Philadelphia Orchestra: Brahms and Bartok

I thought of Richard Wagner, a great composer I don't much like, at this past week's Philadelphia Orchestra concert. Wagner wasn't on the program, but his ghost was in the hall.

The featured composers were Brahms and Bartok, but both in a way were responding to Wagner in the works represented, in Brahms's case by the Second Piano Concerto and in Bartok's by a rare performance of the complete music for his ballet-pantomime, The Miraculous Mandarin.

Brahms wrestled all his life with the problem of size, both musically and personally. The figure he found himself set against was Beethoven, the most monumental figure in the history of music. This challenge was partly a matter of public expectation and partly of his own.

Beethoven's shadow towered over the entire 19th Century; some composers, such as Berlioz and Liszt (and Wagner himself), tried to meet it by grandiosity; some, such as Chopin and Schumann, retreated into miniaturization. Schumann cast a heavy mantle over the young Brahms's shoulders by suggesting that Brahms might be the destined successor the world had been waiting for.

His worthiest failure

Brahms responded with his First Piano Concerto, a still-astonishing work that tried to meet Beethoven on his own terms and which remains to this day the worthiest of "failures." But the Brahms First was a public failure as well, a work that came so heaven-stormingly close to the master's achievement in terms of mid-century style and harmonization that it was too difficult for his contemporaries to assimilate. (Remember that much of Beethoven was still inassimilable to the public taste of the time; the last sonatas and quartets puzzled performers and audiences alike.)

Brahms did not produce another purely orchestral work for nearly two decades, although his large-scale chamber works had such symphonic amplitude that later composers, notably that misbegotten Brahmsian Arnold Schoenberg, have been trying to supersize them ever since.

Belittling his own work

The Brahms First Symphony (1876) and his Violin Concerto (1877) finally broke the ice, and in 1881 Brahms announced the completion of a "tiny, tiny" new piano concerto to his friend Elisabet von Herzogenberg. The Second Concerto was in fact the longest piano concerto composed up to that time, although only by virtue of the massive scherzo that made it marginally longer than the First Concerto. Brahms enjoyed belittling his works in this fashion, in part no doubt to ward off expectations.

But he also had a further motive. By this time Wagner had staged his Ring cycle at Bayreuth, and the music world was divided between partisans of Brahms and of Wagner. For Brahms to describe his own works as "wisps" and "trifles" was an indirect hit at Wagner, who required audiences to sit through ponderous, daylong epics.

To Brahms, Wagner had reacted to Beethoven in hysterical and overblown fashion, distending the fabric of music to the breaking-point and muddying the motivic concision and contrapuntal invention on which Beethoven had built his towering architecture. Brahms himself might never build so high or so well, but he would respect the classical tradition that had underpinned the master's genius.

Wagner's last convert

Wagner's strategy called not merely for pushing musical emotion but also extra-musical feeling to new extremes. In Tristan und Isolde, the decisive work of 19th-Century Romanticism, he drove eroticism, too, to the point of ecstatic fulfillment (and disintegration) in death. His doomed lovers became the emblem of an age, and, implicitly, the standard of genuine passion.

The Wagnerian ethos was finally deposed in World War I, although not before winning a last convert in Adolf Hitler. Wagnerian chromaticism had been challenged shortly before this by Stravinsky; and although the Wagner style, as mediated by Mahler and Richard Strauss, continued to influence the Austro-German school of the 1920s and 1930s, its adherents were, like the late Brahmsians of a generation before, the epigoni of a school that would win no new converts.

Savage parody of Romantic love

The Miraculous Mandarin, which Bartok worked on between 1918 and 1923, fascinatingly encapsulates both the musical and ideological supersession of Wagner. It's the first score in which Bartok came to terms with Stravinsky, and entire pages of it would fit comfortably within Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. With its jazz inflections and traces of Bartok's earlier Impressionist style, The Miraculous Mandarin is a fascinating mélange of influences that nonetheless bears the full stamp of Bartok's maturity and remains a signal work of modernism.

The stage work to which it was attached is, at the same time, a savage parody of Romantic love in the manner of Weimar decadence. The plot involves a prostitute whose trade is run by thieves. The last of her customers, a desiccated "mandarin" who is fixated by her charms, ignores the thieves' various attempts on his life, bleeding and expiring only when she takes him into her arms. This send-up of the Wagnerian Liebestod reduces it to clinical Freudian melodrama, no longer the vehicle of cultural value but merely of squalid and bizarre obsession.

Exceptional solos

Bartok's score is usually performed in a suite that contains less than two-thirds of the original material and which, though highly effective on its own terms, omits the scene of the mandarin's death. The Philadelphia Orchestra's rare performance of the entire work, led by Charles Dutoit, was welcome and well played, with exceptional solos by Ricardo Morales.

Dutoit was joined for the Brahms Concerto by the seasoned Israeli pianist Yefim Bronfman, who has the work in his bones. I disagreed with only one of his interpretive choices, late in the third movement, although the whole performance was undermiked, at least from where I sat.

Waiting for leadership

The considerably less than full house gave Bronfman an enthusiastic ovation. He gallantly shook hands with principal cellist Hai-Ye Ni, whose critical solos in the Andante fell, however, far short of projecting the lyrical warmth and intensity the score demands. And it must be said that the horn section remains unworthy of a first-rate orchestra, let alone a world-class one.

Such problems can't be fixed without a permanent music director, just as Verizon Hall's serious acoustical defects can't be addressed with the Orchestra's finances in their current parlous state. Dutoit soldiers on, and so must his musicians. But the Orchestra has never had a hall worthy of its sound, and the city's priorities clearly remain elsewhere.♦


To read a reply by Steve Cohen, click here.