POLL Brahms or Wagner?

[Winky Willy]

I think one may safely say that Brahms never put particular effort into trying to halt the progressive Wagnerian/Lisztian ideals. He was no fan, but only Hanslick and a large number of lesser lights were really enemies.

[marvinbrown]

I think Brahms won out in the end.   

  If Brahms had won Modern music (IE Schoenberg, Richard Strauss et al) would not have come to into existence in the form and time that it did.  If Brahms had won Max Steiner wouldn't have proclaimed that Richard Wagner invented film music. Oh no quite the contrary, the progression of musical development, art etc. owes more to Wagner than it does to Brahms.

 

I think one may safely say that Brahms never put particular effort into trying to halt the progressive Wagnerian/Lisztian ideals. He was no fan, but only Hanslick and a large number of lesser lights were really enemies.

  Well Brahms was sucked into it!  He was their "champion" as it were.  I remember reading something about a petition that Brahms was trying to get signed against the progressive romantics (Liszt/Wagner etc.) but very few people paid any attention to it.  I do know for a fact that both Hanslick and Brahms were admirers of Wagner's Die Meistersingers- I bet they were so jealous of his talents, how else would you explain their animosity?

  marvin

 
 

[Winky Willy]

If either one was jealous of the other, it was Wagner of Brahms. His vitriolic attacks are absurd unless he realised the truth, which is that Brahms had things he would never have.

[marvinbrown]

If either one was jealous of the other, it was Wagner of Brahms. His vitriolic attacks are absurd unless he realised the truth, which is that Brahms had things he would never have.

  and vice versa- Brahms didn't dare compose a single "opera"! He must have felt "out done" by Wagner!

  marvin

   

[Mirror Image]

  and vice versa- Brahms didn't dare compose a single "opera"! He must have felt "out done" by Wagner!

  marvin

   

Exactly. Brahms knew this was a genre he wouldn't trump Wagner in.

[Winky Willy]

I never heard that Brahms ever had any interest in composing opera anyways.

[starrynight]

  If Brahms had won Modern music (IE Schoenberg, Richard Strauss et al) would not have come to into existence in the form and time that it did. 

But there is no way of telling how different it would have been, it's just conjecture.  And anyway there is the implicit assumption that it would have been worse when it might have actually been even more interesting anyway.  It's arguable that quite a lot of the romantic style holds modernism back through the first half of the 20th century.

[marvinbrown]

But there is no way of telling how different it would have been, it's just conjecture.  And anyway there is the implicit assumption that it would have been worse when it might have actually been even more interesting anyway.  It's arguable that quite a lot of the romantic style holds modernism back through the first half of the 20th century.

  Well the roots of Modernism can be traced to Liszt/Wagner, notably the Tristan chord. There is no other credible source that I can think of.

  marvin

[Scion7]

Well, I'll have to go with Brahms.

Siegfried Idyll notwithstanding.   

[PaulSC]

  Well the roots of Modernism can be traced to Liszt/Wagner, notably the Tristan chord. There is no other credible source that I can think of.

  marvin

Wagner and Liszt were certainly important innovators in chromatic harmony, but there is a great deal more to modernism than pitch syntax. Both Schoenberg and Webern acknowledged  Brahms as an important influence, the former in his essay, "Brahms the Progressive," and the latter in his lectures published posthumously as The Path to New Music.

[Winky Willy]

Exactly. Schoenberg considered Brahms extremely important in his own development.

[marvinbrown]

Can you or anybody here name me one Brahmsian composition that has radically shifted the musical landscape in the way the Tristan Chord has? because I can't.

When I listen to Brahms' chamber  music, his 4 symphonies, his songs, even his piano concertos, as sublime as they are, the proper label that comes to my mind is "Brahms the Classical Romantic". I don't get Progressive from Brahms, nor radical, nor daring......these traits are more suitable to Wagner's music.

  By the way Schoenberg was very much influenced by Wagner as well.

  marvin

 

[starrynight]

It could be argued Wagner was a product of his time just like anyone always is.  And anyway if you want to look at the roots of something, where do you stop?  Medieval plainchant?  You can keep going back and back.  And the roots of something are just that, roots.  Things can develop in very different ways eventually.

[PaulSC]

While the so-called "Tristan chord" has been heavily mythologized, both the sonority and the principle of enharmonic reinterpretation that allows such a variety of interactions with other chords have numerous precedents, particularly in chromatic idioms of the Baroque era. I consider the volume of debate that surrounds this chord to be mainly an accident of history.

Of course Schoenberg and Webern were influenced by Wagner as well as Brahms. My point is that your polarized view of one as progressive and the other is conservative is not a view they shared. There is no point in attributing radical shifts in the musical landscape to any individual chord or even any individual piece by Wagner or Brahms. Instead, there are recurring features in their work — chromaticism, metrical displacement, motivic transformations, and so on — that inspired the composers who studied them carefully. If you want to understand what Schoenberg saw in Brahms's music, reading his essay would be a good start. It appears in the book Style and Idea, although it predates that collection.

[starrynight]

History is always biased and has exaggerations according to people's preferences at the time which is why I never have understood why people continue using it in arguments as to why something is important.  Ulimately all that matters to me is the music itself and whether I think it is good on its own merit.

[eyeresist]

I think Brahms won out in the end.  After all you don't see women in glass tanks or large erector set machines performing Brahms these days. 

