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Thomas Adès and the Spectres of Brahms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Edward Venn
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Abstract

The appearance of a ghost in Alfred Brendel's poem ‘Brahms II’, set by Thomas Adès for baritone and orchestra in 2001, is not the first time Brahms the composer has been discussed with reference to the supernatural. In order to provide a hermeneutic interpretation of Adès's Brahms, op. 21, and an explanation of why Brahms continues to haunt composers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this article draws on Derrida's notion of hauntology, exploring notions of the uncanny, late Brahms and Schoenberg's ‘Brahms the Progressive’.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 140 , Issue 1 , 2015 , pp. 163 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 Adès sets the poem in its original German. The English version of the poem can be found in Alfred Brendel, One Finger Too Many, trans. Richard Stokes (London, 1998), 30, reproduced in Table 1 below. (It has not been possible to secure copyright permission to reprint the original German text. However, comparison between Table 1 and the musical examples in this article will help with the navigation of the work's structure.) A postscript notes that the translation of ‘Brahms II’ is ‘almost entirely Michael Morley's’ (p. 71).

2 A number of poems in Brendel's One Finger Too Many evoke Brahms, always with a tone of ironic ambivalence. See ‘Composers’ (pp. 19–20), ‘Brahms I’ (p. 22) and ‘Brms’ (pp. 49–50). Indeed, Brahms features sufficiently in the collection to warrant inclusion in the list of muses given in the postscript: ‘Johannes Brahms [is the name] of a Vienna-based composer, whose D minor Concerto has given me boundless pleasure’ (p. 71).

3 One of the key characteristics of the supernatural in the nineteenth century was its presence in daily life, even as (or perhaps because) scientific advances were seeking to solve the mysteries of the natural world. The quotidian presence of the supernatural resulted in a change of location for the story-telling, in which ‘the supernatural came up close […] and became intimate and domestic. The yawning vaults, pits and turrets, the cavernous castles and catacombs and cataracts of the Gothic novel became progressively more pent, urban, petit bourgeois’ (Steven Connor, ‘Afterword’, The Victorian Supernatural, ed. Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (Cambridge, 2004), 258–77 (p. 259)). See also Bown, Burdett and Thurschwell's ‘Introduction’ in the same volume, 1–19 (p. 2). Perhaps influenced by the growing body of scientific and medical writings that explored psychological theory (see Louise Henson, ‘Investigations and Fictions: Charles Dickens and Ghosts’, The Victorian Supernatural, ed. Bown, Burdett and Thurschwell, 44–63 (p. 45)), even ghostly deeds changed their function: no longer merely a device to inspire terror and delight, the tales of Scrooge in A Christmas Carol and the Governess in The Turn of the Screw (to name but two) are as much psychological portraits of the protagonists as they are depictions of hauntings (Bown, Burdett and Thurschwell, ‘Introduction’, 11). Nor are such issues unique to Victorian England. Little wonder, then, that Sigmund Freud turned to consider the overlap between the spectral and the psychological in his famous essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ of 1919 (Gesammelte Werke, 18 vols. (London, 1940–68), vii (1947), 227–68), with a special focus on E. T. A. Hoffmann's ‘Der Sandmann’ (‘The Sandman’, 1816).

4 Michael Klein, ‘Ironic Narrative, Ironic Reading’, Journal of Music Theory, 53 (2009), 95–136 (p. 132).

5 Ibid., 133–4.

6 See, for instance, Adrian Jack, ‘Brendel's Poems Set to Music’, The Independent, 3 July 2001; Hélène Cao's comparison between Adès's material and the characteristics of the Second Viennese School in her Thomas Adès le voyageur: Devenir compositeur, être musicien (Paris, 2007), 34–5, more on which below; and Elaine R. Barkin's description of the way in which ‘an Erwartung-ish Schoenberg ghost enters and he and ghost-Brahms compete for attention’, in her ‘About Some Music of Thomas Adès’, Perspectives of New Music, 47/1 (winter 2009), 165–73 (pp. 171–2).

7 ‘Adès retrace l’évolution de la musique germanique sur plusieurs décennies, puisque Schönberg revendiquait l'héritage brahmsien’. Cao, Thomas Adès le voyageur, 34.

8 Tom Service, programme note to Adès, Brahms, op. 21 (2001), available at <http://www.fabermusic.com/repertoire/brahms-3946>.

