Clara Schumann to Brahms, 25 Jan, 1862
[1862]
CLARA to BRAHMS
DÜSSELDORF, Jan.25, Saturday.
DEAR JOHANNES,
First of all many thanks for your letter and the Variations. You see I am still in Düsseldorf. On the journey here I had the misfortune to get a severe attack of rheumatism in my right arm (I had been leaning out of the window on this arm) and I was hardly able to move it for several days. Of course I had to telegraph to Bonn and Frankfort, cancelling my concerts there. You can imagine how hard this was for me, the more so as up to the present my earnings have been very poor, in fact I have lost almost the whole month. Fortunately I was able to arrange to play at the Museum in Frankfort after all on the 31st. Last Tuesday I gave a soirée in Cologne (Stockhausen sang) and on Thursday one in Bonn. Both were quite successful. This is the first day I have been able to write at all, for I feel the rheumatism more in writing than in playing. I returned here yesterday evening, and my first thought today is to write to you.
Although my arm was in a sling I went to Cologne to hear Faust and cannot remember ever having enjoyed anything more in my life. I feel convinced that this work will one day take its place among the greatest of masterpieces. The second part is at least as great as the third.
Seldom have I received such a deep impression from a new work as I did from this one. What a crescendo of delight from beginning to end, not a moment of boredom! And how can I possibly describe the moving quality of the harmonies? If one has not heard it, there are many things in it of which one can have no idea – Ariel, for instance, at the beginning of the second part, the sunrise, Faust’s death and a good deal more. I am sending you an article of Bischoff’s (I happen to have it here). Let me have it back, it belongs to Fr. Leser. The beauty of Stockhausen’s singing defies description. Unfortunately at the end and for fear lest the public should get up and go, Hiller started the Leonora Overture immediately on the close of the Faust, which made a very unfavourable impression on everybody. It was really terrible – he hardly allowed the last notes of the Faust to die away. I should never have believed that I could possibly listen to this Overture except with the utmost delight, but to all us musicians this was impossible.
All the musicians from the neighbourhood were there, even Kirchner and Walter who had come from all that distance. Everybody missed you and nobody could understand how you could be absent when this particular work was being given. I was very glad to hear that you derived so much pleasure from your quartets and that Scholz is at last beginning to appreciate your music. Please greet both of them heartily from me….And now with affectionate greetings, Your CLARA
Litzmann, Berthold, Ed., Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms 1853-1896, Vol. I, Edward Arnold & Co. 1927, pp.144-145.
Eduard Hanslick on how words and music can work together
In this extract from The Beautiful in Music Eduard Hanslick discusses how words and music work together. Footnotes have been omitted.
****************
The beautiful in music would not depend on the accurate representation of feelings even if such a representation were possible. Let us, for argument’s sake, assume the possibility and examine it from a practical point of view.
It is manifestly out of the question to test this fallacy by instrumental music, as the latter could be shown to represent definite feelings only by arguing in a circle. We must, therefore, make the experiment with vocal music, as being that music whose office it is to emphasize clearly defined states of mind.
Here the words determine the subject to be described; music may give it life and breath, and impart to it a more or less distinct individuality. This is done by utilising as far as possible the characteristics peculiar to motion and the symbols associated with sounds. If greater attention is bestowed on the words than on the production of purely musical beauty, a high degree of individuality may be secured – nay, the delusion may even arise that the music alone expresses the emotion which, though susceptible of intensification, was already immutably contained in the words. Such a tendency is in its consequences on a par with the alleged practicability of representing a certain feeling as the subject of a given “piece of music”. Suppose there did exist perfect congruity between the real and the assumed power of music; that it was possible to represent feelings by musical means, and that these feelings were the subject of musical compositions. If this assumption be granted, we should be logically compelled to call such compositions the best as perform the task in the most perfect manner. Yet do we not all know compositions of exquisite beauty without any definite subject? We need but instance Bach’s Preludes and Fugues. On the other hand, there are vocal compositions which aim at the most accurate expression of certain emotions, within the limits referred to, and in which the supreme goal is truthfulness in this descriptive process. On close examination we find that the rigour with which music is subordinated to words is generally in an inverse ratio to the independent beauty of the former; otherwise expressed, that rhetorico-dramatical precision and musical perfection go together but half-way, and then proceed in different directions.
