The thought beneath so slight a film Is more distinctly seen As laces just reveal the surge Or Mists the Apennine --Emily Dickinson Introduction In recent years, a number of performance practice scholars writing on Brahms's piano music have commented on the prominence of low-lying melodic lines, thickly-written accompaniments, and often dense saturation of the lower register. (1) For such writers these textural features constitute proof that Brahms could not have intended performance on the piano. Firms such as Steinway, Bechstein, and Chickering were manufacturing pianos by the early 1860s, roughly the midpoint of Brahms's life, that already exhibited most of the important design innovations that distinguish pianos from earlier ones, and these firms enjoyed enormous success across Europe. (2) Performance practice scholars have argued that the increased power and sustain of these pianos create irreparable problems of balance and clarity in much of Brahms's music, implying that he was writing for the lighter and more transparent instruments that predate the piano, many of which were still manufactured up until the end of the century. The view that low-lying melodies and densely packed textures in the lower register present an undesirable muddiness on the piano was already being elaborated towards the end of the nineteenth century. During the last decades of Brahms's life, several treatises appeared elucidating the fundamental principles of what they proclaimed to be the modern school of pianoforte playing. Three treatises in particular, those by Hans Schmitt (1893), Aleksandr Nikitich Bukhovtsev (1897), and Adolph Christiani (c. 1885), each promote melodic projection, transparency of sonority, and clear hierarchization of the texture through dynamic layering as important ideals for piano music. In addition to providing numerous examples of piano textures suited to achieving those ideals on the piano, they warn against other textures that result in harsh or muddy sonorities. In fact, their discussions of undesirable piano writing focus on qualities of register and spacing which are precisely the characteristics of Brahms's piano music pointed to by performance practice scholars as evidence of Brahms's preference for lighter, more transparent pianos. This presumption is founded on the supposition that Brahms would agree that such textures do indeed produce adverse and inartistic effects on the piano and that textural clarity was Brahms's intent. The musical examples referred to in this article, however, demonstrate this supposition to be a misinterpretation of Brahms's piano writing. On the contrary, the examples represent cases where the avoidance of melodic projection and textural clarity was an essential aspect of his aesthetic intent, and the source of a unique and evocative type of ambiguity. Although the same kind of textural ambiguity and predilection for the lower registers may be found in other genres (particularly the vocal music and chamber music), in this article I have confined the discussion to examples from his solo piano literature in order to compare my remarks to the late nineteenth-century treatises; their discussion of musical clarity is directly linked to acoustic aspects of the piano itself. To consider Brahms's piano writing in the context of these late nineteenth-century writings and to recognize his cultivation of textural ambiguity leads one to reconsider the aesthetic implications of Brahms's ambiguous textures, and to arrive at an understanding that is altogether different from the interpretations that have been widely accepted in performance practice literature. Brahms and the Veiled Melodic Line The opening of the B section of Brahms's Ballade in B Minor, op. 10, no. 4 (example 1), contains a unique performance direction: Col intimissimo sentimento, ma senza troppo marcare la melodia (With the most intimate sentiment, but without marking out the melody too much)? …
Read full abstract
Oct 30, 2024
Enedina Alberdi + 3
Open Access