A Disembodied Head for Mythic Justice: Brahms, Tantalus, and Gesang der Parzen
In correspondence with Theodor Billroth, Brahms explained that he wished to conceal any association with Goethe’s Iphigenie on the title page of Gesang der Parzen Op. 89. Scholarship has been slow to take the composer at his word on this matter, instead associating Op. 89 with Goethe’s (and Euripides’s) Iphigenie setting(s). Scholarship has also discounted the connection Brahms established between the Parzenlied and Goethe’s Juno Ludovisi, disregarding the fact that the head of Juno once belonged to a statue just as the poem Brahms set once belonged to Goethe’s drama.
Aesthetic contemplation of the Parzenlied in and of itself when divorced from Goethe’s play reveals it to recount the tale of the Fall of Tantalus in Classical mythology which is analogous to the notion of original sin in the Christian realm. This tale of divine justice and eternal punishment is retold in many of the books in Brahms’s library (including Homer, Ovid, Aeschylus, and Sophocles). Further, my analytical reading shows that, like Tantalus, Op. 89 steadfastly refuses to allow the listener to touch that which seems to be within their reach, from the sense of consolation the major modality offers in the fifth stanza to the ostensible tonality of the entire piece—D minor. Instead, this most desolate composition seems to offer only emptiness.
Brahms persistently associated Parzenlied with the Book of Job. This juxtaposition of Biblical and mythical tales of divine punishment in relation to this secular choral work provides a broad hermeneutic context for exploration, one which further resonates with certain artworks of the Italian Renaissance with which Brahms was deeply preoccupied at the time of writing Gesang der Parzen.
In correspondence with Theodor Billroth, Brahms explained that he wished to conceal any association with Goethe’s Iphigenie on the title page of Gesang der Parzen Op. 89. Scholarship has been slow to take the composer at his word on this matter, instead associating Op. 89 with Goethe’s (and Euripides’s) Iphigenie setting(s). Scholarship has also discounted the connection Brahms established between the Parzenlied and Goethe’s Juno Ludovisi, disregarding the fact that the head of Juno once belonged to a statue just as the poem Brahms set once belonged to Goethe’s drama.
Aesthetic contemplation of the Parzenlied in and of itself when divorced from Goethe’s play reveals it to recount the tale of the Fall of Tantalus in Classical mythology which is analogous to the notion of original sin in the Christian realm. This tale of divine justice and eternal punishment is retold in many of the books in Brahms’s library (including Homer, Ovid, Aeschylus, and Sophocles). Further, my analytical reading shows that, like Tantalus, Op. 89 steadfastly refuses to allow the listener to touch that which seems to be within their reach, from the sense of consolation the major modality offers in the fifth stanza to the ostensible tonality of the entire piece—D minor. Instead, this most desolate composition seems to offer only emptiness.
Brahms persistently associated Parzenlied with the Book of Job. This juxtaposition of Biblical and mythical tales of divine punishment in relation to this secular choral work provides a broad hermeneutic context for exploration, one which further resonates with certain artworks of the Italian Renaissance with which Brahms was deeply preoccupied at the time of writing Gesang der Parzen.
