Late Style and Last Things in Brahms’s Op. 122 Chorale Preludes
In March 1902, days before the fifth anniversary of Brahms’s death, his longtime publisher advertised a forthcoming edition of chorale preludes, Op. 122, billed as “the only musical legacy of the master.” While these preludes have endured as a staple of the organ repertoire, musicological literature has tended to regard them from a distance, referencing the collection as a whole yet excluding individual chorales from studies of Brahms’s late style, his engagement with religious topics, and his penchant for esoteric allusion.
This lecture-recital situates five of the Op. 122 preludes within stylistic, cultural, and religious contexts established in recent Brahms studies by Beller-McKenna (2004), Notley (2007), and Berry (2014), as well as theories of “lateness” by Edward Said (2006) and “late self-fashioning” that Linda and Michael Hutcheon (2015) have identified in aging composers. Like Brahms’s other late works, the contrapuntal virtuosity of the first and fifth chorale preludes and use of the C-L-A-R-A motif in the sixth invite discussions of artifice, introspection, and enigmatic juxtaposition in the Op. 122 collection—a genre that was the bread and butter of amateur church musicians, but hardly the domain of a “respectable” nineteenth-century composer.
Brahms’s return to the organ by way of an exegetical (and very Lutheran) genre offers insight into his response to significant cultural shifts in late nineteenth-century Vienna, especially the rise of German nationalist sentiment. Noteworthy in the seventh and eleventh chorales is Brahms’s tendency to construct distinct musical spaces through dynamic contrast, manual changes, and registral shifts: correlations between musical gesture and chorale text suggest a demarcation between physical, earthly existence (often forte) and a spiritual, heavenly realm (often piano). Movements between these spaces may be read as attempts to navigate the gulf between them, a deliberate “untethering” from increasingly dystopian surroundings that also offers insight into Brahms’s personal theology.
In March 1902, days before the fifth anniversary of Brahms’s death, his longtime publisher advertised a forthcoming edition of chorale preludes, Op. 122, billed as “the only musical legacy of the master.” While these preludes have endured as a staple of the organ repertoire, musicological literature has tended to regard them from a distance, referencing the collection as a whole yet excluding individual chorales from studies of Brahms’s late style, his engagement with religious topics, and his penchant for esoteric allusion.
This lecture-recital situates five of the Op. 122 preludes within stylistic, cultural, and religious contexts established in recent Brahms studies by Beller-McKenna (2004), Notley (2007), and Berry (2014), as well as theories of “lateness” by Edward Said (2006) and “late self-fashioning” that Linda and Michael Hutcheon (2015) have identified in aging composers. Like Brahms’s other late works, the contrapuntal virtuosity of the first and fifth chorale preludes and use of the C-L-A-R-A motif in the sixth invite discussions of artifice, introspection, and enigmatic juxtaposition in the Op. 122 collection—a genre that was the bread and butter of amateur church musicians, but hardly the domain of a “respectable” nineteenth-century composer.
Brahms’s return to the organ by way of an exegetical (and very Lutheran) genre offers insight into his response to significant cultural shifts in late nineteenth-century Vienna, especially the rise of German nationalist sentiment. Noteworthy in the seventh and eleventh chorales is Brahms’s tendency to construct distinct musical spaces through dynamic contrast, manual changes, and registral shifts: correlations between musical gesture and chorale text suggest a demarcation between physical, earthly existence (often forte) and a spiritual, heavenly realm (often piano). Movements between these spaces may be read as attempts to navigate the gulf between them, a deliberate “untethering” from increasingly dystopian surroundings that also offers insight into Brahms’s personal theology.
