Through an unexpected but nevertheless fortunate combination of circumstances, I wound up involved for several months with fairly in-depth studies of the last works of three different masters. How each of them approached the creation of his respective works was always the primary concern, but an unexpected benefit for me was the opportunity to consider in some detail the similarities in (as well as the differences between) their various modus operandi. Some things emerged that might be interesting, perhaps even worthwhile, to share – hence, these few, informal pages, which began life as a letter to a group of friends. Far from being the last word, I think of this as something of an opening bid. Anyone wishing to share thoughts or opinions on these topics is welcome and invited to do so, using the e-mail address on the site.

Two M’s and Three B’s

by Carl Smith

The musical works in question were these (as considered along with the last two drawings by Michelangelo for the Porta Pia in Rome):

Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 in E♭, “Eroica” – my own lecture on the compositional organization of the first movement as revealed in some immensely varied approaches to its performance.

Bach: Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch” for organ
                (the last, revised version).
A student was preparing the work for his recital, and I worked it up again myself to be better able to help him with it. It is probably the most contrapuntally complex work from the tonal practice period and can perhaps be seen as presenting Bach’s final thoughts on his art, including (towards the end of the fifth and final variation) the anagrammatical use of his name as a musical figure (B♭-A-C-B♮); his many previous presentations of his name(s) were via their numerical equivalents.

Brahms: Eleven Chorale Preludes, Opus 122 (posthumous) –
                  along with Four Serious Songs, Opus 121.
These astonishing organ pieces remained unpublished at the time of Brahms’ death; he had corrected final proofs for seven of them. Another of my students was doing a research project on them, along with a partial performance. Although widely played and much admired as examples of Brahms’ contrapuntal mastery, these eleven pieces (some of them only two pages in length) have often been spoken of as the musical musings of a dying man returning to the hymn-tunes he sang in his youth, beautiful but of slight stature. I have felt for more than forty years that that is a seriously erroneous view of them, that instead they form (at least in my opinion) a tightly structured unit, a cohesive musical work of eleven discrete sections, and one that continues and completes the compositional process begun with the Opus 121 songs. I have myself performed them in this “linked” way following an introductory talk about their symbolic key relationships, their text painting, their alluding to works by other composers, etc. It is, as it were, a “big deal” to propose such an understanding of these beloved pieces; there is nothing in the literature suggesting that they might indeed comprise one very powerful larger work, and – in fairness – it does initially seem almost counter-intuitive, since each piece has its own theme and carries its own title. I hope, before long, to return to an article on the topic I started some years ago for a music journal and present the arguments in support of this view.

Michelangelo: Although I had moved on to other projects and done little with him since writing my book on his signatures, a recent exhibit (which I visited numerous times and at considerable length) of twenty-five of his drawings from the Casa Buonarroti Archive left me pondering anew his various ways of thinking and working. My personal favorite among his works has long been the last of his drawings for the Porta Pia gate in Rome; that particular drawing sheet was not in the recent exhibition, but its companion sheet was, and studying it set me to thinking once again about how his mind worked – to the extent, of course, that one can discern it from working drawings, comments in letters, poems, and the like.

So, which composer of music might have been most like him – remembering, of course, Aquinas’ famous remark that art imitates nature not in her appearance but in her way of working, her modus operandi? Such a question is admittedly of only limited value, but it can be an interesting one to consider, especially since Michelangelo worked in such diverse media and disciplines.

Monteverdi would have to be suggested. An absolute master of his art and all that had gone before him in it, he was among the most distinguished composers of his day, and as an innovator he was without peer. Until Monteverdi, “composition” basically meant the craft of learned contrapuntal music – primarily choral, although learned instrumental music (and, to a much lesser extent, freer instrumental music) was also developed by his time. But it was Monteverdi who introduced the dance rhythms and folksong elements usually associated with the tavern into church music; without him, Bach’s church cantatas would have been impossible. (One thinks of him also when recalling Romare Bearden’s famous remark that an artist is like a whale swimming with its mouth open, scooping up everything in its path, only later digesting whatever proves useful.)

We have almost nothing by way of sketches from Monteverdi. We know something of his training and we have a lot of his music, but we still find coming to an understanding of how he did what he did almost impossible, much as is the case with Schubert. But, while appreciation for him and familiarity with his music continues to grow, Monteverdi remains far enough outside the mainstream for most classical music lovers that any attempt at relating him to a visual artist would have to remain fairly superficial – together with the fact that almost all of his non-operatic secular music is of such subtle sophistication as to be accessible only to musically trained, native Italian speakers.