9 Tom Service, ‘Thomas Adès: Breaking the Silence’, BBC Music Magazine (July 2001), 26–9 (p. 29). Clearly Adès takes Brahms's ‘self-pity’ as something entirely genuine, rather than ironic self-deprecation (or a combination of the two).

10 Thomas Adès and Tom Service, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service (New York, 2012), 145, 174. The notion that Brahms stymies his expression – that he hides behind structures or garb – resonates with Brendel's characterization of the ‘bearded’ in his poem ‘Beards’ (One Finger Too Many, 52–3). Given the regularity with which Brendel associates Brahms with his beard, the veiling of expression described by Brendel is surely aimed at Brahms too. As the beardless of the poem note, ‘It is by baring the face / that the world is freed from deceit and deception / Beardless / the face speaks for itself / an altar of sincerity / to which our hearts go out’ (lines 23–8).

11 Adès and Service, Thomas Adès, 174–5.

12 David Hart, ‘Potty-Mouthed Prophecy Shows CBSO in Glowing Colours’, Birmingham Post, 21 February 2004.

13 John Daverio, Crossing Paths: Schubert, Schumann and Brahms (Oxford and New York, 2002), 193. Max Kalbeck's defence of the concerto as a hybrid genre has provided the basis for an alternative critical tradition (pp. 194–5).

14 Gay coins the term ‘cerebral sentimentalist’ for Brahms in response to polarities discerned in his chronicling of the composer's reception. Peter Gay, ‘Aimez-vous Brahms? On Polarities in Modernism’, Freud, Jews and Other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (Oxford and New York, 1978), 231–56 (p. 247). He also presents Brahms as an ‘alienated conformist’ who is ‘distinctly at odds with his age’ (pp. 251–2) – a characterization that resonates with much of the reception of Brahms to be explored below. It is interesting, in this context, that Gay illustrates this final point with reference to Brahms's Song of Destiny and Alto Rhapsody (p. 252) – works in which Adès locates ‘the real Brahms’ (Adès and Service, Thomas Adès, 173), suggesting that Adès might well be sympathetic to Gay's account.

15 Gay, ‘Aimez-vous Brahms?’, 255. Daverio offers a similarly positive account of cerebral sentimentalism, countering Hanslick's criticism of op. 102 with the suggestion that Brahms demonstrates that ‘passion could be treated as a worthy object of the intellect’, thereby inverting the ‘commonplace of the Romantic aesthetic that the artwork should conceal its artfulness’ (Crossing Paths, 241, 240).

16 Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Brahms the Progressive’, Style and Idea: Selected Writings, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (London and Boston, MA, 1975), 398–441 (p. 435; emphasis added).

17 Margaret Notley, Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (Oxford and New York, 2007), 35.

18 See John Covach, ‘The Sources of Schoenberg's “Aesthetic Theology”’, 19th-Century Music, 19 (1995–6), 256–61.

19 See also Adès's arrangements of Couperin in Les baricades mistérieuses (1994) and Three Studies from Couperin (2006).

20 See Edward Venn, ‘“Asylum Gained”? Aspects of Meaning in Thomas Adès's Asyla’, Music Analysis, 25 (2006), 89–120.

21 See Service, ‘Thomas Adès: Breaking the Silence’.

22 See Christopher Fox, ‘Tempestuous Times: The Recent Music of Thomas Adès’, Musical Times, 145 (2004), 41–56; Kenneth Gloag, ‘Thomas Adès and the “Narrative Agendas” of “Absolute Music”’, Dichotonies: Gender and Music, ed. Beate Neumeier (Heidelberg, 2009), 97–110; and Emma Gallon, ‘Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès: The Piano Quintet and Brahms’, Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael L. Klein and Nicholas Reyland (Bloomington, IN, 2013), 216–33.

23 See Samuel John Wilson, ‘An Aesthetics of Past–Present Relations in the Experience of Late 20th- and Early 21st-Century Art Music’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2013), 251–63.

24 Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London, 1994), 89.

25 Ibid., 54.

26 To date, hauntology has had greater impact in literary than in political studies as a tool for hermeneutic interpretation (Colin Davis, Haunted Subjects: Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (Basingstoke, 2007), 9–10). The reason for this appears to be rooted in the negative reception given to Derrida's realignment of deconstruction with a radical Marxism by philosophers of the left, ranging ‘from skepticism, to ire, to outright contempt’ (Michael Sprinkler, ‘Introduction’, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida (London, 1999), 1–4 (p. 2)).

