see James Web- ster, Haydn's "Farewell" Symphony and the Idea of Classical Style (Cam- can be understood as a logical extension of what Schoenberg bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 30-57. David Beach analyses the called the progressive element of Brahms's style, in particular Trout Quintet movement and several other one-part Schubert sonata forms his tendency to avoid literal repetition and periodicity in favor in "Schubert's Experiments with Sonata Form: Formal-Tonal Design versus Music Theory Spectrum of continuous formal evolution or musical prose . 3 As such, Underlying Structure," 15 (1993): 1-18. Though Schenker reads the K. 545 sonata as an interruption form with a Kopfton of in Free Composition (supplementary vol.: Fig. 47,1), it is possible to graph 3Arnold Schoenberg, "Brahms the Progressive," reprinted in Style and it as an uninterrupted tonal structure with a Kopfton of Š. See John Snyder, Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo "Schenker and the First Movement of Mozart's Sonata, K. 545: An Unin- Black (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 398-441. terrrupted Sonata-Form Movement?" Theory and Practice 16 (1991): 51-78. A Mutual Response to Sonata Form 79 earlier repertoires using similar analytic strategies to place the of interruption, the parallelism of the Urlinie descents is often procedures discussed here in a fuller historical context . 5 A reinforced by a parallelism in thematic design. Through the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/mts/article/16/1/77/1068547 by guest on 24 September 2021 more determinate backdrop could help identify particularly concept of interruption, Schenker downplays the degree to Brahmsian techniques (or particularly Brahmsian realizations which, for example, the consequent of a parallel period is of shared strategies) within the long tradition of blurred re- heard primarily as a repetition or architectural counterweight capitulatory boundaries. One important distinction, however, to the antecedent, a perception that would run counter to his can already be drawn: Brahms, unlike the Viennese classi- predilection for continuous linear evolution. cists, lived after generations of Formenlehre writers had cod- One way in which the indivisibility of the Ursatz can relate ified what they took to be the defining characteristics of so- to a parallel construction is as part of a listening strategy in nata form, a practice that resulted in the fossilization of which a comparison is made between the interrupted descent classical conventions in the eyes of many late romantics. and its hypothetical complete form as a piece unfolds. The Thus, sonata-form composition must have been a much more interruption increases the goal-directedness of the second de- self-conscious affair for Brahms than for his predecessors. He scent, and therefore the unifying force of the Ursatz, because actively chose to substantiate the most prestigious of classical it creates a situation in which the arrival of a predestined goal forms in the historical context of the late nineteenth century is implied but then delayed until a later point.