One often reads comparisons of Michelangelo to Beethoven – and vice-versa. I think that both unfortunate and misleading, because their modus operandi were so very different. Of course, if people want to make that comparison – usually because they perceive (or imagine they do) similarly heroic attitudes and gestures in each, that’s fine; there’s surely no harm done by it, and besides, it’s not completely untrue. But for me Michelangelo is more like Bach, who builds up musical textures and sonic edifices one line, gesture, or figura at a time. It is understandable (if more than a little simplistic) to suggest that Beethoven often seems to have had a sense right from the start of the size and shape of the mountain he needed to scale; doing it was mostly a matter of hacking his way through underbrush and over the boulders in his way. And hacking it often was; we have sketchbooks aplenty to demonstrate that. Whereas Bach’s sons, among other reliable witnesses, tell us that Sebastian most often worked out his compositions in his head, then wrote them down – which is why what is now known as the Leipzig Manuscript Collection, some eighteen works of which the Canonic Variations is the last, is so very interesting. As the last music Bach worked on, these pieces are all revisions of works from earlier in his life – in some cases decades earlier. It is a unique circumstance that allows us to watch him take what is already fine and effective music and turn it into really extraordinary music.

Still, comparing Bach’s art to Michelangelo’s art is more than a little tortured in its logic (as comparisons between arts often are), and it requires ignoring the enormous differences in their personalities and working circumstances. Beyond a certain point, it begins to feel like a kind exercise that becomes fatiguing.

However, there is such a comparison to be made, and one that only deepens the longer we consider it – that between Michelangelo and Brahms. Both lived and worked in the epicenters of their respective fields, with Michelangelo in sixteenth-century Rome and Brahms in nineteenth-century Vienna. Both were single yet had ardent friends and supporters and legions of admirers. Both began with nothing but died quite well-off, the result of their own skills and diligence (and some good fortune); both were fiercely independent, and both rigorously covered their tracks, systematically destroying sketches and studies. But there is something else they have rather powerfully in common that I had long sensed but never quite understood or been able to identify.

Both were largely self-taught – outside their immediate fields – and were proud of their learning. Brahms, considered by some stodgy and old-fashioned, was known to be well read in both older and more contemporary literature and poetry, was acquainted with a number of prominent living artists in Austria and Germany and made regular trips to Italy to study older ones; he had several close friends in the Jewish community and was fascinated by modern invention and technology. If he appeared to live an outwardly conservative, even somewhat hermetic life, he was nonetheless a man of his time, a thoroughly modern man (in at least some senses).

Then there was his library, among his earthly possessions his pride and joy. Once assumed to have been destroyed in the Second World War, in fact it was not and has survived, the collection apparently intact. It is now inventoried and has been (and is still being) studied extensively. Never mind the Haydn and Mozart everyone else knew and studied, Brahms owned and had studied in detail Palestrina and Lassus and other continental Renaissance masters. He knew all the music of Monteverdi that was then published, and he owned everything available by Monteverdi’s pupil Heinrich Schütz, through whom the Venetian style made its way into Germany and on to Bach. Brahms subscribed to the then-emerging Bach Gesellschaft edition of the composer’s complete works. We know from a letter to a friend that every time another volume was issued he played though and studied it, note-by-note. This became apparent, too, in our study of the Opus 122 chorale preludes, which allude to a number of Bach’s organ works, almost none of them known to the musical public of Brahms’ day.

He also alludes to the music of the seventeenth-century German composer Johann Jakob Froberger. How could Brahms have known his music? Not too hard to answer, really, since he was a friend of the eminent musicologist Guido Adler who, in the 1890s, was busy preparing the first edition of Froberger’s complete keyboard music and, apparently, gave Brahms copies of certain pieces. But that is by no means all; Brahms himself worked as a musicologist (to the annoyance of friends who thought he should be composing new music instead), preparing performing editions not only of Chopin, but of the complete keyboard music of Handel – as well as that of François Couperin (a Baroque-era Frenchman, for heaven’s sake!). The Handel and Couperin editions are still available today and are widely used.

But further – and this is where it gets really interesting – his surviving volumes of poetry, folksong, and hymnody are filled with annotations – a word or two underlined here, a phrase there, maybe even a whole stanza or two marked, with his commentary in the margin. Although himself often taciturn, that he was a master of verbal skills can be better appreciated when one realizes that the texts of all his larger choral works – the German Requiem, the Alto Rhapsody, the Schicksalslied and others – were fashioned, not by a librettist, but by the composer himself. We need only pause for a moment to recall Michelangelo’s fame as a moving reciter of Dante’s verse (as well as that of Petrarch and Boccaccio) and his own several hundred known poems to begin to better appreciate their similarities.