27 Andrew Clements, ‘CD Releases’, Guardian, 27 February 2004.

28 ‘Although the text of Brahms is amusing, its music is often threatening, even frightening. Who doesn't fear the stories of revenants at which he laughs? Anyway, even if just a little, who doesn't believe in ghosts?’ Cao, Thomas Adès le voyageur, 109 (my translation).

29 Service, programme note to Brahms.

30 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 4.

31 Service, ‘Breaking the Silence’, 29.

32 As Christopher Fox notes: ‘Adès is composing not with Brahms's logic but with the patterns within which that logic manifests itself.’ ‘Tempestuous Times’, 47.

33 John Roeder, ‘Co-operating Continuities in the Music of Thomas Adès’, Music Analysis, 25 (2006), 121–54.

34 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 126 (original emphasis). An objection might be raised to this hauntological reading of spirit and body in Brahms, given that Brahms (the composer) does the same thing when he realizes the abstracted idea of falling thirds in different ways in different works. The difference is that Adès (and, as we shall see later, Schoenberg) realizes the falling thirds in ways that cannot be mistaken for Brahms; Brahms the composer is always displaced, the ‘body’ that Adès and Schoenberg provide is always spectral, partial and conjured up, so that it reflects the summoner as much as Brahms himself.

35 There might be a meta-allusion here, too: see note 2 above on Brendel and Brahms's op. 15.

36 An association of Brahms's piano practice with cigar smoke can be found in Eugenie Schumann's memoirs. ‘We would often sit talking for a long time, but Marie reminded him sometimes, “Herr Brahms, you really must practise now, or you will not play properly at the concert.” Then he always got up obediently, went into the music-room with his beloved cigar, and presently we heard the vigorous attack of his two fifth fingers, one at each extreme end of the keyboard, and arpeggios in counter movement through endless modulations followed.’ The Schumanns and Johannes Brahms: The Memoir of Eugenie Schumann (New York, 1928), 170. The famous caricature of Brahms playing the piano also features him smoking a cigar dropping ash.

37 This might be another allusion to op. 15: Adès's baritone line recalls the material for the piano soloist (doubled at first in the upper wind) in bars 143–5 of the first movement.

38 Adès and Service, Thomas Adès, 175.

39 That Brahms is said to have described the Intermezzos of op. 117 as ‘lullabies of my sorrows’ (cited in Daniel Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2004), 170) also reinforces the self-pitying aspect of his character against which Adès is ostensibly railing (whilst also potentially being another ironic utterance).

40 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 135–6.

41 Cao stresses the connection to ‘O Tod’ at this juncture (Thomas Adès le voyageur, 34), even though the pitches cease to be an exact quotation as soon as the second trombone intones its A♭. Certainly, the echoes of ‘O Tod’ are significant, as I go on to discuss below, but the initially orchestral opening at Figure J, coupled with its role as a point of formal articulation, seems to me to be closer in both spirit and function to the similar passage in Brahms's symphony.

42 Arnold Whittall, ‘James Dillon, Thomas Adès, and the Pleasure of Allusion’, Aspects of British Music of the 1990s, ed. Peter O'Hagan (Aldershot, 2003), 3–27 (p. 5). Here, Whittall is responding to, and inverting, Harold Bloom's model of artistic influence, and in particular the ways in which artists transform and rework the work of their precursors to stave off the ‘anxiety of influence’. Notable applications of Bloom's theories to music include Joseph Straus, Remaking the Past: Musical Modernism and the Influence of the Tonal Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1990), and Kevin Korsyn, ‘Towards a New Poetics of Musical Influence’, Music Analysis, 10 (1991), 3–72. Michael Klein offers a useful critique and reframing of these approaches in Intertextuality in Western Art Music (Bloomington, IN, 2005), 17–21.

43 This point is also made by Cao, but she rightly observes that the critical dimension of Brahms is lost if the allusions are not recognized: ‘On ne percevra pas la dimension critique de Brahms si l'on ne connaît pas les signatures stylistiques du compositeur épinglé; on sera alors sensible à l'atmosphère inquiétante de la pièce, à l'humour corrosif qui émane de l'alliance du texte et de la musique’ (Thomas Adès le voyageur, 29). I return to the critical aspect of the work below.

44 In a similar vein, Gloag has noted that the allusions to Brahms in the Piano Quintet are closer to ‘Schoenberg's Brahms the progessive [than] to Schenker's Brahms the last master’. ‘Thomas Adès and the “Narrative Agendas” of “Absolute Music”’, 108.

