Expressive Intersections in Brahms: Essays in Analysis and Meaning

5. Ancient Tragedy and Anachronism:Form as Expression in Brahms’s Gesang der Parzen

5 Ancient Tragedy and Anachronism: Form as Expression in Brahms’s Gesang der Parzen Margaret Notley Gesang der Parzen (Song of the Fates, op. 89) has always been one of Brahms’s least understood compositions. Few recent critics have given close consideration to the poetic text, known as the Parzenlied, or its source, the play Iphigenie auf Tauris by Goethe.1 In Brahms’s day, many listeners, in contrast, were thoroughly familiar with Goethe’s play, and at times this paradoxically also proved to be an obstacle to their understanding of Brahms’s setting, as the composer himself had anticipated. Well before the first Viennese performance in February 1883, Brahms wrote to a friend, Theodor Billroth, about the response that he expected from the critic Ludwig Speidel: “I already hear Speidel saying that it is not Goethe’s Iphigenie, and of course the Song of the Fates isn’t Iphigenie.”2 Like other documentary evidence related to Brahms’s setting, this passage has rarely received the careful attention that might enable insights into his compositional choices. Those writing about the music have erred in other ways as well, often either by trying to force the setting into an existing formal schema or, as I have already implied, by underestimating his grasp of the poetic text. If we assume Brahms’s sophistication regarding both the poem’s subtleties and the consequences of removing it from Goethe’s play, to which he obliquely refers in the letter quoted above, it becomes possible to arrive at a more convincing account of the work. Although I have stressed the text, I shall delay addressing it more closely for the moment. I ask the reader to consider instead a short instrumental passage for a compelling example of the interrelated formal idiosyncrasies and peculiar expressivity of Gesang der Parzen. This passage (mm. 100–103; see Example 5.1) enters after a long development section (not shown) culminates in a prolonged G♯ dominant that arouses overwhelming expectations of resolution to C♯ minor. The subsequent deceptive progression to an A–C♯ dyad in m. 100 is startling indeed, despite the many, at times unusual, semitone resolutions that precede it. Although it appears in a composition in D minor, the dyad enters as the submediant of C♯. Only in retrospect, with the return in m. 104 of one of the main 112 Margaret Notley themes, which I shall call the refrain, does the dominant function of A emerge with clarity. The large-scale significance of this thematic return as a recapitulation (rather than a simple restatement) of opening material—and thus of the retransitional function of the A dominant expansion—also requires a more synoptic perspective. As experienced in the moment, the resolution in m. 100 and the three measures that follow are not easily reconciled with a retransitional formal function. Measures 100–103 also constitute one of the most evocative passages in a composition remarkable for its extremes of expression. When the prolonged G♯ dominant resolves abruptly in m. 100, the bassoons begin to play a mournful descending line in A-Phrygian, all the more striking because Brahms places it within a spare texture otherwise comprising ostinato patterns in the D horns, timpani, cellos, and contrabasses. (These patterns derive from the refrain’s accompaniment ; see m. 20ff.) The placement of the semitones in the bassoons’ line gives a distinctly archaic coloring to the A octave that it traces, whose larger harmonic meaning, like the formal meaning of the measures, remains obscure until the refrain reenters at m. 104. Only when we recognize A as the dominant of D minor does the significance of the equivalence between the lower four notes in A-Phrygian (D–C–B♭–A) and the initial notes in the descending D natural minor (D-Aeolian) scale become clear. A-Phrygian has given way to D-Aeolian. The modal basis along with the ostinati, moderate tempo, duple meter, and combination of percussion and bassoons create the effect of an ancient processional . This may seem fitting, given the play’s basis in a myth that Euripides had dramatized more than two millennia before Goethe; Goethe, however, had rei-     fl. cl.           100 hr. + 8ve lower p pk. p                                              dim.                                     fag.p vc. p                                  dim.                         Example 5.1. Gesang der Parzen, mm. 100–103 (contrabasses’ pizzicato quarter note A on downbeats not shown). Ancient Tragedy and Anachronism 113 magined the story within the worldview of late...