Len Fehskens ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

>Dave Lampson writes:
>
>>..., I think it's quite easy to see that it is a synthesis of Wagnerian/
>>Lisztian and Brahmsian approaches to composition - a collaboration of
>>harmonic daring and absolute music, if you will.  It was this reliance on,
>>and affinity with, structural formality - as learned from Brahms - that
>>allowed Schoenberg to define a new compositional paradigm.
>
>All of which is consistent with my intuition that Brahms' "contribution"
>was his distillation and refinement of everything he inherited.  One can
>be influential without breaking radically new ground.

As the one who started this, I thought I'd better butt in again.

Firstly, my recollection of Furtwaengler's quote was - to say the least -
shaky.  (I think Dave should have realised this was more likely to be the
case than that someone of Furtwaengler's stature was "uninformed"...)  [I
think Deryk should realize I don't base determinations of "stature" on size
of the fan club, nor am I naive enough to believe that people of "stature"
always display perfect judgement.  In any case, careful readers will notice
that I never mentioned Furtwangler in my post.  -Dave]

My failing memory managed to synthesize a couple of quotes from a highly
perceptive essay on Brahms, quoted in the liner notes to the Electrola
box of Furtwaengler's Brahms (issued sometime in the 70s IIRC).

The WF quotes, we are told, are from "Sunono e parola, by Wilhelmn
Furtwaengler, Italian translation by Oddo Piero Bertini" and I cannot
vouch for their accuracy or lack of same.

   "Brahms once said that he had been assigned a position in musical
   history similar to that of Cherubini...He was not talking about
   himself...but merely wanted to indicate 'musical history' as a
   category:  wehat was taught and studied in his day, and to a good
   degree is still taught and studied, as the history of music: a
   discipline in which the only real content of musical development
   taken into consideration is the material development of rhythm,
   hartmony and various ideals, tendencies and influences.  ...

   "In such a history of music, Brahms is not wrong to assign himself a
   place similar to taht of Cherubini. The music of his later years no
   longer carried out a sunftion for 'progress'...And yet the comparison
   with Cherubini is false. Which brings us to what makes the case of
   Brahms so significant for us today, to what even endows him with
   imediate modernity.  "Brahms is the first great musician in whom
   historical function and artistic stature no longer coincide. That was
   not his fault, but his time's.  ...

   Personal will and the will of their time coincide in Beethoven and
   Wagner, and later in Strauss, Reger, Debussy and Stravinsky. In
   Brahms, for the first time, these wills divide. Not because Brahms
   was not most profoundly a man of his time, but because the real
   musical possibilities of his time had taken a different direction.
   and did not suffice for his will. He is the first artist and creator
   who is greater than his historical and musical function."

BTW I have no idea when this was written and find his exclusions (Mahler,
Schoenberg) as interesting as his inclusions.

Deryk Barker
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