The recitative affords a good illustration of this truth, since it is that form of music which best accommodates itself to rhetorical requirements, down to the very accent of each individual word; never even attempting to be more than a faithful copy of rapidly-changing states of mind. This, therefore, in strict accordance with the theory before us, should be the highest and most perfect music. But in the Recitative music degenerates into mere shadow and relinquishes its individual sphere of action altogether. Is not this a proof that the representing of definite states of mind is contrary to the nature of music, and that in their ultimate bearings they are antagonistic to one another? Let anyone play a long Recitative, leaving out the words, and enquire into its musical merit and subject. Any kind of music claiming to be the sole factor in producing a given effect should be able to stand this test.
Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen, 1891, pp.56-58. The text of the title page of this edition is reproduced below.
**************************************************
THE
BEAUTIFUL IN MUSIC
A CONTRIBUTION TO
THE REVISAL OF MUSICAL AESTHETICS
BY
DR. EDUARD HANSLICK
Professor at the Vienna University.
SEVENTH EDITION, ENLARGED AND REVISED (LEIPZIG, 1885).
TRANSLATED BY GUSTAV COHEN
And dedicated to his Friends
MR. AND MRS. F. COLLIER.
__________
LONDON: NOVELLO AND COMPANY, LIMITED.
NEW YORK: THE H.W. GRAY CO., SOLE AGENTS FOR THE U.S.A.
____
1891.
MADE IN ENGLAND
Brahms to Clara Schumann, 10 Dec, 1855
[1855]
BRAHMS to CLARA.
Hamburg, Monday, Dec.10
BELOVED CLARA,
This letter is to wish you a very good morning. I should have liked it better if it could have wished you good-night after the very bad journey. You will not be out of my mind for a moment today. You are always before my eyes; I can still see you sitting at the window of the railway-carriage looking sadly out at us. I hope you will not cry too much to-day. You ought to have seen me yesterday. I was so angry and ultimately so desperate. We played trios at Otten’s, first Jaell played Rubenstein’s G minor, which is no better or worse than his other things- now insignificant, then atrocious, and anon having a touch of profundity. Then I played your husband’s number 3, which aroused the wildest enthusiasm such as was certainly not vouchsafed to Rubenstein, in spite of Jaëll’s brilliant playing and pyrotechnic skill. Then J. played Chopin’s C minor Scherzo, and I the F by Bach. J and I thereupon had dinner at Grädener’s and I got more and more to dislike this wine merchant’s traveller. Then on Gr’s small piano he tinkled out some of his own and Liszt’s pieces until our hair stood on end. It appears that artists and members of the public have already told him many unpleasant things about Rubenstein, but for the moment he let fly about L. My head was absolutely swimming and I sat quite solemnly at the piano and played away in B and B Flat at the same time. We were all quite dizzy, Jaëll alone excepted. The whole day I longed just for one hour at home. How wearing it was, but how blissful I felt when a little before ten o clock I was sitting at home and abandoned myself to silent bliss! I have told them all that I am leaving tomorrow. But don’t you believe it. I must be quiet for one whole day and leave Jaëll to go to Hanover. At the concert on Saturday he played very well. He plays with skill and bravura, but such trash. During his solo piece and the Tannhäuser I left the hall, but came back again just as he was playing again by request some execrable variations on an Italian melody. I may be wrong to talk to you about such rubbish, but I do it with the blessed feeling of having survived it. Please write here. With a thousand hearty greetings, my Clara, Your JOHANNES
Litzmann, Berthold, Ed., Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms 1853-1896, Vol. I, Edward Arnold & Co. 1927, pp. 59-60.
Eduard Hanslick: can music represent anything?
In this extract from The Beautiful in Music Eduard Hanslick discusses if music can express or represent anything. Footnotes have been omitted.
