Rating and Berating Brahms

Consistent with my reputation for candor, my distaste for the orchestral Brahms is no secret. I have spent a lifetime trying to correct this gross flaw in my aesthetic nature, but inevitably my feeling at the end of a performance of one of the symphonies or concerti is that of having been nigh-smothered in some vast overstuffed Victorian sleeping-machine. Part of the trouble lies in Brahms's notion of the orchestra. Lewis Mumford, in Technics and Civilization, advances the notion that the symphony orchestra is a product of the industrial revolution, with its concept of the division of labor, and the assembly-line, and so on. Brahms, it seems to me, imposes on this idea a sort of nineteenth-century view of corporate efficiency--viz., as long as we are employing a hundred people, we may as well get the most out of them for our money.  So he has all the musicians sawing and banging and tooting away all of the time, and it sounds thick and furry and indigestible. Poor man! How could he help taking himself too seriously? First Robert Schumann told him he was Beethoven's successor, and then Eduard Hanslick proclaimed to the world that he was greater than Wagner, and those are difficult things to get around.

Brahms reminds me of certain people I've met in the academic world--genial, fascinating, exciting in intimate situations, they turn into pompous bores on the lecture platform. Brahms (in my opinion, which, you will be glad to hear, is shared by an infinitesimal minority) is ill at ease as a public figure. He doesn't know quite who it is he's supposed to be talking to, and so indulges himself in harrumphing and sententiousness and platitudinizing, and even in citations from the authorities, God help us! But get him in the parlor with a friend or two, a fireplace, and a bottle of Moselle and he is irresistable--expansive, charming, humorous, even profound. And so he is (as perhaps nowhere else) in the piano trios.

Recording the piano-violin-'cello tri­os as a set always poses a problem: what to put on side 4, since there are only three of them. One solution is to give short measure on four sides, a device that seems to be becoming very popular these days. (I encounter so-called long-playing records that run for ten minutes and eighteen seconds!) Another is that adopted by the Beaux Arts Trio a few years ago, by which they included an unsigned A major trio, found by a maid in a wastebasket in a resort hotel at Unteroberzwischenberg and triumphantly pronounced an unknown work by Brahms [ein Werk unbekannt von Brahms] by a Herr Professor Doktor in the Department of Creative Statistics at the University of Luneberg. A third approach (which no one but I seems to have thought of) would be to include the Schumannesque 1854 version of Op. 8 along with the 1889 revision, which is the one everyone knows and plays. Finally, an extra musician could be hired (with a consequent drain on the profits) for the clarinet or the horn trio.

The Olewsky-Olefsky-Olevsky Trio has hit on a radical solution--one which only musicians of their competence and fame would dare: they have used the horn trio with Paul Olefsky playing the horn part on the 'cello. Now the horn trio has always seemed to me the final word in romantic-outdoorsy-hunt music (Brahms specified the old valveless hunting-horn!) and nowhere do I find that he entertained any either-or notion (as he did with the sonatas for viola or clarinet). It will, therefore, be interesting to see how well this novel approach pays off.