Brahms is an inexorable formulist. His four symphonies, his three piano sonatas, the choral works and chamber music--are they not all living testimony to his admirable management of masses? He is not a great colourist. For him the pigments of Makart, Wagner, and Théophile Gautier are as naught. Like Puvis de Chavannes, he is a Primitive. Simple, flat tints, primary and cool, are superimposed upon rhythmic versatility and strenuousness of thought. Ideas, noble, profundity-embracing ideas he has. He says great things in a great manner, but it is not the smart, epigrammatic, scarlet, flashing style of your little man. He disdains racial allusions. He is German, but a planetary Teuton. You seek in vain for the geographical hints, hintings that chain Grieg to the map of Norway. Brahms's melodies are world-typical, not cabined and confined to his native Hamburg. This largeness of utterance, lack of polish, and a disregard for the politesse of his art do not endear him to the unthinking. Yet, what a master miniaturist he is in his little piano pieces, his Intermezzi. There he catches the tender sigh of childhood or the intimate flutterings of the heart stirred by desire. Feminine he is as no woman composer; and virile as are few men. The sinister fury, the mocking, drastic fury of his first rhapsodies--true soul-tragedies--how they unearthed the core of pessimism in our age. Pessimist? Yes, but yet believer; a believer in himself, thus a believer in men and women.
He reminds me more of Browning than does Schumann. The full-pulsed humanity, the dramatic--yes, Brahms is dramatic, not theatric--modes of analysis, the flow, glow, and relentless tracking to their ultimate lair of motives is Browning; but the composer never loses his grip on the actualities of structure. After Chopin, Brahms? He gives us a cooling, deep draught in exchange for the sugared wormwood, the sweet, exasperated poison of the Polish charmer. A great sea is his music, and it sings about the base of that mighty mount we call Beethoven. Brahms takes us to subterrane depths; Beethoven is for the heights. Strong lungs are needed for the company of both giants.
Brahms, the surgeon whose scalpel pierces the aches of modern soul-maladies. Bard and healer. Beethoven and Brahms.