**********************
Music can undertake to imitate objective phenomena only, and never the specific feeling they arouse. The falling of snow, the fluttering of birds, and the rising of the sun can be painted musically only, by producing auditory impressions which are dynamically related to those phenomena. In point of strength, pitch, velocity, and rhythm, sounds present to the ear a figure, bearing that degree of analogy to certain visual impressions which sensations of various kinds bear to one another. As there is, physiologically speaking, such a thing as a vicarious function (up to a certain point), so may sense-impressions, aesthetically speaking, become vicarious also. There is a well-founded analogy between motion in space and motion in time, between the colour, texture, and size of an object and the pitch, “timbre”, and strength of a tone, and it is for this reason quite practicable to paint an object musically. The pretension, however, to describe by musical means the “feeling” which the falling snow, the crowing cock, or a flash of lightning excites in us, is simply ludicrous.
Although, as far as we remember, all musical theorists tacitly accept, and base their arguments on the postulate, that music has the power of representing definite emotions – yet, their better judgement has kept them from openly avowing it. The conspicuous absence of definite ideas in music troubled their minds and induced them to lay down the somewhat modified principle that the object of music was to awaken and represent “indefinite”, not definite emotions. Rationally understood, this can only mean that music ought to deal with the motion accompanying a feeling, regardless of its essential part, with what is felt; in other words, that its function is restricted to the reproduction of what we termed the dynamic element of an emotion, a function which we unhesitatingly conceded to music. But this property does not enable music “to represent indefinite feelings” for to “represent” something “indefinite” is a contradiction in terms. Psychical motion, considered as motion apart from the state of mind it involves, can never become the object of an art, because without an answer to the query; what is moving, or what is being moved, an art has nothing tangible to work upon. That which is implied in the proposition – namely, that music is not intended to represent a definite feeling (which is undoubtedly true) is only a negative aspect of the question. But what is the positive, the creative factor, in a musical composition? An indefinite feeling as such, cannot supply a subject; to utilise it, an art would, first of all, have to solve the problem; what form can be given to it? The function of art consists in individualising, in evolving the definite out of the indefinite, the particular out of the general. The theory respecting “indefinite feelings” would reverse this process. It lands us in even greater difficulties than the theory that music represents something, though it is impossible to define what. This position is but a step removed from the clear recognition that music represents no feelings, either definite or indefinite. Yet, where is the musician who would deprive his art of that domain which from time immemorial has been claimed as belonging to it?
This conclusion might give rise to the view that the representation of definite feelings by music, though impracticable, may yet be adopted as an ideal, never wholly realisable, but which it is possible, and even necessary, to approach more and more closely. The many high-sounding phrases respecting the tendency of music to cast off its vagueness and to become concrete speech, no less than the fulsome praises bestowed on compositions aiming, or supposed to be aiming at this, are proof of the popularity of the theory in question.
Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen, 1891, pp. 53-55. The text of the title page of this edition is reproduced below.
********************************************************************
THE
BEAUTIFUL IN MUSIC
A CONTRIBUTION TO
THE REVISAL OF MUSICAL AESTHETICS
BY
DR. EDUARD HANSLICK
Professor at the Vienna University.
SEVENTH EDITION, ENLARGED AND REVISED (LEIPZIG, 1885).
TRANSLATED BY GUSTAV COHEN
And dedicated to his Friends
MR. AND MRS. F. COLLIER.
__________
LONDON: NOVELLO AND COMPANY, LIMITED.
NEW YORK: THE H.W. GRAY CO., SOLE AGENTS FOR THE U.S.A.
____
1891.
MADE IN ENGLAND
Brahms to Clara Schumann, Dec 8, 1855
[1855]
BRAHMS TO CLARA
Saturday, Dec.8
I wanted to write to Detmold again, but I must first send you my greetings and my best thanks for the dear letter received this morning. You have told me nothing about your playing, particularly of Op. 106! Did you play it and how did it go? Beautifully? How I should have loved to have heard the C major Symphony! Out of the five it is my favourite, and of its four movements I prefer most decidedly the adagio. Only a German could have composed such an adagio. His deeply earnest eye alone could look so full of love when in the greatest suffering. A reminiscence of this beautiful adagio would interest you in Bach s Musikalisches Opfer, if you do not know it.