Did you happen to notice that lovely little tune buried in the left hand of this piano intermezzo? It turns out to be taken from an out-of-the-way Tyrolean folksong. Look more closely at the piece and you may find that it’s simultaneously in the other hand too, but inverted, and also fragmented, perhaps in augmentation, in the bass. He was indeed a whale swimming around with his mouth open, but his are never mere assemblies of quotations; his textures are always so unified, so fully integrated, that we have to look to Bach to find their equal in that regard. To a certain extent, we are only now discovering the origins of some of his musical ideas and appreciating more fully just how very allusive his working methods were.

In Brahms’ day composers themselves, music critics, theorists, and others in the German-speaking world wrote rather extensively about concert music – as well as composing an unprecedented amount of it. Fierce battle lines were clearly (if somewhat artificially) drawn and then defended, between the “futurists” (Wagner, Liszt, and their disciples) and the conservatives, of whom Brahms was considered champion. But Brahms himself, although sometimes attacked by Wagner, Tchaikovsky, and others, steered clear of the debate, at times even expressing admiration for certain of Wagner’s works. It was a great deal of sound and fury that ultimately signified little, although it can be instructive for us today to note just how deeply another culture cared about its new music and the composers of it.

A brief summary is in order at this point: Brahms was, in his day, surely the most historically aware and informed composer alive; as a native Hamburger, he was usually restrained in his comments but was nevertheless a master of verbal skills; he was not – as Arnold Schoenberg’s famous essay “Brahms the Modernist” makes clear – a conservative.

***

The real debate in German composition at the time – and it was a meaningful one – was a bit less clearly defined than the other. It was a conflict largely of approach. One approach held fast to the belief that the composing of all art music ought to proceed along architectural lines, that is, that the presentation, ordering, and arranging of musical ideas in a given work or movement ought to be structural or conceptual in nature; musical form was uppermost, and since Brahms worked in the traditional “classical” forms, his music is generally understood as architectural in the manner of Beethoven’s, when really, it isn’t. While it might be a clue as to what to expect, the shape of a wine bottle doesn’t tell us much about the character of the wine contained in it.

The other approach to composition (and to performance) at the time was based more upon poetics; one’s understanding of a musical score differs considerably with this approach, and it might well be the significance of poetics in their modus operandi that Brahms and Michelangelo have most significantly in common. A relatively recent expansion and English translation of a book by Constantin Floros is filled with insights into Brahms’ compositional poetics; he does for Brahms and his music what Paul Barolsky and others have done for Michelangelo and his way of thinking and working:

Johannes Brahms. “Free but Alone.”
A Life for Poetic Music (pub. Peter Lang)

The subtitle refers to the use of the anagram “Frei aber einsam” as a recurring theme (F-A-E) in the musical works of Brahms, Schumann, Dietrich, Joachim, and others. (The English translation of Floros’ insightful and valuable writing can be a bit alarming at times; throughout the book, for instance, one finds “Brahmins” rather than the preferred “Brahmsians,” but Floros’ meaning is always clear, and his insights are invaluable.)

While the Brahms we hear in performances today may be hard to dislike, it is still different from what was heard in his day: ours is now almost universally an architectural approach. But Brahms lived late enough that there are some valuable recordings, beginning with rudimentary wax cylinders from the late 1890s, made by his friends and colleagues, musical collaborators, and others of his circle that we can study and use in forming an idea of how they played and sang his music. Hearing his music in this way, instead of in the predictably ponderous (if reverent) “architectural” approach we’ve learned to expect, can sometimes be a jarring experience, but it does help us better understand the passionate responses his music elicited when new.

So we need, metaphorically, to clean some rabbit glue off much of Brahms’ music so we can hear it better, just as the restorers helped us see Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel better.

While it may ultimately be rather pointless to search for congruent understandings of music and the visual arts, it can still make for some interesting investigations. I am grateful for the opportunity I had this year to work on these very different – yet not really un-related – projects, considering the last works of some of the greatest of our great masters.

So yes, by all means, say – if you wish – that Michelangelo was like Beethoven, although in truth he was probably more like Bach.

Really though, he was a lot more like Brahms.

Carl Smith

Nashville
5/VI/16

©2015 Carl Smith