CHSA 5333 – BRAHMS / BUSONI
Brahms / Busoni: Violin Concertos – Tradition and Renewal
Introduction
Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897) and Ferruccio Busoni (1866 – 1924) are rarely mentioned in one breath. When they are, it is generally in the context of their radically different arrangements of Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin. Both are for piano, but Brahms’s version is unusually chaste – Brahms restricts himself to the left hand, adding almost nothing to Bach’s score – while Busoni’s is a work of excess; notes spill from the page.
The composers seem poles apart, too, in their approach to musical politics. By the end of the nineteenth century, Brahms was widely viewed as a dyed-in-the-wool conservative interested only in music rooted in tradition, and having little appetite for polemics. As he put it, ‘I speak through my music’. Busoni, by contrast, was a committed littérateur , and the titles of several essays – ‘Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music’ (1907), ‘The New Harmony’ (1911), ‘New Beginning’ (1913) – leave no doubt that he wished to be seen as an innovator, a radical even. Indeed, Busoni’s ‘New Aesthetic’ sets out beliefs that would have been anathema to Brahms – for example, ‘the function of the creative artist consists of making laws, not following laws’.
Nonetheless, there are strong reasons for coupling the violin concertos of Brahms and Busoni. This curious situation is explained partly by the complexity of Busoni’s aesthetic – as the critic Gerald Abraham put it, ‘everything about Busoni is paradoxical’ – partly by the changes seen over time in Busoni’s compositional style. Busoni wrote the Violin Concerto relatively early in his career, at a time when Brahms’s star was still high in Busoni’s firmament.
Busoni: Violin Concerto
Busoni was born near Florence, the son of a virtuoso clarinettist and a pianist mother who was of mixed German-Italian heritage. His musical talent was recognised early – he could play by ear by the age of four – and his childhood was not unlike Mozart’s, marked by constant travelling and frequent piano recitals. (He also studied violin for a while, but the piano was always his focus.)
Busoni first came to prominence in February 1876, when he gave a solo concert in Vienna. Eduard Hanslick, one of Brahms’s circle of friends, published a very positive review, noting that, while the careers of Wunderkinder tend to burn out fast, ‘nine-year-old Busoni will surely become a great musical artist’. When Brahms and Busoni first met is not clear, but Brahms took an interest not long after Busoni made his Viennese début. At one point Brahms even talked of mentoring the budding composer, rather as Schumann had mentored him. However, their relationship was never easy. In the late 1870s or early 1880s, Brahms suggested that Busoni take lessons in counterpoint from the pioneering Beethoven scholar Gustav Nottebohm, a close friend. Busoni – like Hugo Wolf, who was also sent to Nottebohm – took exception to his teacher’s strict regime and rebelled. Brahms apparently lost interest at that point, claiming that he ‘doesn’t care for those who consider themselves infant prodigies’.
That, however, is only part of the story. Busoni went on to publish several pieces dedicated to Brahms and, later in his career, arranged six of Brahms’s Chorale Preludes, Op. 122, for piano. What is more, only a few weeks after having spoken so dismissively about prodigies, Brahms wrote a letter of recommendation for Busoni. This bore fruit, and Busoni soon left Vienna for Leipzig to study with another of Brahms’s colleagues, Carl Reinecke. Whatever the nature of the composers’ personal relationship, Busoni clearly retained some respect for the music of Brahms. On the day of Brahms’s funeral, 6 April 1897, he performed the D minor Piano Concerto, Op. 15. Earlier that day, he had followed Brahms’s coffin as it was borne through the streets of Vienna.
Busoni’s Violin Concerto, like the two violin sonatas that appeared either side of it, owes its existence to Busoni’s friendship with Henri Petri, a Dutch violinist who had studied with Joseph Joachim, to whom Brahms had dedicated his Violin Concerto and who had been the closest friend of the composer in his youth. It was composed in 1896 and premièred, in Berlin, in 1897, a few months after Brahms’s death.
