Brahms Beyond Mastery: His Sarabande and Gavotte, and its Recompositions by Robert Pascall (review)

After publishing his first ten opuses in 1854–56, Brahms reassessed his creative standing. Robert Schumann’s laudatory article “Neue Bahnen” (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 39, no. 18 [28 October 1853]) had created lofty public expectations; yet, mixed reviews of Brahms’s earliest pieces suggested he had failed to meet them. Brahms consequently postponed further publication of new works and set about improving his technique and broadening his knowledge of historical styles. One of the first results of this study was a group of neo-baroque dances for piano solo. A Gavotte—actually Gavottes I and II in da capo—and Sarabande were soon performed at several concerts by both Clara Schumann and Brahms himself. For a time, these pieces formed part of a Suite, along with a now-lost Air and Prelude. After he began to publish large-scale instrumental works again in 1860 these dances were withdrawn from public performance and never issued. Nevertheless, the Gavotte and Sarabande now assumed a new role in Brahms’s creative activities, serving as the thematic and structural basis for movements in three important chamber pieces spanning the remainder of his career: the Second String Sextet, op. 36 (1865), the First String Quintet, op. 88 (1882), and the Clarinet Quintet, op. 115 (1891).

Robert Pascall’s new book, Brahms Beyond Mastery, tells the story of these recompositions in a critical-analytical narrative, representing the first detailed study of this aspect of the composer’s stylistic evolution. Pascall’s work on this topic will already be familiar to Brahms scholars through his several articles on the dances and their reuse, beginning in the mid-1970s (“Unknown Gavottes by Brahms,” Music & Letters 57, no. 4 [October 1976]: 404–11; “Brahms Underway to the Adagio of his Clarinet Quintet: A Story of Stylistic Assimilation and Enrichment,” in Rezeption als Innovation. Untersuchungen zu einem Grundmodell der europäischen Kompositionsgeschichte: Festschrift für Friedhelm Krummacher zum 65. Geburtstag, eds. Bernd Sponheuer, Siegfried Oechsle and Helmut Well (Kieler Schriften zur Musikwissenschaft, bd. 46) [Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001], 337–56). The metamorphosis of the Gavotte and Sarabande represents a subject of special significance for several reasons. First, for a composer who destroyed almost all of his sketches and drafts, Brahms’s treatment of this preexistent material affords a rare view of his compositional strategies down to the level of the motive and phrase. Second, it taps into Brahms’s interaction with nineteenth-century historicism: the Gavotte and Sarabande are themselves historicist documents, representing an outgrowth of Brahms’s study of the suites of Bach and his forerunners and contemporaries. Pascall shows that Brahms’s innovative “combination of normative with less characteristically Bachian formal and harmonic procedures” such as mixture of major and minor keys, clearly articulated phrases, and a modernist approach to embellishment, was a crucial feature in the viability of the dances as sources for transformation (p. 16).

The author suggests that the reuse of these hybrids in later works plots another history: that of Brahms’s own stylistic evolution. Citing Martin Heidegger’s ideas on artistic models, Pascall argues that Brahms and other great creators share a willingness to “let themselves be influenced” (p. 77). The composer early on sensed the limits of the broad structural modeling typical of lesser composers and moved toward a more thoroughgoing stylistic supplementation(p. 34). Although the author does not deal with larger cultural concerns, students of the period will recognize the hallmarks of midcentury German liberal historicism in Brahms’s approach—the notion that past styles and genres serve only as a starting point and must be integrated convincingly with contemporary cultural trends to hold any aesthetic validity—a position that stands in direct opposition to antiquarianism and its concomitant political conservatism, both attitudes erroneously attributed to Brahms at various points in the past.

Pascall’s interpretation of Brahms’s choices focuses...