Shaw on Brahms

If Brahms was unduly rough on the music of colleagues, he got his comeuppance from the pen of George Bernard Shaw, who had this to say about the German Requiem:


There are some sacrifices which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to Brahms’s Requiem.

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I do not deny that the Requiem is a solid piece of music manufacture. You feel at once that it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker.

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…his Requiem is patiently borne only by the corpse.


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The admirers of Brahms had a succulant treat at the Richter concert last week. His German Requiem was done from ene to end, and done quite well enough to bring out all its qualities. What those qualities are could have been guessed by a deaf man from the mountanous tedium of the unfortunate audience, who yet listened with a perverse belief that Brahms is a great composer…

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…the colossally stupid Requiem, which has made so many of us wish ourselves dead.

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[after it] the very flattest of funerals would seem like a ballet…

Brahms and Other Composers

In 1879 Hugo Wolf showed some of his music to Brahms, who said, “First you must learn something. Then we shall see if you have any talent.” Brahms advised him to study counterpoint with Nottebohm. Wolf, who up until this point admired Brahms’s music, turned into a violent antagonist. During his three-year stint as critic of the Wiener Salonblatt he wrote many anti-Brahms pieces. He did not study counterpoint with Notteborhm.

Soon after this, Hans Rott--a gifted young colleague of Mahler’s--played two of his scores for Brahms hoping to obtain support in winning the coveted Beethoven Prize. Brahms advised him to give up any thought of a musical career. This harsh commentary appears to have driven Rott over the edge. On a train from Vienna to Alsace he was convinced that Brahms had loaded the train with dynamite and wouldn’t allow his travelling companion to light his cigar. Rott had to be taken back to Vienna, hospitalized, and he died four year later without recovering. Brahms was generally blamed for his demise (by Bruckner, for example.)
In 1885 Brahms met the young Richard Strauss and heard his Symphony in F minor. He said, “Very pretty, young man, but too full of thematic irrelevancies. There is no point in piling up themes which are only contrasted rhythmically on a single triad.”
Nor was Brahms easily won over by great eminence. At the age of twenty he visited Weimar with violinist Eduard Remenyi. Brahms was too shy to play his compositions for Liszt. So Liszt sight-read them, without difficulty and keeping up a running commentary. Then Liszt played his own Sonata in B Minor, which was still in manuscript. Brahms fell asleep during Liszt’s performance.

Under Attack

Those of us who give lectures prior to classical music concerts should feel under threat of extinction. The New York Philharmonic has experimented with a hand-held device that provides listeners with a running analysis of works of music as they are being performed. If successful, and adopted widely, these devices would make such pre-concert talks a thing of the past. As I contemplate being made redundant, I would like to offer some suggestions for improvements to the new technology. The first added feature should make it possible to enter a code and receive an instant, on-the–spot evaluation of the performance by one’s choice of critics from the nearest prestigious newspaper. I envision a kind of skybox with five critics feverishly typing away at computer terminals. You could punch in the name of critic A and get “Too fast!” or Critic B and get “Too loud!” or Critic C and get “Too leathery.” This would make up for the reduction in space even the best papers now allot to serious music criticism and give these worthy writers a higher profile.

The next phase of my proposed technological enhancement would allow the audience to interact with the performers and actually affect the interpretation. Upon a certain threshold of hand-held input, the conductor would receive a message saying “Slow down!” or “We can’t hear the flute!” or, more seriously, “Skip to the next piece; we’ve had it with this one.” It could be like a channel changer. Not maybe such a good idea for contemporary composers such as myself. But it would add a new dynamic to the concert hall: audience empowerment.

If that seems just too democratic I would suggest that series subscribers and donors be rewarded with periodic insider messages. For example, “The second bassoon just lost his place.” Or “We never got around to rehearsing this passage.”

Until this technology is perfected I plan to stay with the live lecture. I hope it’s good for at least one more season.

The Lives and Deaths of Composers

A question no doubt on the minds of lovers of music is: why are there so few operas based on the lives of composers? The answer is, because composers’ lives are so boring. Writing music, the act of applying pen or pencil to paper (or, more recently, inputting at a keyboard), hour after hour, day in and day out, is not material for high drama. Proofreading orchestral parts gives little in the way of visual excitement.

