The Logos Scripture · The Book of Brahms
The Book of Brahms 3 · Written by himself, from the Reinthaler correspondence, the letters to Clara Schumann and Joachim, and the texts he chose
Johannes Brahms, born at Hamburg in 1833, died at Vienna in 1897, aged sixty-three. As a boy he earned his bread playing piano in the taverns and dance halls of Hamburg. In 1853 Schumann met him and published an essay proclaiming him, which caused a stir. He never married. He destroyed a great deal of his own work: he wrote and destroyed some twenty string quartets and published his first only at forty; and he once returned to former lodgings and, in front of the tenants, tore open a wall to recover manuscript paper he had used years before to stop a leak, so that he could destroy it. The First Symphony took him twenty-one years. He also gave years to editing the scores of earlier men, working on the complete editions of Couperin, Emanuel Bach and Schubert. Ein deutsches Requiem was composed between 1865 and 1868. Its text is not the customary Latin mass; Brahms selected it himself, passage by passage, out of Luther’s Bible, and throughout it names no Christ, speaks of no redemption through him, and does not say the dead shall rise. Before the first performance Reinthaler, music director of Bremen cathedral — his friend, a theologian, and the man who trained the choir for him — challenged him on it: the consolation this work gives to mourners has Christ for its premise, so why is his name not written? Brahms replied that as far as the text went he would as gladly leave out the word German and simply put of Mankind, and that passages such as John 3:16 he had done without quite deliberately and consciously. Chapter three follows that reply, and the words are his. On Good Friday 1868 the six-movement version had its première at Bremen; afterwards Brahms added the fifth movement, Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit, for solo soprano, containing the line I will comfort you, as one whom his mother comforteth. His mother Christiane had died in 1865. It is commonly held that the movement was added for her. The Order records that this is an inference drawn by later people and that Brahms never said it; chapter five therefore says only what he did and not for whom, which is what 5.5 means. This volume rests on what he wrote himself: the Reinthaler correspondence, the letters to Clara Schumann and Joachim, and the texts he chose. There exists a widely circulated book reporting his late remarks on composition and divine inspiration; the Order takes not one word from it, since what it reports does not agree with the biographies and scholars have long doubted it. This book is therefore built from what he did and from the trustworthy letters, not from aphorisms. What this volume supplies is two things. First, until now no book in the scripture came from a person who did not make his case in argument. That is not because a maker of music falls outside the way of the Order; it is because the rule of admission recognises only a person’s own written reasoning — a limit on evidence, not a ranking of persons. So the Order does not call music a thing outside reason. Music is not unreasoning; its reason simply does not fall into propositions. What is true and has no premise had nowhere to sit in this scripture before. Second, and it matters more: the Order has already confessed a lack. The Gospel of Antisthenes 4.23 says whoever wishes to be comforted, go to the priest — the Order admitting that the priest holds something it does not. And yet The Songs 10 does comfort, and comforts without a falsehood (cf. The Songs 10.5). What Brahms did is that same act, done in 1868, at the summit of an art: keep the form, remove the assertion, and address it to the living. His second movement, for all flesh is as grass, the grass withering and the flower falling, is the axiom of dissipation (cf. The Covenant 6.1); his fifth, as one whom his mother comforteth, in which the comforter is the one who is gone, is the axiom of common source (cf. The Covenant 4.1). Neither is the Order reading itself into him: the grass is the text he chose, and the mother is the movement he added.