# Brahms and the curse of craftsmanship



## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

I was delighted to find this article, as I'm sure it will ruffle some feathers.

"Brahms's Clarinet Quintet begins, writes his biographer Jan Swafford, with 'a gentle, dying-away roulade that raises a veil of autumnal melancholy over the whole piece: the evanescent sweet-sadness of autumn, beautiful in its dying'.

This being late autumn, I listened to the quintet on Sunday to see if its 'distillation of Brahmsian yearning' still made an overwhelming impression on me. It did. I swear these are the most miserable 35 minutes in classical music."

Read the rest at the link.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

The guy sounds like someone who doesn't get Brahms, particularly late Brahms. He has a mental image of a grumpy, dying man and appears to be projecting that on the music. 

One of the major stumbling block for many with Brahms is that they feel his music sounds too dreary and depressed. I have never gotten that impression from his music. What I hear are the sounds of a human being who has gone through much and experienced much good and bad, has mixed emotions and is expressing that. I also sense that music is where he gets his solace and his comfort and in creating it he also wishes to provide comfort to the listener. I find Brahms music comforting.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

When the guy says every movement sounds the same, I know not to take his article seriously.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Is Brahms' Clarinet Quintet overrated?


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## Bruckner Anton (Mar 10, 2016)

Music critics are nearly always so picky and so unconstructive on composers' works and even the most widely-acclaimed piece, such as the clarinet quintet of Brahms, sounds mediocre to them. However, they themselves cannot write one single note that is comparable to those of Brahms.


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## Couchie (Dec 9, 2010)

RogerWaters said:


> They're ruder in my experience than Wagnerians, who are used to hearing their idol being trashed.


Too true.

Now this Brahms work. This is what you get when you take a Beethoven or Schubert chamber work and deflate it of all ambition and passion.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

*A reminder that extensive quotation of copyrighted material is not allowed. I have deleted a large part of the first post - people who are interested in the rest can read it at the link.*


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Not being content with heaping on Brahms, he also includes, Telemann, Rimsky, Mendelssohn, Strauss, Schoenberg and Dodekaphony, Minimalism as well as
"Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Prokofiev, Shostakovich and dozens of lesser contemporaries in which uniformity of style can make you lose track of which movement you’re in".

This is a bit funny because of these at least Sibelius, Rimsky have been attacked for amateurism, not for excessive craftsmanship.

If he had anything to say about the music he would not start with clichés (well meant ones as Swafford's or the author's less kind ones) and listen to the music in their dull light (his mind not being able to provide anything brighter, I suppose).


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Someone got paid to excrete this dreck?


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## Symphonic (Apr 27, 2015)

Such excessive descriptive writing. 

Ergo the article has very little authority.


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## Highwayman (Jul 16, 2018)

Obviously, I feel no sympathy for the author or the article but I feel the urge to thank him for this article because he is helping Brahms to earn the title of_ the most polarizing composer_ from Wagner.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

Hate in the Spectator has spread to the views of Brahms that they print. The article is trash: how can any critic equate the melancholy and the autumnal in music with misery for the listener? This guy doesn't seem to understand the basics of art appreciation and criticism. Is music that shows us war likely to kill us or our loved ones?


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Brahms, Mozart and J. Haydn are probably the composers where I really struggle with the idea that they could be polarizing at all. Of course, that's part socialization, part personal history, part personal taste.

That reviewer could at least have made the effort and listen to two other late Brahms pieces, such as the quintet op.111 and the E flat major clarinet sonata to realize that there are works from the same period that are very different from the clarinet quintet and not melancholic. But this guy is so deaf that he cannot distinguish between the admittedly melancholy first movement of the clarinet quintet and the rather bucolic 3rd movement or the serene dream + puszta fantasy of the 2nd, he has really no business writing about music.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

The article isn't serious criticism or art appreciation. It's paid internet trolling. The aim is attention by the cheapest possible means: Defecate on something people care about and hope they're bored enough to notice. Loser author, loser publication.


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## Botschaft (Aug 4, 2017)




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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

Couchie said:


> Too true.
> Now this Brahms work. This is what you get when you take a Beethoven or Schubert chamber work and deflate it of all ambition and passion.


both of these are supreme masterpieces (and they're even reminiscent of each other):

3:28


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I will consider myself avenged for wasted time if in the place to which the author goes after death they play only the miserable music of Brahms.


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## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

EdwardBast said:


> The article isn't serious criticism or art appreciation. It's paid internet trolling. The aim is attention by the cheapest possible means: Defecate on something people care about and hope they're bored enough to notice. Loser author, loser publication.


The author asserts that "With Brahms... his devotees [are] ruder in my experience than Wagnerians, who are used to hearing their idol being trashed.". You may have proven him right.

Anyway, to me the little piece is well-written, witty and entertaining in the old style of good satirical writing. Sure, it doesn't have formal analysis but it does invite me to consider a few interesting points and to experiment in grouping some composers together in this or that way for a moment. Most importantly, it does so without making me die of po-faced boredom by paragraph 3.

Some fantastic lines:



> The finale of the Fourth Symphony is a tightly argued passacaglia, a fact that surprises musicologists far more than it does audiences





> And so the old boy gets away with forcing his mood on us, whereas when Mahler does it we wince at his self-pity.


Cheer up!


