Schoenberg vs. Brahms: face off at Carnegie Hall
It was a packed house last night at Carnegie Hall, where The Berliner Philharmoniker, in the capable hands of conductor Sir Simon Rattle, staged a tête-à-tête between composers Arnold Schoenberg and his predecessor, Johannes Brahms. Now, anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the great composers might think this an odd pairing. The innovative, progressive Schoenberg and the traditional, arguably academic Brahms, what is Rattle thinking? But Schoenberg was actually a great admirer of the Romantic Brahms, and successfully incorporated his ideas into the German Expressionist movement he’s most closely associated with.
Sure, maybe Schoenberg is the more interesting of the two. Certainly Brahms would never write anything like Erwartung (Expectation), Schoenberg’s monodrama, a morbid and disturbing half hour about a woman out of her mind, lost in the woods who stumbles upon her lover’s dead body. The language is just as fragmented as the music, and I know this is a piece that gets hardcore classical music lovers all atwitter, but it’s hard to sit through and when Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 began I literally breathed a sigh of relief.
A lot of critics dismiss Brahms and his traditional, Romantic tendencies, but I think this is unfair. He worked his ass off on this symphony, pitting himself against Beethoven’s legacy the whole time. He didn’t have the luxury of the German Expressionist ideal of composing in the moment. Brahms was a master of counterpoint and development, two “highly complex and disciplined methods of compositions” made famous by the other two B’s, Bach and Beethoven. How are those for standards? And anyway, Symphony No. 2 is a happy, exalting piece, and you can’t have an unrelenting, if ingenious, monodrama by Schoenberg without some reprieve.