Arguably, the Concerto reconciles the styles of Brahms and Liszt, the two most important influences of Busoni’s formative years. Structurally, it follows Liszt’s favoured pattern of a single movement made up of sections based on standard symphonic units – in this case, an opening Allegro moderato , a slower passage marked Quasi andante , and an Allegro impetuoso that Busoni characterised as ‘a type of carnival’.
The Brahmsian influence is felt most strongly in the detail. Gerald Abraham claimed to hear Brahms’s voice again and again; as he put it, the work ‘might almost have been written by Brahms’. Perhaps the most obvious trace of Brahms’s Violin Concerto lies in the way the soloist enters. As Francesca Dego notes elsewhere, in both concertos the violin loops up, over a dominant pedal, to sing forth in the heights.
Busoni’s treatment of themes owes something to both Brahms and Liszt. Historians have often drawn a dividing line between Liszt’s technique of thematic transformation and Brahms’s use of developing variation. (The former, as the label suggests, usually requires the recasting of entire themes, whereas the latter involves a dense web of motivic cross-references, as in Beethoven’s mature practice.) Indeed, around the time of the Violin Concerto, Busoni wrote that
every motif contains, like a seed, its life-germ within itself; each inevitably unfolds in its individual way, yet each obediently follows the laws of eternal harmony
– words that could easily have been written by Brahms.
Some writers have criticised Busoni’s reluctance to move beyond classical models: Sergio Sablich, the principal Italian authority on the composer, describes the Violin Concerto as a ‘transitional work that juxtaposes different styles without leaving a personal footprint’. Busoni himself held the Concerto in high regard. As he wrote to his publishers in 1898, the work was his ‘most successful to date – so much so that it’s likely to have a great future’. His confidence in the Concerto is reflected in the fact that he waived a publication fee in favour of multiple copies of the new work. More than twenty were despatched to top violinists in Europe and North America – with good effect, for the Concerto soon entered the repertoire of virtuosos including Adolf Busch, Fritz Kreisler, and Joseph Szigeti. Over the decades, however, Busoni’s Violin Concerto has faded from sight, awaiting the advocacy of a fresh generation of interpreters.
Brahms: Violin Concerto
The fate of Brahms’s Violin Concerto was rather different. Contemporary violinists were slow to embrace it, and it earned its place as one of the cornerstones of the violin repertoire only after some years.
The Concerto springs from one of the most productive periods in Brahms’s life. It was composed in southern Austria during the summer of 1878, one year after the Second Symphony, with which it shares tonality, D major, and several thematic shapes. We learn from Brahms’s correspondence with Joseph Joachim that the original plan was for four movements, including an adagio and a scherzo. Over the following months, the two inner movements were dropped, and a new slow movement took their place. Several critics, noting that Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto has a scherzo in the key of D minor, assume that this was one of the discarded movements. Some go so far as to claim that both found a new home in the Piano Concerto. However, there is no hard evidence for either theory; translating movements conceived for a largely monophonic instrument into thick piano textures may not have been as straightforward as some assume.
Though the final stages of composition went remarkably smoothly – Brahms often struggled with new genres – the shaping of the solo violin part occupied the composer for months. Joachim’s initial response to the violin part was diplomatic: some passages, Joachim claimed, were ‘strikingly original in terms of violin technique’, a phrase that hints at unwonted, perhaps unwelcome, challenges. His letters contain numerous corrections and alternatives, many of which were accepted by the composer, though often with further refinements. Even after Joachim premièred the Concerto, on New Year’s Day 1879, Brahms refused to publish it. Joachim retained the manuscript score and parts and, drawing on insights gleaned from later performances, continued to suggest adjustments to both solo part and orchestral accompaniment. The printed score eventually appeared in October 1879.
