>Stirling Newberry:
>
>>Hugo Wolf could be added to this list, and later GB Shaw.
>
>Yes, when did Hugo Wolf entered the debate? In the 1880s? The whole thing
>started during the later part of the 1850s.
>
>Mikael
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Well if we are going to be pedantic, then I suppose I should roll up the
howitzers and start blasting.

Works of a programatic or quasi-programatic nature had existed for
quite some time prior to the Wagner-Brahms debate, there are a couple of
Dittersdorf symphonies which have explicit programs, there were overtures
to stage plays and finally the examples of Beethoven's 3rd, 6th and 9th
symphonies.  One with an implied program, the other with programatic
movement titles, and the last with text.

In the 1820's at least one piano concerto was written with a program,
though the program was suppressed by its author - Karl Maria von Weber.

The work that began the fighting in earnest was Berlioz' Symphony
Fantastique.  A work wiht not merely titles or implications, but a laid
out program.  But what made it controversial, in an age that had become
academically learned, was that he veried from the academically mandated
formulae of what a symphony should be.  His first defender was Liszt,
his second, an obscure composer/critic by the name of Robert Schumann.
Schumann's defense was tied into his own composing, he composed piano
pieces which were neither light bagatelles, nor full fledge sonatas, but
were meant to be taken as seriously in their structural integrity as
sonatas.

This broke the genre rule: pieces where either structured as sonatas, or
they were smaller pieces of some type, a dance, even a batelle with some
poetic turn to its title.  But such "salon" pieces, while they might be
virtuoso displays, were not generally accorded any weight.  The road to
making a genre piece have weight was to make it part of a extended set of
variations.

Schumann would even add programatic implications to works which had none
listed: witness his notice on Chopin's orchesral variations...

There were, in the end, three camps.

The most academic, and regarding itself as conservative, even though it
was a tradition a scant generation and a half old, stated that programatic
implications were not allowed, except in very special circumstances.  One
finds this attitude in any age of course: "it is permitted, but not to
you, because I, the hackademic say so."

The next stripe was one that drew in Schumann and Mendelssohn and Chopin -
a kind of embroidering of music with program - but requiring that musical
form stand on its own, and that formed should owe its outlines to the
sonata form as they understood it.

The final group were the self-professed radicals, whose chief figures were
Liszt and Berlioz.  LIszt came to poetic implications differently, out of
improvisation.  Since improvisation does not allways come out neatly to
form, Liszt searched for an alternate model of construction, and finally
formulated the most radical statement: form could be determined by an
external source, which was made coherent by the expression of the music.
One could have a poem, play or any other narrative.  The composer was not
merely a writer of music - but a "tone poet" who created "tone poems".

When all is said and done, the distance from Mendelssohn's "Hebrides" to
Liszt's "Mazeppa" is rather small, but the implication was quite weighty -
it was a rationalisation - far from the only one - for overthrowing an
entire means of structuring music.

- - -

Where does Wagner versus Brahms come into this, patience, patience.

When he was young Wagner befriended a young critic by the name of Hanslick,
who became enthusiastic about his work, especially his new operas.

Back when I was writing such things, and had hope that people might be
roused into belief, I wrote a shor tdialog of their meeting based on the
statements the two had made, if ther eis any taste for it I will repost it.

But they parted ways.  Hanslick, of very conservative temperment found that
the sphere of Mendelssohn and Schumann was more conducive to his bliefs on
art, and Wagner's increasing mania of anti-semitism put several nails in
the coffin.  In the end Wagner parodies Hanslick in an opera...

- - -

Wagner's declaration was that the symphonic form had reached its limit
with Beethoven's 9th.  In this there was a certain agreement from his
opponents, but their response was that while one was working in Beethoven's
shadow, that there was no shame in this.  For Wagner the "programatic"
idea extended not only to concert works - but to the necessity of musical
drama itself.  The whole of harmony and melody had to be reshaped along
programatic ends, and older works had to be interpreted programatically.
Including for example Beethoven's 7th.

For the "sonatists" - those who felt that progress in music was the study
of combining homophonic sonata form with polyphonic forms - Brahms seemed
the great hope.  Brahms, for his part, did not take part in sniping against
Wagner, but this is largely because Wagner's work was not in the concert
hall.  Brahms did not have kind words for Liszt or Bruckner, the new
germans who were on his turf.

The Brahms versus Wagner debate then was the crystalisation of a much
longer running argument in music.  What crystalised it was the rise of
the institution in music.  In 1840 every musician had to make the case for
his own music.  Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt and so on all had to
push their own work, or the work of others who they admired.  In 1860 the
concert society has begun to dominate musical cultural life.  Just as now,
the struggle over who should control that society, and what music should be
played there, overshadowed the music itself - who a conductor was going to
program became at least as important as how well he was going to do.

It is also largely forgotten that there were two other poles in this debate
- the Franco-Russian idea of music was to have composers who produced an
entire range of music to fit the need of the moment, and the Italian school
focused on the creation of operas.  Both were largely undisturbed by the
Brahms Wagner debate until the late 1880's, at which point Wagner more than
Brahms, became the force which could not be ignored...

Stirling S Newberry
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