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RE: I don't want to be limited by Germanic-only concepts of structure

Posted by josh358 (P) on April 20, 2012 at 15:18:26

In Reply to: I don't want to be limited by Germanic-only concepts of structure posted by Chris from Lafayette on April 20, 2012 at 13:41:29:

I love Bernstein's lectures, and many of his observations here seem to me informative and astute. But IMHO, he's trying too hard to make a point that can't be made.

Bernstein says, "Tchaikovsky's large scale symphonic writing lacks the inevitability of Beethoven or, indeed, Brahms. But Tchaikovsky used the Germanic symphonic forms for his own purposes - for maximum emotional engagement and for shattering contrasts. In other words, Tchaikovsky is often seeking variety, rather than unity." And then he asks rheotrically, "Does that make his symphonic writing less valid - or less 'structural'?" But my answer to that would be yes, of course it makes it less "structural," in the same way that the similar structure of the trees on a tree make it more structural -- or the branches, the flowers, the fruit.

I think it was Tchaikovsky's intent in the first movement, to juxtapose and contrast the antsy motivic writing with the beneficent melody. Thus the emotional contrast. But, to me, he just gets lost, because to do this, he must sacrifice the formalism of the movement. By the time it's two thirds of the way through, I'm about to tear my hair out, because he's struck off in every possible direction, meaning that there's no direction left.

Furthermore, when he does develop, his efforts at development are too often perfunctory. Like Wagner, he repeats too much with too little change, and yet he never achieves the magnificent effect that Wagner, at his best, achieved. His development is as uninspired as the development of Beethoven or Brahms is inspired. As with another great melodist, it's nowhere near the level of his sublime melodies and haunting harmonies, and yet Schubert's structural deficit is nowhere near his own. Indeed, it seems to me that he could have written ten wonderful movements with what he's put in the first, had he only had the restraint and discipline to stick with one or another, and to develop it with real skill.

Guess I'm a sucker for tricks, because to me the backtracked ending of the Brahms third is the key to the entire work and one of the most haunting moments in music. The listener senses the relationship between the ending of the four movements, but not consciously, rather, intuitively, where the spirit lives. We go back to the beginning, or maybe, to borrow Churchill's phrase, the end of the beginning, and the effect is melancholy and profound.

Could it be that, as my mother used to say, you should never look too closely at your food? If we look too closely at the music that moves us, we'll find artifice, the trick behind the effect, and I think that's as true of Tchaikovsky's melodies as it is of Brahms's development. The difference, perhaps, being that we always sense that Brahms is hard at work, while Tchaikovsky, in his melody, strives for a more seemingly natural, Mozartean effect?

I like the last movement of the fourth. Brahms has transformed the theme, yes, but I see it as a transformation into the idiom of the time, and of Brahms himself; he's not trying to imitate the style of Bach, as Mozart and Beethoven sometimes did. The movement seems to be an experiment in updating or adapting an old form or thematic material to a contemporary vernacular, an exercise many composers have undertaken -- Beethoven, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Bach himself.

I can't say I love Brahms, or any composer, unreservedly -- there are times he seems too labored, or too humorless, or too melancholy or dour or even jocose -- but for me personally, he's in the very first rank of composers. Whereas, while I love some of what Tchaikovsky wrote, mostly when he isn't forcing his boat-on-the-Volga melodic gift into the straightjacket of Germanic form, I don't hear the same level of genius in Tchaikovsky that I do in Brahms, or anything like. When he tries his hand at development I get bored, wish I were somewhere else, anyplace else other than the interior of a movement that then seems interminable to me. When the melodies and harmonies come along, I come alive again. But this makes his music problematic for me.

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