The most interesting aspect of most composers’ lives is how they die. Legends spring up about this. Some are true, such as Chausson riding his bicycle down an incline; the braking mechanism (newly invented) fails him, he smashes into a wall, and expires. Some are suspect, such as Alkan reaching for the Torah on a high bookshelf. It falls hitting him on the head killing him. If a composer is thought to die at the hand of another composer, this has operatic potential. Pushkin’s tale Mozart and Salieri was taken up by Rimsky-Korsakov who composed his opera of the same title in 1897. Much later, Peter Shaffer developed a similar theme in his 1979 play Amadeus later made into a successful film. Of course, Salieri did not really poison Mozart--although he no doubt wanted to.

Composers who exhibit criminal tendancies would seem to offer fruitful possibilities. There was Johann Rosenmüller, the 17th century composer, trombonist, and organist. He was arrested in the spring of 1655 for sexual misconduct. He escaped from jail and managed to resume his career—there being a shortage of accomplished trombonists in Venice at the time. Alas, he was too obscure a composer for this to be of general interest.

The composer of Der Freischütz, Carl Maria von Weber, was arrested, along with his father, on February 9, 1810. He was charged with embezzlement, participation in a draft-evasion scheme, and theft of royal silverware—the last charge, and only the last charge, was found to be unfounded. After a short confinement Weber (and his father) were banished from the Stuttgart region. So far, this material has not inspired an opera.

Hector Berlioz very nearly commited murder—not just once, but serially. After his initial infatuation with Harriet Smithson, he fell in love with a certain Camille Moke. Hector and Camille became engaged. Berlioz went alone to Rome, having finally won the Prix de Rome (on the fourth or fifth try). There was a suspicious lack of news from his fiancée. Presently, her mother informed him by post that she was now going to marry the prosperous piano maker Camille Pleyel. She was dumping Berlioz. Armed with two pistols and a chambermaid’s disguise, Berlioz left for Paris intending to kill Camille, her mother, the other Camille Pleyel, and then himself. Pausing in the city of Nice, he composed his overture to King Lear, cooled off, and returned to Rome, all murderous plans abandoned.

The one composer who did indeed commit multiple murders was Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa, who lived from about 1561 until 1613. On October 16, 1590, he dispatched his wife Maria and her lover, the Duke of Andria. He had discovered them in a compromising situation. Because of his aristocratic station, add to which Italian sympathy for the wronged husband, no particular penalty (other than a certain notariety) came to Gesualdo—who proceeded to find another wife, Leonora d’Este, whom he married in a festive ceremony. (Did she know his history?) That marriage was equally unhappy, but less violent. But from the standpoint of operatic treatment, crime does seem to pay. Four operas that I know of have been written about Gesualdo: Alfred Schnittke’s in 1994; Franz Hummel’s in 1996; Bo Holten’s of 2003; and Luca Francesconi’s of 2004. As far as I can tell, New York has yet to experience any of these.

Richard Strauss

There are certain details about the family background of Richard Strauss that every lover of music needs to remember. His maternal grandfather, Joseph Pschorr, founded a brewery the name of which can still be seen in Germany today. This puts Strauss in a category of composers (along with Mahler, Debussy, and Smetana) whose ancestors were in the liquor business. I regret to say that musicologists have so far ignored this detail and its implications for stylistic analysis.

Old Mr Pschorr was so frugal that he went about the house in his underwear in order to keep his outer clothes from getting too worn. He also kept his coffin in the living room and would have it re-varnished from time to time. His daughter, Josepha, Richard Strauss’s mother, was subject to nervous spells (understandable as she grew up in a house with a coffin in the living room). She consulted the same doctor who attended Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, Wagner’s great patron. The word “attended“ especially applies here. When Mad Ludwig drowned in Starnberger Lake, the doctor drowned with him.

Strauss’s father was Franz Joseph Strauss, who was the first horn of the Munich Court Orchestra for forty-two years. His first wife died of cholera; their son died of TB and the infant daughter of cholera. He lost his entire family by age 32. He met Josepha Strauss soon after but—perhaps a bit shell-shocked or gun-shy or whatever the term is--took seven years to propose to her.

Franz Strauss played his French horn in the premieres of Tristan, Die Meistersinger, Das Rheingold and Die Walküre but hated every minute of it. When Wagner’s death was announced, the other members of the Munich Court Orchestra rose in silent tribute; Franz Strauss, alone, remained firmly seated. His greatest fear was that his very talented son would grow up to like the music of Wagner. To his chagrin, this is what happened.

But not before Richard would go through a phase of Brahms adoration. Incidentally, Franz Strauss hated Brahms also. He was an Equal Opportunity hater. Playing the French horn in an orchestra for forty-two years makes you misanthropic.