45 Preface to The Spiritual Diary of Emanuel Swedenborg, or a Brief Record, during Twenty Years, of his Supernatural Experience, i, trans. J. H. Smithson (London, 1846), v–xv (p. xii), quoted in Bown, Burdett and Thurschwell, ‘Introduction’, 7.

46 Ernesto Laclau, ‘The Time is Out of Joint’, Diacritics, 25 (1995), 85–96 (p. 87).

47 Schoenberg, ‘Brahms the Progressive’, 438.

48 Ibid.

49 William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, scene v.

50 Derrida begins Specters of Marx with this quotation from Hamlet (p. xxi); his first extended discussion of the resonances of this phrase occurs on pp. 17–29.

51 Schoenberg, ‘Brahms the Progressive’, 422.

52 Alexander Goehr, ‘Brahms's Aktualität’, Finding the Key, ed. Derrick Puffett (London and Boston, MA, 1998), 175–88 (p. 185).

53 Ibid.

54 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 48.

55 Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny (Manchester, 2003), 272.

56 This dialectic approach is itself Schoenbergian: see Michael Cherlin, Schoenberg's Musical Imagination (Cambridge, 2007), 44–67, for a fuller discussion of Schoenbergian dialectics.

57 Bayan Northcott, ‘Alexander Goehr: The Recent Music (II)’, Tempo, 125 (June 1978), 12–18 (pp. 12, 18).

58 Bayan Northcott, ‘Alexander Goehr: The Recent Music (I), Tempo, 124 (March 1978), 10–15 (pp. 13–14).

59 Robin Holloway, ‘Towards a Critique’, The Music of Alexander Goehr, ed. Bayan Northcott (London, 1980), 83–7 (p. 85).

60 Ibid.

61 Robin Holloway, ‘Alexander Goehr at 70’, Sing, Ariel: Essays and Thoughts for Alexander Goehr's Seventieth Birthday, ed. Alison Latham (Aldershot, 2003), 1–6 (p. 1).

62 See Geoffrey Poole, ‘Training the Rose: Reflections on the Individual and the Collective in New Music’, Sing, Ariel, ed. Latham, 257–65 (p. 264).

63 Milton Babbitt, ‘A Message from Milton Babbitt’, Sing, Ariel, ed. Latham, 325.

64 Goehr, ‘Brahms's Aktualität’, 186–7.

65 Hugh Wood, ‘A Photograph of Brahms’, Staking Out the Territory and Other Writings on Music (London, 2007), 44–63 (p. 51).

66 Ibid., 52.

67 Ibid., 58.

68 Wood's enduring commitment to thematicism and the development of motivic shapes makes it difficult to single out any of his individual works as particularly representative of the Schoenberg–Brahms tradition, though honourable mentions ought to be given to the Passacaglia finale of his Symphony op. 21 (1974–82) and his later instrumental music. In the latter case, although Wood's themes have increasingly drawn on intervals of thirds and (especially) sixths, it is the autumnal spirit of Brahms, rather than any specific technical device, that informs his music. See Edward Venn, The Music of Hugh Wood (Aldershot, 2008), 147–52, 204–15.

69 See Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit, 5.

70 Ibid., 4.

71 Notley, Lateness and Brahms, 11.

72 Ibid., 8. Notley cites Christian Schmidt's view that Brahms's Third Symphony marks the transition towards the composer's late style, ‘characterized by an uncompromising prominence of artifice, by the far-reaching penetration of the musical details, which makes no allowance for effectiveness and easy perceptibility’ (quoted ibid., 40). Given that this description of the Third Symphony might also be applied to much of Adès's music, it is interesting to note that the work is ‘still by far’ Adès's favourite symphonic work by Brahms (Adès and Service, Thomas Adès, 133).

73 Notley, Lateness and Brahms, 95.

74 Ibid., 220.

75 Goehr, ‘Brahms's Aktualität’, 175.

76 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 23, 28.

77 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 174.

78 Michael Cherlin, ‘Schoenberg and Das Unheimliche: Spectres of Tonality’, Journal of Musicology, 11 (1993), 357–73 (p. 360).

79 Fredric Jameson, ‘Marx's Purloined Letter’, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida, ed. Michael Sprinkler (London, 1999), 26–67 (p. 39).

