![]() Light peeks through the darkness with serene wonder. Rather than a Beethovenian transformation of dark to light, these are relative values. Starkly focused rhythms don’t stay that way. Harmonies bleed dissonances, at times foretelling Schoenberg’s 12-tone methods more than half a century later. New melodies are old melodies evolved and transformed. Brahms may follow his standard forms like a good student, but he blurs the edges. Swafford likens this to an emotional coiled spring. Brahms deals with it for as long as he can (which isn’t long), then explodes. Time and again, the quintet evokes a quiet mood of contained upset. It opens with the line that becomes its theme: “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” For our caring we are rewarded with stunning beauty.Ĭomfort finds its way into the quintet with a kind of caring reverence. This requiem is for the living, about our responsibility toward the dead. Though as somber as they come, this requiem is not a Mass and not for the dead. May we take a brief “German Requiem” break here to extoll Brahms’ relevance? The term “surge,” so suited to music of Brahms and to the F-Minor Quintet in particular, has taken on troubling connotations at this turn of the pandemic. Gehry, Borda, Kopatchinskaja, Sorey, Gupta, Grazinyte-Tyla and Edmunds. This year’s list is devoted to pandemic doers: Dudamel, Salonen, Sharon. The final form, finished in 1864 around the time he was beginning his “German Requiem,” incorporated the best of both worlds.Įntertainment & Arts Best classical music of 2020: 10 heroes who came to our rescue in a horrendous year He destroyed that copy and fashioned a clanky, skeletal version for two pianos. That was apparently too sonically bland, too mushy. He wrote it initially as a string quintet. The quintet wants to be many things - a symphony, a concerto, modern music, chamber music that harks back to Schubert and Beethoven, a love song, an expression of torment, an attempt at triumph - and Brahms’ mission was first to find a sound for conveying his turbulence. Throughout his life, Brahms calmed his hormones - and his harmonies - by grounding himself on classical forms, on what history had shown worked. He struggled to balance his own turbulent attractions to and revulsions toward women, having been traumatized growing up in Hamburg and being forced to play the piano as a young boy in late-night spots popular for picking up prostitutes, as is well documented in Jan Swafford’s colorful biography of the composer. In his early 30s when he wrote the quintet, Brahms had some Anthony Perkins and Yves Montand in him. His is a middle way in what has been called the crown of Brahms’ chamber music. Brahms’ greatness is finding balance without downplaying the extremes. The Piano Quintet in F Minor, Opus 34, has a constant play of heart and soul, impulse and permanence, gloom and exhilaration. Should she submit to the passions of Anthony Perkins (with some “Psycho” still in him) or stick with the fickle sophistication of Yves Montand? Her eyes embrace the ups and downs of the movement with the rapt intensity of an orchestra musician following a conductor. But it is worth checking out on YouTube, despite crummy resolution and sound, the scene in which Ingrid Bergman, about to embark on an affair with an impetuous younger lover, is captivated by the Allegretto from Brahms’ Third Symphony at a concert in Paris. (However, if you happen to read Russian, Romanian, Spanish, German or Arabic, you’re in luck.) Nor is there a readily available domestic DVD, Blu-ray or stream of “Goodbye Again,” the 1961 movie version of the novel. Perhaps this is just the way acrimonious America is these days, but there is no English translation to be found of Sagan’s bestseller. Brahms wrote true-to-life, morphing melodies. Our emotions, like Brahms’ ambiguous rhythmic pulses, remain moving targets. But like Brahms’ chromatic harmonies, nothing ever truly resolves. We hope to be able to make amends, as Brahms always did in his homage to Old Masters. What is it about Brahms that gives us permission to get along and thus makes him such a welcome counterbalancing icon for our contemptible, divisive culture? Francoise Sagan may have hit on the answer in her romantic French novel from six decades ago, “Aimez-vous Brahms?” Swept away, as on a surging melody in a Brahms symphony, we have our flings. Brahmsian Ross happens to be the author of this year’s most talked about music book, “Wagnerism.” Brahms, in fact, held in high regard Wagner’s music, if not the anti-Semitic man. Brahms’ music, though, doesn’t ask for allegiance. The worst Wagnerians can be a nasty bunch, as Hitler notoriously demonstrated. But there is another, less acknowledged difference.
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