I have to play the C Sharp minor studies here almost every evening and they are all enthusiastic about them. I also play Carnaval, Davidsblünder and Kreisleriana a good deal. Yesterday Jaëll arrived here. We spent the evening together at Avé’s. He raves about everything under the sun, not least of all about my things, and he played the F Sharp minor Sonata publicly in Frankfort. He looks exceedingly comical, so very well fed. Wagner is his God, evidently a kind one, for he can blaspheme him with impunity with the most atrocious transcriptions. He played some of his stuff to us yesterday, also some arrangements of songs by Schumann and Franz. It would be difficult to produce more wretched and more shallow rubbish, and yet Hoffmeister gives him a year’s salary for producing such inferior work. The first contract is to last another eighteen months, so even if he wished to do so he could not spare the world; for a certain number of his pieces must be printed.
I shall probably have to play your husband’s Third Trio at Otten’s. We only lack one cellist. I am very much looking forward to it. Today the Lobgesang will be played, then Beethoven s Phantasy with chorus, and the chorus from the Idomeneo, the andante, and finale from Chopin’s E major Concerto (which I don’t enjoy very much) and the Tannhäuser-Lohengrin Phantasy.
(The end of this letter is missing)
Litzmann, Berthold, Ed., Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms 1853-1896, Vol. I, Edward Arnold & Co. 1927, pp. 58-59.
Eduard Hanslick on the role of emotions in music
In this extract from The Beautiful in Music Eduard Hanslick discusses the role of emotions in music.
*************
Though, in our opinion, the chief and fundamental task of musical aesthetics consists in subordinating the supremacy, usurped by the feelings, to the legitimate one of beauty – since the organ of pure contemplation, from which, and for the sake of which, the truly beautiful flows, is not our emotional, but our imaginative faculty – yet the positive phenomena of the emotions play too striking and important a part in our musical life to admit of the question being settled by simply effecting this subordination.
However strictly an aesthetic analysis ought to be confined to the work of art itself, we should always remember that the latter constitutes the link between two living factors; the whence and the whither; in other words, between the composer and the listener, in whose minds the workings of the imagination are never so pure and unalloyed as the finished work itself represents them. Their imagination, on the contrary, is most intimately associated with feelings and sensations. The feelings, therefore, are of importance both before and after the completion of the work; in respect of the composer first, and the listener afterwards, and this we dare not ignore.
Let us consider the composer. During the act of composing he is in that exalted state of mind without which it seems impossible to raise the beautiful from the deep well of the imagination. That this exalted state of mind will, according to the composer’s idiosyncrasy, take on the colouration of the nascent structure, now rising with great force, now subsiding into mere ripples, without ever being an emotional whirlpool which might stifle the powers of artistic invention; that lucid deliberation again is at least as essential as inspiration: these are well-known principles of art. With special reference to the creative action of the composer, we should bear in mind that it always consists in the grouping and fashioning of musical elements. The sovereignty of the emotions, so falsely reputed to be the main factor in music, is nowhere more completely out of place than when it is supposed to govern the musician in the act of composing, and when the latter is regarded as a kind of inspired improvisation. The slowly progressing work of moulding a composition – which at the outset floated in mere outlines in the composer s brain – into a structure, clearly defined down to every bar; or possibly, without further preliminaries into the sensitive polymorphous form of orchestral music, requires quiet and subtle thought, such as none who have not actually essayed it can comprehend. Not only “fugato” or contrapuntal passages, but the most smoothly flowing Rondo and the most melodious air demand what our language so significantly calls an “elaboration” of the minutest details. The function of the composer is a constructive one within its own sphere, analogous to that of the sculptor. Like him, the composer must not allow his hands to be tied by anything alien to his material, since he, too, aims at giving an objective existence to his (musical) ideal, and at casting it into a pure form.
Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen, 1891, pp.99-101. The text of the title page of this edition is reproduced below.
*********************************************
THE
BEAUTIFUL IN MUSIC
A CONTRIBUTION TO
THE REVISAL OF MUSICAL AESTHETICS
BY
DR. EDUARD HANSLICK
Professor at the Vienna University.
