Brahms No More
Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)
"The Young Kriesler"
A rarely exhibited portrait of Brahms
-1-
The Philadelphia Orchestra is in town this weekend. I just heard their Brahms' Symphony 1 and Marsali's tuba concerto tonight at the Hill. It was no doubt a world-class performance with the lead of Yannick. I share Yannick's promotion of underperformed works and instruments. They are critical to the survival of musicians and the so-called "classical music" in a time when big pieces are in a never-ending cycle of worldwide circulation in concert halls. I remembered going to 5 consecutive Beethoven-exclusive piano recitals in 2020, the Beethoven 250th anniversary -- I happened to learn the Waldstein at the same time. Since then I start to instinctively avoid Beethoven. I am PTSDed honestly.
-2-
The first time I heard the PhilOrchestra was in May 2019 Shanghai Oriental Arts Center, the summer of my freshman year. Yannick led the Orchestra with Dun Tan’s vocal work The Nine-Color Deer, Rachmaninov’s Paganini variations (with Haochen Zhang), and Sibelius’ 2nd Symphony. In a nutshell, it was a landmark concert that reminds me of what music should not have been.
My status as an Asian female — a gender and racial minority — may well justify this minor suspicion for racial politics. As a minority, I am all for the marginalized, as I am aware of the urgency to recognize and support, be recognized and be supported. All I want to convey is, the faithfulness of Dun’s works to the Chinese culture is a question left in suspension.
Tan’s very first piece that night was about revenge, rebellion, and melodramas of a village lady in an oblivious ancient Chinese story. The role falls on soprano Jia Lei, who, similar to the narrative in Schubert's Erlkönig, serves and characterize multiple roles with one voice. The entire series is meant to be a homage to the Dunhuang artworks in northwestern China. Yet it reflects more about feudalism, stereotypes for females, and misplaced cultural signals, rather than a genuine reverence for Dunhuang.
It’s quite unlike the then 18-year-old genius’ masterpiece. Despite being categorized as a member of white European males, Franz Schubert is emphatically a minority. Schubert is gay. His music is also gay. He died at 30, a fact that delegitimizes him or his music as old (despite his unusual compositional maturity).
The delivery of the performance verged on a gray line. I couldn’t really tell whether they were demonstrating their support for non-western culture. Sometimes the strings would stop playing and raise their bows all of a sudden to imitate ancient Chinese soldiers raising spearheads. Sometimes the orchestra would surprisingly roared 'Ha', another symbol for socialistic indignity, in Chinese stereotypical TV series in particular.
The double, perhaps triple infatuations over exoticisms — a western orchestra’s attraction to ancient Chinese culture, plus the modern Shanghai audience’s fascination to a western interpretation of Chinese works — frighten me. After the concert ended, I rode the shared bike home, full of confusion and discontentedness.
-3-
I planned to put aside our historical differences and went to the Ann Arbor concert any way, in hope that their performance could redeem my possible 'misjudgements'.
-- FYI, I also went to Tan's concert for a second time, in October 2020 Shanghai, when I was taking a gap year in the pandemic. It was the same concert hall, Shanghai Oriental Art Center, one of the most beautiful, most newly renovated concert houses in the world.
I was, again, very shocked. In fact, I walked out of the concert hall angry and unsettled. It was a rock’n’roll reincarnation of Bach through variations of the theme B-A-C-H. Till this day, I am still not sure which Bach he was referring to. That night Tan conducted the whole concert. There were also sophisticated, deliberate arrangements of lighting designs. They appeared to transport the audience to the aristocratic horsebacks on a Mongolian prairie. Except when the concert was delivered, it was more like an unidentifiable genre that nobody is aware of yet — perhaps it is even unknown to Tan. We could call it inventiveness, or generous promotion of the Bach family in China. We could also call it a pastiche.
-4-
Back to the present. Yannick's reconstruction of Brahms was combined with deliberately organized layering and articulation, with the whole orchestra being incredibly responsive and cooperative. They delivered a marvelous performance of the work and made an effort to reassemble this giant piece. Whereas their interpretation is vacant.
It may have something to do with the compositional style of the music. The music itself is a metaphor of slowly opening oneself up from self-imposed dilemmas, a particular kind of tension and misfit between one's inner self and the external world. One has to wait for more than half an hour to hear the C-Major finale. In the case of Brahms, it is impossible to resist the temptation to relate this overdoing with his 20-year struggle of the Beethoven shadow.