Though Joachim performed Brahms’s Violin Concerto many times over the years, relatively few contemporaries took up the challenge. The Concerto’s technical difficulties were partly to blame. Some talked of a concerto not so much for as against the violin – a quip variously attributed to Hans von Bülow and Joseph Hellmesberger, both intimates of Brahms. Indeed, the great Polish virtuoso Henryk Wieniawski called the Concerto ‘unplayable’, while Pablo de Sarasate, another leading violinist, refused to perform it on the grounds that he did not like being upstaged by the principal oboist, whose solo at the start of the central Adagio – ‘the only melody in the whole piece’, according to Sarasate – takes up about a quarter of the movement.
Another factor may have been the lack of a cadenza. The Violin Concerto by Brahms is the last major work in the genre for which the composer failed to provide a cadenza. This decision is usually linked to Brahms’s love of tradition – after all, classical composers frequently left a hole at this point in the score. However, Brahms’s lack of confidence in writing for violin, as revealed by the Joachim correspondence, may also have played a role.
Because of the connection between the two musicians, the cadenza by Joachim is often seen as close to what Brahms might have written, had he played the violin. That has not stopped others from stepping into the breach. Brahms’s publisher, N. Simrock, issued cadenzas by Leopold Auer, Tor Aulin, Carl Halir, Hugo Heermann, Henri Marteau, Franz Ond Å™ Ã Ä ek, Edmund Singer, and Florian ZajÃc during Brahms’s lifetime – to which they later added contributions by Alberto Bachmann, Vasily Bezekirsky, WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Górski, and Alfred Marchot. Other musicians who tried their hand include George Enescu, Jascha Heifetz, Fritz Kreisler, Max Reger, Donald Francis Tovey, and Eug ène Ysaÿe.
In 1913, some fifteen years after Brahms’s death, Busoni also composed a cadenza for Brahms’s Violin Concerto. By this stage, his enthusiasm for the work seems to have dimmed somewhat: in a letter to his wife, dated 12 March 1910, he described it as second-rate and ‘stolen from Beethoven’ – a clear reference to the latter’s Violin Concerto, of 1806. But if the truth be told, both Brahms and Busoni owed a significant debt to their great predecessor.
From its first performance onwards, Brahms’s Concerto was seen as a direct response to Beethoven’s, in much the same way as Brahms’s symphonies were deemed a continuation of Beethoven’s symphonic legacy. Indeed, at its première, Joseph Joachim made a clear statement about compositional lineages by pairing Brahms’s Violin Concerto with Beethoven’s. The shared elements – key, character, etc. – were enhanced by the special significance which Beethoven’s Concerto held for Joachim. It was he who had championed the work at a time when it was largely neglected. It may seem odd today, but Eug ène Ysaÿe claimed, in the 1880s, that without Joachim’s ‘ideal interpretation’, Beethoven’s Violin Concerto ‘might have been lost’.
Busoni was also fascinated by Beethoven’s Concerto. At some point in 1898 – probably while working on his own Violin Concerto – Busoni asked his friend Ottokar NováÄek to remodel for violin the cadenza which Beethoven wrote for his piano arrangement of the Violin Concerto (the work sometimes known as Beethoven’s Piano Concerto, Op. 61a). Busoni was delighted with the result: ‘we’ve now gained a cadenza by Beethoven, as it were, for his own Violin Concerto’.
This was one way of addressing the lack of a cadenza in Beethoven’s Concerto. However, Busoni found another, for he composed three cadenzas for the work, the first of which includes accompanimental parts for strings and timpani. Here we find another point of contact, for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto opens with quiet strokes on solo timpani – a striking effect that is echoed in Busoni’s cadenza for Brahms’s Concerto, in which the timpani play almost throughout, as well as in Busoni’s own Violin Concerto, in which timpani and solo violin are frequently juxtaposed. Tellingly, Busoni wrote his cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at exactly the same time as his cadenza for that of Brahms, in September 1913.
Conclusion
In an undated poem written during his youth, Busoni addresses Brahms’s debt to Beethoven:
Was du geerbt, hast du nicht wachsen laßen