FHS List A: Nineteenth-Century Symphony

1. FHS List A: Nineteenth-Century Symphony Dan Grimley daniel.grimley@music.ox.ac.uk

2. Lecture 3. Late Idylls, Symphonic Anxieties • Carl Dahlhaus: the ‘Second Age’ of the Symphony • Problem of late 19th century symphony: how monumental style could exist under conditions of extreme motivic density and development. • Symphony as ‘museum culture’ (Peter Mercer-Taylor) • Brahms’s symphonies, though the heirs of Beethoven’s, are directed not at the bourgeois public as a whole but primarily at the individual listener, at the ‘subject’ immersed in his feelings and thoughts, and are thus perceived, by aesthetic criteria, as though they were chamber music. (Dahlhaus, p. 269)

3. Brahms and the German Symphony Gottfried Wilhelm Fink, ‘große Symphonie’, Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften der Tonkunst, 1838 It is absolutely necessary that the great symphony have as its essence, and in considerable abundance, the greatest potential for development, as does the morning dream before awakening. Thus, that which music alone has—melody; rhythm; harmony; character; the roundedness of an autonomous whole; shapes that are clear, well-formed and beautiful, even uniquely magical and stimulating; the setting into motion of these shapes—all this must be present in the highest degree within and for the symphony, like a life-force that is ever bubbling and richly vital. All these things must intertwine and grow from one another without effort, as if by chance. They must support each other mutually, they must strengthen, necessitate, and condition each other until the fruit, which must be nutritious and refreshing, is ripe. … It is a tale, developed with psychological coherence and told in tones. It is a dramatically developed story that captures a particular state of mind shared by a large group. Stimulated by some main impulse, it expresses their common essential feeling individually—in all respects like a representative democracy—through an instrument absorbed into the whole.

4. Der Weg zur ‘Neue Bahnen’ • c. 1854—sketches symphony in D minor, becomes Allegro of 1st Piano Concerto, 1855-7 • 1857-9, two orchestral serenades, op. 11, 16; court orchestra in Detmold • June 1862 sketches first movement of C minor symphony: shows to Albert Dietrich and Clara Schumann • 1868 sends Alphorn theme to Clara, motto ‘Hoch auf’m Berg, tiefim Tal, grüßichdichvieltausend mal’ • 1876 completes autograph score of symphony, premiered in Karlsruhe, 4 November (Vienna premiere 17 December); premiere of complete Ring Cycle, Bayreuth. • Four movement scheme: c—E—Aflat—c/C

5. Symphony no. 1: finale SLOW INTRO: 1 [P prefigured] cminor—German sixth 29 Alphorn theme C major EXPOSITION 61 P C major 93 TR V/G 113 Alphorn theme reprise! 117 S G—V/e minor 141 C eminor! RECAPITULATION 185 P C major 203 TR with development! E♭—modulatory/unstable 284 Alphorn theme/S C 325 C V/c minor! CODA 366 ESC cminorC major!

6. Brahms 1 and the ‘taking back’ of Beethoven 9 Reinhold Brinkmann [Late Idyll, p. 45] : Beethoven at the beginning of the nineteenth-century was concretely relating his symphonic music to history, shaping a programme of ideas that had very precise structural analogies in the processual form of music and its drive toward a goal, as also in the explicit formulation of this goal itself. … Brahms in the end was relating the programme of ideas in his—formally at first analogous—First Symphony to what was beyond history, unchanging, constant, essentially at rest: the nature-metaphor, the chorale. He was a contemporary of the late nineteenth-century who had become a sceptic.

7. Genesis of the Second Symphony • Clara Schumann to Hermann Levi, 24.ix.1877, Brahms is in good spirits, highly delighted with his summer stay, and has finished, in his head at least, a new symphony in D major—the first movement is now written out—of a quite elegiac character. • Theodor Billroth to Brahms, 14.xi.1877. Why, it is all blue sky, babbling of brooks, sunshine and cool green shade! By the Wörther See it must be so beautiful. If the instrumentation isn’t altogether too chaste, the Viennese will get a quite special pleasure out of this piece! • Brahms to Fritz Simrock, 22.xi.1877. The new symphony is so melancholy that you won’t stand it. I have never written anything so sad, so mollig [i.e. soft, ‘minor-key’]: the score must appear with a black border. • Brahms to Elisabet von Herzogenberg, 22.xi.1877. The new one, though, is really no symphony [Symphonie] but merely a sinfonietta [Sinfonie]…

8. First movement: formal plan EXPOSITION (bb. 1-183) Topic 1 P V/D Idyll 44 P/TR D!—C♯7 Rhapsody 82 S F ♯minorWiegenlied 118 C/S EEC: V/A major Marcato  DEVELOPMENT (183-301) Fugato—Auslauf [winding-up]—Peripeteia (bb. 286ff)—Ablauf  REPRISE (302-446) 302 P/TR Tonic 6/4! 350 S B mi nor 386 C D regained  CODA (447-523) Summing-up/Retrospection

9. First movement (opening) • the natural note at the beginning of the work has, in fact, only the semblance of spontaneity. Even the nature-idyll is determined reflectively; there is, in Brahms, no naïve immediacy that has escaped from the idea and obligation of history. [57] • If Brahms was decidedly modifying Beethoven, and his EroicaSymphony in particular, by projecting an entry of nature at the start of his Second Symphony and conjuring up, both in the sound and the in the type of movement and motion, the ‘static’, indeed ‘spatialising’ natural idea of time, then this also signifies a skeptical reaction against the optimistic and utopian promise of that forward-looking, perspectivist idea of history, which Beethoven’s formal process implies. [60] • The beginning of the symphony trails off, come almost to a halt before it can even proceed. [p. 76]

10. Categories of Melancholia (after Brinkmann) 1. melancholy as individual, historically-mediated state of mind and spirit [personal disposition]. 2. melancholy and mourning: comforting pain/self-torment 3. melancholy as lateness/Weltschmerz 4. melancholy and ‘incessant labour’ 5. melancholy and introversion: turning inwards (chamber music vs. grand symphony) 6. melancholy and nature 7. melancholy and idyll: idyll and elegy

11. Third Symphony (1883): finale EXPOSITION topic 1-52 P, f minor ballade, schattenhaft 53-75 S, C major chivalric rhapsody 75-108 C, cminor fantasy DEVELOPMENT 108-71 P material, tonic! REPRISE 172 P regained Stormy! 194 S, F major chivalric 217 C, fminor fantasy CODA 246-309 Epilogue/Abgesang working-out of f-d♭ tensions

12. Conclusion: Brahms symphony as melancholic project • Brinkmann: ‘dark’ tone • Lateness as historical category • Ernst Bloch, ‘melancholy of fulfilment’ (Das PrinzipHoffnung, I [1959]): there is everywhere a fissure, indeed an abyss in the very realizing, the actuated-actual arrival of that which was so beautifully foreseen and envisioned; and this is the abyss of uncomprehended existence itself. Thus the surrounding dark also provides the ultimate basis for the melancholy of fulfillment: there is no earthly paradise which does not have, at its entrance, that shadow which the entrance still casts.