Classical music was something of a battleground in 19th-century Germany, with composers fierce about protecting their own particular aesthetic and approach. This schism in the classical world became known as the War of the Romantics…
War of the Romantics… Brahms, the traditionalist
During the period now known as the War of the Romantics, Johannes Brahms was seen to be at the head of the ‘Absolute Music’ camp. This revered musical forms and tonal structures, building on a tradition from Haydn to Schumann.
There’s no doubt that Brahms was a an ingenious composer. He composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, violin, voice, and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. And he worked with leading performers of his time, including Clara Schumann and violinist Joseph Joachim, both of whom were close friends.
He can also be seen as both a traditionalist and an innovator. On the one hand, his music definitely adheres to the basic structures and techniques of the Classical tradition. Sonata form, for example, is much in evidence. On the other hand, the intensity of expression of his works aligns him more closely with the Romantic movement.
However, Brahms’s great rival, Franz Liszt dubbed Brahms and his followers ‘the posthumous party’. So there’s a bit of a clue as to his views.
War of the Romantics… Liszt, the innovator
Liszt was a controversial figure in his day. At his concerts women swooned in the aisles. But though a ladies’ man and fabled lover, he was always attracted to the Church and ultimately took holy orders.
Despite his multifaceted and paradoxical nature, Liszt’s works have always been regarded as showy and excessive in certain quarters. And although some performers go out of their way to emphasise the epic and abstract qualities of Liszt’s works, others can’t help but crash through the Hungarian Rhapsodies and fantasies on Don Giovanni and Rigoletto as fast and loudly as possible, paying scant attention to their wealth of colour and detail.
There’s no doubt, then, that although Brahms was an innovative and even difficult composer in his day, Liszt, the creative visionary, was regarded as the more daring of the two.
‘Rank, miserable weeds’… the central argument
Opposing Brahms’s ‘Absolute Music’ camp, was the ‘Music of the Future’ movement, headed by Liszt. This cluster of artists felt that music should be programmatic, interact with art, poetry and literature, and push the boundaries of tonality and form. Liszt’s son-in-law Wagner and his Gesamtkunstwerk was the epitome of this school.
The touchpaper was lit in 1860, when Brahms and Joseph Joachim penned a manifesto against the ‘evil influence’ of the New German school. They suggested that these composers ‘regard everything great and sacred which the musical talent of our people has created up to now as mere fertiliser for the rank, miserable weeds growing from Liszt-like fantasias’.
Their words were leaked, published – and mocked. Brahms didn’t make any more public proclamations, although the critic Eduard Hanslick carried on the fight for the so-called conservative school.
War of the Romantics… the aftermath
Brahms went on to write four symphonies – pinnacles of the ‘pure’ music philosophy. The futurists flourished too: think of the tone poems of Richard Strauss and of Wagner’s Ring Cycle.
Still, the tussle rumbled on. As late as 1947, Arnold Schoenberg penned an essay arguing that Brahms ‘the classicist, the academician, was a great innovator in the realm of musical language, that, in fact, he was a great progressive’.