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## RogerWaters (Feb 13, 2017)

hammeredklavier said:


> both of these are supreme masterpieces (and they're even reminiscent of each other):
> 
> 3:28


I wonder whether only a fixation on syntax over semantics, or what is expressed (ironic considering the thesis of the article), could result in the strange statement that these two pieces are similar.

The brahms is nostalgic, introverted and humanistic.

The wagner is mythological, expansive and transcendental (the only word i can think of as an antonym for 'humanistic').


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Hyperbole aside, I think that the article is an interesting opinion piece. Brahms was a perfectionist, and there was recent discussion of this here, to which I contributed:



Sid James said:


> He not only destroyed entire scores but also sought to decrease any clues as to the gestation of the published ones. Draft manuscripts and even printed ones with corrections and revisions by Brahms are rare as hen's teeth. Much of what remains is held at the Brahms Institute in Germany https://www.brahms-institut.de/index.php?cID=612
> 
> This differentiates him from Beethoven, whose sketchbooks are there for future generations to study.
> 
> The exact reason is unclear, perhaps Brahms wanted to downplay the painstaking nature of his compositional process. This is a valid conclusion given other facts we know, not only the amount of music he destroyed but also his substantial recasting of certain works (one which comes to mind is the Piano Quintet, which could have become a symphony). There's also the tendency of Brahms to consult trusted colleagues (such as Joachim) about technical matters concerning works in progress and inviting a select group of friends and colleagues to his home for private performances of works like the symphonies in two piano reduction form.


The late clarinet works are a case in point. One of the few manuscripts which survive in draft form is of the clarinet sonatas, and it suggests that Brahms' compositional process wasn't simply a matter of just writing down what was in his head. However, Brahms was a perfectionist from the start, so singling out his late works is a weak point of Thompson's article.

Its obvious that from Beethoven onwards, composers became more and more preoccupied with posterity. I think that Beethoven continues to cast his shadow, even though it probably doesn't inhibit all composers to the same extent as it did Brahms.

In a way, I agree with Thompson about the _Clarinet Quintet_. I admire it, but it comes across to me as old man's music. I'm not disputing the consensus that it's a masterpiece, and I don't have the same reaction to _Symphony No. 4_, let alone _Piano Concerto No. 2_. Perhaps I expect a bit more bite or even anger to be added to the mix, as is apparent in Elgar's late chamber works. In any case, that's just a matter of my personal taste.


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## Highwayman (Jul 16, 2018)

RogerWaters said:


> The author asserts that "With Brahms... his devotees [are] ruder in my experience than Wagnerians, who are used to hearing their idol being trashed.". You may have proven him right.


Brahms himself was a rude man so it`s not weird that his devotees may adopt some of his mannerisms. But I think Brahmsian rudeness is no ordinary rudeness. He quite intentionally insulted his opponents, members of his audience and I assume even some colleagues from his entourage. If you also consider his central position within the high society of the time it becomes clear that his coarseness was in fact a subversive statement. A shabby, gruff old man who was openly a godless fornicator and quite probably a drunkard as well. Oh and apparently he was also the standard-bearer for the conservative front-line. 

As a Brahms devotee, I find it adequate to perpetuate the Brahmsian tradition to be offensive in certain social occasions. In this particular context, I think the author of this article deserves some impertinence, in the same vein as Brahms.

EdwardBast should apologize, if he has failed to offend the author. :lol:


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## Kreisler jr (Apr 21, 2021)

Sid James said:


> In a way, I agree with Thompson about the _Clarinet Quintet_. I admire it, but it comes across to me as old man's music. I'm not disputing the consensus that it's a masterpiece, and I don't have the same reaction to _Symphony No. 4_, let alone _Piano Concerto No. 2_.


This is hardly surprising as the quintet was written 10 years after the piano concerto. Nobody regards the latter as "late Brahms" or an old man's piece because it is not. The quintet is both and I don't see a problem that it should sound like this to a certain extent.
The 4th symphony was written 6 years before the quintet, maybe Brahms did age a lot between his early and late 50s. But he had written the rather sunny and cheerful String quintet op.111 only shortly before the clarinet quintet, so I think that it is misleading (as it is most of the time) to overstress biographical factors here.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

As I said, my reaction to the piece is just a matter of my personal taste. I only referred to the two other works because Thompson lumped them together with his critique of the _Clarinet Quintet_.

The clarinet works wouldn't have been written had Brahms not met the clarinetist Richard Muhlfeld. He effectively came out of semi-retirement to write them. Generally speaking, that sense of nostalgia or melancholy is an aspect which makes Brahms' music unique. Some have commented on an instrument similar to the clarinet called the tarogato used in gypsy bands. Its mournful sound probably influenced Brahms. These are not detractors of the work, but strengths.


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## Coach G (Apr 22, 2020)

Brahms is good, though it took me a while to get to know and to enjoy his music. Brahms is thick, layered, very sturdy, like some fine German clock, very heavy, with intricate woodworking and tightly wound. If one is patient and steadfast one will discover that underneath Brahms sometimes austere and "autumnal" exterior there is much beauty and warmth. He was, after all, a "Romantic". As different as they are from one another, I consider Mozart, Brahms, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg to be the finest craftsmen among the great composers.


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## fbjim (Mar 8, 2021)

I admit to laughing at the line about the 4th and the passacaglia. 

The piece is caustic but I've heard the same sentiment expressed toward other composers like Bach and Mozart - i.e. that some react negatively to music that comes across to them as excessively intricate, formal, or concerned with structure. Anyway, it's not a crime to hate Brahms, though I certainly don't.


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