The unexpected with Brahms
Johannes Schild explains in his book that the symphonies of the "progressive" Brahms also carry hidden messages and meanings.
If the quote in the title of this book had reminded you of Gustav Mahler, you would have been wrong, but you would have expected hidden messages from Brahms. Arnold Schönberg had placed him at the forefront of modernism at the time as the "progressive" precisely because his compositions corresponded to Hanslick's "tonally moving form" and took a back seat to the "symphonic poems" of Liszt and Strauss, which were saturated with literature.
Schönberg would be amazed today if he were to pick up Johannes Schild's book, in which the author discovers many hidden messages in Brahms' four symphonies that establish connections to Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Liszt and others. The fact that not only Mahler, but also Brahms, used the linguistic capacity of music to come to terms with himself and his work is astonishing with each new case, which Schild is able to explain in a stylistically confident and comprehensible manner, and not only for those readers who are able to evaluate the many musical examples accordingly.
The cross-movement relationships in the symphonies are interesting in themselves, but even more rewarding are the cross-movement relationships and those that establish connections across musical epochs. Starting with Bach's E major fugue, the final theme of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony a whole range of covers right up to the Song of Destiny.
Particularly astonishing in another context are the Meistersinger-Aspects that Tristanor the musical references to the "milk-young boy" Felix, who could at best be the illegitimate son of Johannes Brahms resulting from his intimate relationship with Clara Schumann.
With three hundred musical examples, sixty pages of notes and twenty-four pages of bibliography, the book underpins the surprising wealth of compositional "innards", but also extra-musical influences, which one would not have expected from Brahms in particular.
Johannes Schild: "In meinen Tönen spreche ich" - Brahms und die Symphonie, 443 p., € 49.99, Bärenreiter/Metzler, Kassel/Stuttgart 2022, ISBN 978-3-7618-2525-9