80 Davis, Haunted Subjects, 11.

81 Freud, ‘Das Unheimliche’, 394.

82 The emergence of a repressed but familiar notion in an unfamiliar manner, Richard Cohn asserts, is one of the necessary and sufficient conditions to establish the uncanny: typical rhetorical figures, textual strategies and devices do not on their own signify its presence (‘Uncanny Resemblances: Tonal Signification in the Freudian Age’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 57 (2004), 285–324 (p. 287)). Later, Cohn goes on to state that ‘neither the magical nor the gruesome nor the undecidable is at the heart of the Freudian uncanny. Rather, the uncanny is that class of the magical, gruesome, and so on “which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar”, and which is indeterminate on the basis of its simultaneously alien and hyper-proximate status […] their uncanniness must have something to do with the capacity of those constituents to associate with, but at the same time resist or defamiliarize, the musically comfortable and Heimlich’ (p. 318). Nevertheless, in their search for the uncanny, analysts have had recourse to exploration of the ways in which Freud's categories of the uncanny might take musical form (see, for instance, Carolyn Abbate, Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 52–7, and Lawrence Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice 1800–1900 (Berkeley, CA, and London, 1990), 176–213); others have sought to establish those musical ideas that might accrue uncanny qualities in the appropriate context, or even come to define the uncanny as a musical topic (see Cherlin, ‘Schoenberg and Das Unheimliche’; Cohn, ‘Uncanny Resemblances’; Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 78–87; and Cherlin, Schoenberg's Musical Imagination, 173–229).

83 Lawrence Kramer, Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley, CA, and London, 2002), 265.

84 Schoenberg, ‘Brahms the Progressive’, 431. Nor is Schoenberg by any means the first to make such claims. Notley recounts Brahms's reaction to Riemann's analysis of unusual progressions in the Fourth Symphony and the Double Concerto: ‘Brahms was not very pleased about this revelation and said with complete seriousness: “One should not show how it was made!”’ Margaret Notley, ‘Plagal Harmony as Other: Asymmetrical Dualism and Instrumental Music by Brahms’, Journal of Musicology, 22 (2005), 90–130 (p. 103).

85 Cherlin, ‘Schoenberg and Das Unheimliche’, 358. Schoenberg also highlighted his debt to Brahms's metrical freedom with an analysis of the cello solo from ‘Serenade’ (Pierrot lunaire) in ‘Brahms the Progressive’, 428. Yet, as Goehr points out in ‘Brahms's Aktualität’, such phrasing irregularities ‘are in fact frequently related to harmonic intensification’ (p. 185), which is to say that in Brahms's music such devices remain related to tonal practice. On Cherlin and Freud, see Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 78–80.

86 Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 213. See also the accounts of ‘Das Unheimliche’ in Hélène Cixous, ‘Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud's Das Unheimliche (The “Uncanny”)’, New Literary History, 7 (1976), 525–48, and Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory (Albany, NY, 2011), 17–48.

87 Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 209.

88 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 97.

89 Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 87.

90 For instance, Abbate, writing of repetition in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, argues that by ‘repeating each element a few too many times […] the moment may compose out what Freud understood as uncanny repetition, recurrence’ (Unsung Voices, 56).

91 This process of making tonal material strange is similar to that found by Cherlin in Schoenberg's work (‘Schoenberg and Das Unheimliche’).

92 Notley, Lateness in Brahms, 220.

93 Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 96. Nevertheless, if the syntactical meaning has been drained from these thirds, there remains within them a certain level of semantic meaning by virtue of topical references and the poem's text.

94 Abbate, Unsung Voices, 176. See also Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 191. The repetitions themselves are also a quality of Victorian nonsense literature (see Gallon, ‘Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès’, 225–8), forging a further link between Brahms and literature of the late nineteenth century.

95 See Kramer, Music as Cultural Practice, 204.

96 Ibid., 207.

97 Freud, quoted in Bown, Burdett and Thurschwell, ‘Introduction’, 10.

98 Gallon, ‘Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès’, 225.

99 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 47.

100 Bown, Burdett and Thurschwell, ‘Introduction’, 9.

101 Henson, ‘Investigations and Fictions’, 47.

102 Derrida, Specters of Marx, xvii.

103 Ibid., xviii–xix (original emphasis).

104 Ibid., 126. Derrida goes on to add: ‘For there to be a ghost, there must be a return to the body, but to a body that is more abstract than ever’ – as can be found in the ways in which both Schoenberg and Adès clothe Brahms's spirit in the flesh of tonally abstracted falling thirds.

105 Samuel A. Chambers, ‘Ghostly Rights’, Cultural Critique, 54 (2003), 148–77.

106 Schoenberg, ‘Brahms the Progressive’, 438.

107 Klein, Intertextuality in Western Art Music, 13.