Yes, I think Brahms would be the less embarrassed today

I remember reading something about a petition that Brahms was trying to get signed against the progressive romantics (Liszt/Wagner etc.) but very few people paid any attention to it.  I do know for a fact that both Hanslick and Brahms were admirers of Wagner's Die Meistersingers- I bet they were so jealous of his talents, how else would you explain their animosity?

This sounds like conspiracy thinking. Can we see something verifiable about this "petition"?

[marvinbrown]

While the so-called "Tristan chord" has been heavily mythologized, both the sonority and the principle of enharmonic reinterpretation that allows such a variety of interactions with other chords have numerous precedents, particularly in chromatic idioms of the Baroque era. I consider the volume of debate that surrounds this chord to be mainly an accident of history.

Of course Schoenberg and Webern were influenced by Wagner as well as Brahms. My point is that your polarized view of one as progressive and the other is conservative is not a view they shared. There is no point in attributing radical shifts in the musical landscape to any individual chord or even any individual piece by Wagner or Brahms. Instead, there are recurring features in their work — chromaticism, metrical displacement, motivic transformations, and so on — that inspired the composers who studied them carefully. If you want to understand what Schoenberg saw in Brahms's music, reading his essay would be a good start. It appears in the book Style
and Idea, although it predates that collection.

  I wouldn't be so rash as to dowplay the importance of the Tristan Chord. That was no accident of history. Wagner knew exactly what he was doing when he conceived it.

  That said I will take a look at what Schoemberg saw in Brahm's music, should prove an interesting read.

  With regards to the petition, Read the section below on the conservative manifesto:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Romantics

  My God you anti- Wagnerians are making me work hard tonight!! But I don't care, I'll stand by Wagner till the day I die!!

  Good night everyone,

  marvin

 

[eyeresist]

With regards to the petition, Read the section below on the conservative manifesto:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Romantics

  My God you anti- Wagnerians are making me work hard tonight!! But I don't care, I'll stand by Wagner till the day I die!!

I don't think there are any anti-Wagnerians on this thread, unless you think anyone who denies that Wagner was a literal incarnation of the deity is anti-Wagnerian.

The manifesto of Brahms and Joachim was in its expressions mild in comparison with the attacks that provoked it.

[Luke]

Some good stuff from PaulSC, here, marvin, and he's bang on. There's really no debate about it, musicologically speaking - Schoenberg himself said that his art derived in equal measure from Brahms and from Wagner, and the analysis of the music bears this out. One could in an extremely generalised way say that the still-tonal chromatic leanings of Wagner, Liszt and a few other composers hinted at the border to be crossed by Schoenberg in his op 11 and the freely-atonal territories explored in the subsequent works (and wonderful, wonderful works they are too!). And then one has to say that the Schoenberg found it necessary to temper this freedom with a strong dose of the developing variation principle he perceived in Brahms - a principle which is just as important to Schoenberg as atonality ever was. It is Brahmsian developing variation, with its rigorous motivic work, which leads to the twelve-tone technique, with its fundamental concern with unity and consistency of interval and motive. Wagner's influence on Schoenberg was deeply important but broad-brush - rather like Wagner's music, one could say: it is the totality, not the details, that weighs so heavy. But Brahms's influence was technical and specific (witness the analyses of Brahms that Schoenberg published), and therefore affected the everyday note-to-note details of Schoenberg's work deeply.

[marvinbrown]

Some good stuff from PaulSC, here, marvin, and he's bang on. There's really no debate about it, musicologically speaking - Schoenberg himself said that his art derived in equal measure from Brahms and from Wagner, and the analysis of the music bears this out. One could in an extremely generalised way say that the still-tonal chromatic leanings of Wagner, Liszt and a few other composers hinted at the border to be crossed by Schoenberg in his op 11 and the freely-atonal territories explored in the subsequent works (and wonderful, wonderful works they are too!). And then one has to say that the Schoenberg found it necessary to temper this freedom with a strong dose of the developing variation principle he perceived in Brahms - a principle which is just as important to Schoenberg as atonality ever was. It is Brahmsian developing variation, with its rigorous motivic work, which leads to the twelve-tone technique, with its fundamental concern with unity and consistency of interval and motive. Wagner's influence on Schoenberg was deeply important but broad-brush - rather like Wagner's music, one could say: it is the totality, not the details, that weighs so heavy. But Brahms's influence was technical and specific (witness the analyses of Brahms that Schoenberg published), and therefore affected the everyday note-to-note details of Schoenberg's work deeply.

  We are going around in circles here. The bottom line is this, atonality (that break from romanticism and into modernism) in music was ushered in by the Liszt/Wagner camp and not by Brahms/Schubert/Mendelssohn camp.  This is regardless of the influence Brahms had on Schoenberg. Scheonberg was born in the modern age of music, an age ushered in by Wagner.

  Going back to PaulSC contention that the Tristan chord was an accident, a fluke.,  Tristan und Isolde is built on the idea of unrequited love, an unresolved love.  It is this "nonresolution" that Wagner sought to express in the Tristan Chord. There is a break in the harmonic language which leaves the listener uneasy, unsure, what comes next? It was intentional, it ties in with the whole philosophy of that music drama. It is this "break" that inspired the modern musical world Schoenberg lived in. This is why Wagner is so very important to the progression of music.

  marvin