There are indeed moments of minor relief in the 3rd movement. And the G-C-B-C theme in the finale will never fail to move or inspire, regardless of the calibre of performers; or let me put in this way, the finale will always blossom into a triumph of reconciliation -- the highest emulation for human vulnerability. To my knowledge few music could manage this, not to mention us mortals. I remember hearing a similar kind of powerfulness from It's Quiet Uptown: There are moments that words don't reach/ There's grace too powerful to name/ We push away what we can never understand/ We push away the unimaginable. Music, a lot of times, serves to reassure us that (1) everything will be alright; (2) hope, hope, and hope.
Yet Brahms' overwhelming intentionality in composition, along with Yannick's unnecessarily detailed assemblage of the music, forfeit the overall spontaneity of the performance. I believe Brahms' pervasive emphasis on heaviness could have been delivered as lightness, which is not an equivalent to "lack of seriousness". The orchestra could have avoided the overcomplicated standard that Brahms once fallaciously held himself to.
-5-
Almost every musician I have met feels the urge to ally with Brahms and proclaim their endorsement aloud, as if the exhibition of love is also an establishment of one's identity. One comment I heard is, Brahms' music is philosophical, so philosophers always love Brahms. This statement proves to be untenable in my case. One of my past selves did share the similar impulse to say "I fall for Brahms." Yet that stage isn't lasting. I still love Brahms' music. I just wouldn't rate it as my top intimacy.
At the same time, I am endlessly nostalgic of Vienna being the artistic, intellectual powerhouse in Brahms' time. We could only reimagine it again, and again, to lighten up our present.
Today, we witness waves of China dream. Decades ago, there were a group of extraordinary musicians from the Soviet Union. Nowadays Russian musicians are likewise excellent. The rigorousness of their music education, including ear trainings via Preludes and Fugues of J. S Bach and Dimitri Shostakovich since a very young age, seems to be a source of their distinction. Chinese music education might not totally overlap with the USSR one. Yet it likewise manages to deliver the most top-notched musicians in the world. The star pianist Yuja Wang is one of them.
It is not because how frustrated or resentful I am with the ego-driven narcissism, celebrity culture, or the obnoxious competitiveness in music world. Nor can it be explained by my own disappointment in the rarity of good music these days. It is simply that I don't 'see' music in the idealized way that I once did. My musical intuitions sharpened. I am also more than ever aware of the industry vibe and how the game is played. I see so many undervalued, unknown musicians being drowned, devoured, and burnt out by unnecessary competition. IA, or a SPIRIO Steinway, would probably reach the unreachable standard nowadays for a performer, with the implication being a possibility of the erasure of the whole performing industry. However machinery is superior in the technical sense, souls are not fungible. They are fleeting embodiments of the nostalgia, futurism, carpe diem that the core of music always addresses and tries to answer for. Hhm, brave, new world?
-6-
A couple weeks ago, I was asked by Danny who my fav composer was--this is always a tricky question, regardless of how committed to music I am. I remembered pausing for almost an entire minute, and eventually stumbled on "Franz Schubert” — by the way, the orchestra did perform Schubert’s 9th symphony on their second night in Ann Arbor. Since one could already predict the style and pattern based on past trials, I didn’t go.
I came to realize my affinity with music has been changed, or in a worse way, killed. I stopped being obsessive with Brahms. His unfulfilled yearning seems to be too paralyzing to me now. I once worshipped his elusion from true loves as a platonic definition for ἔρως. But not any more. Besides, the masculinity embedded in Brahms' music is simply too much, not to mention the fact that he is a well-known misogynist. Composers and her compositions has been always separate, yet simultaneously indistinguishable. Music demystified and remystified.
Schubert, on the other hand, is always the closest to me. I don't deny the lethargic repetitiveness in all his works. Still, I divide time each day, to sight-read his impromptus 899 & 935, 6 Moments musicaux, piano sonatas, and 3 Klavierstücke. I've never got tired of his lyricism. Schubert identified himself as "a man reaching for the stars" (Alex Ross). Here I am making a bold stretch: the starry sky above and the moral law within. Isn't our eternal infatuation with the categorical imperative a brilliant star up in the sky? (omg didn’t realize I am such a Kantian) Sometimes I feel reserved to even think about the stars. I feel bewildered that the reality differs significantly from the stars in the sky.
Most of the time, I refrain myself from revisiting Brahms' compositions. I can't cope with his wretchedness, melancholy, fetish of absoluteness, or sudden outbursts of euphoria amid quiet desperation--I believe everyone has enough of those things to sort out in their own life. I am desperate enough, except that I could be loud. I will try my best to sound musical anyway.
So I refuse to label myself as a Brahms super-fan. My life will be more abundant.