Brahms and the canon

From Jan Swafford’s deep and compassionate biography of Brahms comes this little tidbit. At one point, at the height of his fame, Brahms attended the opening of a new concert hall. Above the proscenium were the names of three composers from the classical canon — Bach, Beethoven, and himself.

What an amazing experience for any living composer! But the historical meaning of this is very important. The idea of a classical canon — the idea, in fact, of classical music — didn’t exist before the 19th century. In general, music from the past wasn’t performed, and while a few people treasured older music (as Charles Rosen likes to point out, Bach’s keyboard music circulated in manuscript), the public at large wanted to hear music that was new.

Early in the 19th century, this started to change. As William Weber documents in his book Music and the Middle Class, connoisseurs (especially German connoisseurs) began to talk about the music of the great masters, at first meaning Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and then extending the canon (as music from the past got better known) to include Bach.

Brahms came along after this movement had gotten well established. So even as a teenager, studying with one of his first teachers, he could be hailed as a likely successor to Beethoven. The canon, in those days, was in a fascinating state, halfway between (or so it strikes me) the 18th century, when no canon existed, and the classical music world we know today. That is, the canon existed, but it still was alive; living people could join it.

Which is exactly what Brahms did. He was widely recognized as the next name in the canon, a position which, by the way, didn’t mean that he was the unchallenged leading composer of his time. Music was divided then, broadly speaking, into three types. (Swafford is wonderfully vivid about this.) There was “popular music” (as the connoisseurs actually called it), which meant opera and performances by flashy virtuosos. And then there was the avant-garde music of the “new German school,” written above all by Wagner, who said outright that he was writing the music of the future. And then there was music in the classical tradition, or in other words by composers who saw themselves as continuing the work of the classical masters. These included Mendelssohn, Schumann, and then Brahms.

So who was the leading composer of that time? If you were Italian, or liked opera, you might have said Rossini, and later Verdi. If you were an artist inclined toward the avant-garde, you’d say Wagner. And if you were a classicist, you’d say Brahms. So there was his name, in one of the top three slots of the pantheon, staring at him from the proscenium of a new concert hall. Being in that position (which of course he got to long before his name was inscribed above that concert stage) put a lot of pressure on him. That’s one reason he found it so hard to write a symphony. (Robert and Clara Schumann told him almost as soon as they met him, when he was all of 19, that the piano music he was writing was certainly good, but that he wouldn’t fulfill his destiny until he started writing for orchestra.)

But what a moment for classical music that was — when the canon was formed, but somebody still alive could be inscribed in it. By the end of Brahms’s life, that couldn’t happen. The composers that came along after him (Mahler, for instance) were too radical to fit in the canon. And thus things started to move to where we are now, when new music stands outside the normal classical-music order. Yes, you can be elected (so to speak) to the classical canon, as Mahler was, or Benjamin Britten, but only after you’re dead.