Emulation Will Save the World
Johannes Brahms (1833-97) was born to poor parents in Hamburg. His father was the horn player of the local militia, and his mother was a seamstress, 17 years older than him. The family lived in a small, crowded apartment, barely making enough to put food on the table. Despite this, music became the bright center of family life.
Young Johannes was taught by his father the violin and the cello in the attempt to pass on his love for music, which succeeded. Not only did Johannes begin to love music, but he also began to excel at it.
An impresario, a man who financed and produced concerts, took notice. He suggested that if the boy were to continue with music, fortune may lie ahead, so his father arranged for piano lessons.
But his piano teacher began to detest teaching him. He complained that Brahms “could be such a good player, but he will never stop with his never-ending composing.”
This teacher could not satisfy the desire deep within Brahms to become a great composer, so he sent him to Eduard Marxsen.
Marxsen was the perfect teacher for Brahms; he not only taught him how to master the piano, but he also taught him how to compose. Marxsen himself was a composer, and he knew Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert personally—the perfect learning opportunity for Brahms.
Brahms underwent a regimen of the best music. Under Marxsen, he studied the works of Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart, and Haydn. But above all, he developed an almost religious reverence for the great Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750).
Counterpoint
The element of Bach’s music that Brahms was drawn to most was his use of counterpoint. In music, counterpoint is the technique of taking two or melodies, also known as voices, and having them work together to make a single piece of music.
In his day, Bach was a master of counterpoint and was revered all over the world because of it. With counterpoint, he could take a single tune and create variation upon variation.
It was this reverence and these pieces that began his career. He was 11 years old when he had his first full-length piano recital, and he had chosen to play a fugue by Bach in a time where everyone studied him but no one played him. Bach’s counterpoint had enraptured Brahms.
After traveling for several years, performing recitals, and playing with counterpoint, he had the opportunity to meet Robert and Clara Schumann at their home in Dusseldorf. The Schumanns immediately fell in love with the 20-year-old Brahms.
Clara later wrote that he “seemed as if sent straight from God.” As if a pilgrim on a journey, the Schumanns became to Brahms as his mentors.
Robert personally poured into him, and he helped him compose his first works. After having a world-class mentorship, Brahms had finally reached his dream of becoming a composer. He intentionally chose to debut his compositions in Leipzig, the hometown and final resting place of Bach.
Brahms began to receive notoriety for music, particularly for his counterpoint. Schumann and the early Romantics influenced his sound, but the textures of his music were much older, as he looked to Bach and other Baroque composers.
As he began to rise in popularity and to travel to major music hotspots, he began to meet composers with newer sounds, such as Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner.
The War of the Romantics
Liszt and Wagner were from the Weimar school of thought, also known as the “New German” school. They believed that there was great freedom in music; forms could be changed, new techniques would replace the old, and music was to be flashy and to be made in order to say something.
The Conservatives believed that music had clear rules that were not to be changed but built upon and improved, and that music was to be made for the sake of having beautiful music, not for storytelling and narration.
After the death of Robert Schumann, the two schools began to clash. Wagner and the “New Germans” openly despised Brahms, saying that he “belongs in a museum” for his older sound. Liszt called Brahms and the Conservatives “the posthumous party.”
The Conservatives had to take a stand. The trends that Progressive was following and promoting pointed to a new approach to music that walled off all previous influences.
Brahms and the Conservatives penned a manifesto against the New German School, saying that they “regard everything great and sacred which the musical talent of our people has created up to now as mere fertilizer for the rank, miserable weeds growing from Liszt-like fantasias.”
The manifesto was met with mockery from the other side. There were not many open rebuttals in words, but in compositions. Music began being arranged as if they were bombs being lobbed at each other. In these tense times, Brahms turned to Bach for help.
In 1747, Bach was invited to the royal palace of King Frederick the Great. It was the age of the Enlightenment; old ideas were being tested, principles were mocked, and the traditions of the past were scoffed at.
By this time, the legend of Germany was known as “Old Bach,” and his ability to improvise any piece of music was renowned, so the king wanted to test him.
On the night they met in the palace, the king played a single fugue on a flute. The challenge that king had was for Bach to improvise the fugue to have six voices. And to the amazement of the court, “Old Bach” achieved the impossible task with his counterpoint. This became his world-famous Musical Offering.
Brahms had to take a similar stand. His compositions and performances had been slipping in recent years, which was publicly humiliating. His confidence had been shaken, and he began to doubt his convictions about what music should be. It took the deaths of his mother and Robert Schumann to release him from this pit.
He started to compose his Ein Deutsches Requiem. Moved by their deaths, the piece begins with somber mourning for the dead and ends with peaceful hope for the living. Brahms trusted in Bach’s counterpoint to be his guide throughout the work. And at the premiere, it was met with praise for its elevated craftsmanship and its echoes of Bach.
Emulation Will Save the World
In any time of great decay or of the testing of principles, there are those giants of the past that become profitable examples. They are waiting to be studied for their insights, their wisdom, their blindnesses, and their mistakes.
Ultimately, they are there to be emulated, or imitated, in their noble efforts. If they are not there to be emulated, then why should we praise their successes?
As Plutarch said in his Parallel Lives, “It was for the sake of others that I first commenced writing biographies; but I find myself proceeding and attaching myself to it for my own; the virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking-glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life.”
The past has wisdom for the future; draw from it. Man and his problems have not changed; there is nothing new under the sun. Why not look to lives full of the problems that we are only facing for the first time?
By study of the past we may commit to memory, as Plutarch says, “images of the best and worthiest characters.” Whenever there is a problem to be solved, an idea to be defended, or a culture to be preserved, you emulate heroes; you do what they did. They did what you are doing for the first time many times over, and you are to follow in their footsteps.
When Brahms died, in his house there were two portraits found: one of Beethoven above the piano and another of Bach above his bed.