Brahms’s “Great Tragic Opera”

Abstract

Nineteenth-century critic Hermann Kretzschmar’s hearing of the first four songs of op. 57 as a “great tragic opera“ offers a fitting starting point for this analytical essay on Brahms’s song, “Ach, wende diesen Blick” (op. 57, no. 4), the very song referenced in Kretzschmar’s remark. This essay demonstrates how Brahms constructs drama through several prominent pitch constructs that unfold as musical representations of the poetic conflict. This will be achieved primarily through voice-leading analysis and explication of an event called amelodic disjunction, a linear construction that arises as a result of Brahms’s complex contrapuntal style. Often composed of more than one strand of linear motion (as in a compound melody), the melodic disjunction features a seemingly anomalous leap or gap that is created when one of these melodic lines is abruptly abandoned, and any residue of melodic implication in the line is not resolved immediately, or at all. Along with several other disruptive pitch events that recur throughout the song, the melodic disjunction in op. 57, no. 4 avoids traditional resolution for dramatic reasons.