SEVENTH EDITION, ENLARGED AND REVISED (LEIPZIG, 1885).
TRANSLATED BY GUSTAV COHEN
And dedicated to his Friends
MR. AND MRS. F. COLLIER.
__________
LONDON: NOVELLO AND COMPANY, LIMITED.
NEW YORK: THE H.W. GRAY CO., SOLE AGENTS FOR THE U.S.A.
____
1891.
MADE IN ENGLAND
Brahms to Clara Schumann, Nov 25, 1855
[1855]
BRAHMS to CLARA
Sunday, Nov.25
Your letter of yesterday reached me too late for me to be able to write to Berlin, but you must have received a letter from me on Saturday in any case. How much I love your beautiful letter! It is lying before me now and I feel as if I cannot answer it. I should prefer to copy it out…. Let me tell you first of all that everything went well yesterday, even at the second rehearsal as well. I was loudly applauded, for Hamburg it was quite enthusiastic. I really did play with both fire and restraint. It was decidedly better than at Bremen. Let me give you the programme: 1. Mendelssohn’s Symphony in A minor, the scherzo of which delighted me, though I was bored with the andante. The first movement pleased me very much, the last less. 2. Aria by Mozart, sung by Frau Guhrau with orchestra. To my great joy she was accompanied by two basset-horns, which had been procured with great difficulty. I don’t believe any instrument blends so perfectly with the human voice as the basset-horn, the tone of which seems to come half-way between the cello (bassoon) and the clarinet.
Otten is always rather inclined to go too slowly which was not to the advantage of this Aria. But it was wonderfully beautiful. Then followed a Bach suite for orchestra (three trumpets) of which the overture, an aria, a gavotte and gigue were played. This was the most beautiful of all. What a marvellous effect, yet how much better it could and ought to have been. I can’t write to you about it. I should like to play the score through with you. Then came the E Flat major Concerto which went with a good swing.
Frau Guhrau sang Das Veilchen and a song by Marschner; I accompanied her and led her along so that some day I may be able to do the same with Chiarina. After this I played the Canon in B minor by Robert, and then, at Otten’s and Avé’s urgent request, I played Schubert’s March. They were both equally and quite enthusiastically applauded. The Euryanthe Overture brought the concert to a close. The Carnaval would have been too long. That is why I had to leave it out. But I should like to play it some day.
I was much more pleased with Frau Guhrau than I have been before. She is in many respects very different from what she used to be. And then there is also the fact that one sympathizes with her for her really sad plight. She told me with some emotion about her time with you, then about her brief marriage, on which she now looks back as on a desert. She sang beautifully at the concert, particularly Das Veilchen. I was delighted about the concert in Berlin and about the Heinrich Overture etc. At the first rehearsal Otten also played Wahner’s Faust Overture, which I disliked exceedingly. I advised him very strongly to consider whether he ought to have the honour of being produced in Hamburg for the first time.
You know that we once discussed whether one ought to make complementary notes after trills in Bach. I said that my taste was strongly opposed to it. Now let me copy out for you a chapter out of my Ph.Em. Bach who, you must acknowledge, was the best of teachers, particularly of his father s works.
2nd Section, 3rd Part, SS13
“Trills above a note which is somewhat long, whether it goes down or up, always means that there must be a complementary note. When a jump follows the note with a trill the complementary note also follows. The same also applies in regard to emphasized notes. When a trill is not followed by any note, at the end for instance, or when it comes over a sustained note etc. there is always a complementary note.
SS14. Dotted notes followed by a short note going up may also have trills with complementary notes.”
Later on he says “The complementary note must be played as quickly as the tr”.
But we ought in any case to read Bach carefully together.
….A thousand greetings from everybody and above all from me, Your JOHANNES.
I have bought a sonata for two pianos by W. Friedmann Bach (MS) which is certainly very rare, and other things!!
Litzmann, Berthold, Ed., Letters of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms 1853-1896, Vol. I, Edward Arnold & Co. 1927, pp. 55-57.
