The unerhörte Begebenheit as a Formal-Aesthetic Paradigm: Reading Brahms's Vocal Quartets as Musical Novellas
Johannes Brahms was an avid reader, as evidenced by his extensive personal library, catalogued by Kurt Hofmann in 1974. But despite the composer’s lifelong engagement with literature and the wealth of scholarship on the influence of fiction on other nineteenth century composers, few scholars have seriously considered the influence of literature on Brahms’s music. In exceptional cases scholars discuss Brahms’s music in relation to lyric poetry, or Greek tragedy, but arguably the century’s most representative literary genre, the German novella, has yet to be examined in connection with his music. An interpretation of Brahms’s vocal quartets (op. 31, 52, 64, 65, 92, 103, and 112) as musical novellas is particularly apt because it offers insight into the composer’s aesthetic conception of Hausmusik; according to his biographer and friend Max Kalbeck, Brahms repeatedly expressed his wish that the quartets be performed domestically, even though their extreme technical difficulty seems to preclude amateur performance. I argue Brahms’s quartets represent an imagined sociability analogous to the story-telling that is a defining characteristic of the German novella. As my analysis of “An die Heimat” (op. 64, no. 1) and “O schöne Nacht” (op. 92, no. 1) demonstrates, this literary influence is observable in the quartets’ rondo forms, which approximate the novella’s typical narrative structure: a main “framing narrative” alternates with nestled “framed narratives” (stories told by characters). In addition, I draw on Goethe’s theory of an “unprecedented event,” an unexpected or fantastic occurrence characteristic of the novella, to explain formally anomalous middle sections that enact moments of romantic self-reflection. By demonstrating how Brahms’s aesthetic of domestic intimacy manifests itself in his vocal quartets in tangible musical terms, I seek to provide insight into a neglected repertoire and establish a model for more sophisticated interactions between the mediums of music and literature.
Johannes Brahms was an avid reader, as evidenced by his extensive personal library, catalogued by Kurt Hofmann in 1974. But despite the composer’s lifelong engagement with literature and the wealth of scholarship on the influence of fiction on other nineteenth century composers, few scholars have seriously considered the influence of literature on Brahms’s music. In exceptional cases scholars discuss Brahms’s music in relation to lyric poetry, or Greek tragedy, but arguably the century’s most representative literary genre, the German novella, has yet to be examined in connection with his music. An interpretation of Brahms’s vocal quartets (op. 31, 52, 64, 65, 92, 103, and 112) as musical novellas is particularly apt because it offers insight into the composer’s aesthetic conception of Hausmusik; according to his biographer and friend Max Kalbeck, Brahms repeatedly expressed his wish that the quartets be performed domestically, even though their extreme technical difficulty seems to preclude amateur performance. I argue Brahms’s quartets represent an imagined sociability analogous to the story-telling that is a defining characteristic of the German novella. As my analysis of “An die Heimat” (op. 64, no. 1) and “O schöne Nacht” (op. 92, no. 1) demonstrates, this literary influence is observable in the quartets’ rondo forms, which approximate the novella’s typical narrative structure: a main “framing narrative” alternates with nestled “framed narratives” (stories told by characters). In addition, I draw on Goethe’s theory of an “unprecedented event,” an unexpected or fantastic occurrence characteristic of the novella, to explain formally anomalous middle sections that enact moments of romantic self-reflection. By demonstrating how Brahms’s aesthetic of domestic intimacy manifests itself in his vocal quartets in tangible musical terms, I seek to provide insight into a neglected repertoire and establish a model for more sophisticated interactions between the mediums of music and literature.
