Classical Music for Aficionados

Hi gdnrbob - schubert is correct. Brahms literally grew up playing piano in some pretty nasty brothels.  Women were either madonnas or whores for him forever after.  One wonders if his experiences in them also contributed to his lack of confidence in his artistic craft that he struggled with off and on through his whole career. He literally tore up half of what he wrote. 

schubert and I have argued about Wagner on this board before. I won't rehash all of it, but I will say here for readers of this thread that almost all artists would agree that one must separate the art from the man. As far as Wagner the artist goes, he was one of the greatest iconoclasts in the history of all of the arts, truly an artistic genius. He had a bigger effect on music debatably than any other artist has ever had on his/her art. Music was never the same after him - though it did not go the direction he expected it to, it splintered off into so many different directions. Pretty much for the next 100 years, everything written was influenced by him in some way, whether pro or anti, in a musical sense.  Wagner the man was truly despicable, but almost all artists would agree that one must not throw out the art for that.  This question has come up again in a different fashion in the musical world over the last year, with some listeners wanting to get rid of their Levine and Dutoit recordings because of the sexual harassment/abuse scandals. 

The Wagner/Brahms controversy was about taking music in new directions vs. musical conservatism.  The two composers themselves rarely entered the fray (in fact they were mostly complimentary of each other's musical abilities publicly), which was fostered mostly by the famous Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick, who was most firmly on the side of Brahms and conservatism. George Bernard Shaw, who besides being an incredible playwright and essayist also happened to be one of the greatest music critics, was the most famous critic who took the part of Wagnerism (musically only, of course).   As a side note, anyone who wants an education in music criticism or the state of music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries could do no better than to read Shaw's collected music criticism. Truly wonderful writing, very entertaining, and far ahead of his time on many issues. Late in life he retracted many of the negative things he wrote about Brahms when young, too. 

At least it wasn’t Shaw who wrote “Exit in case of Brahms.”
That was Philip Hale of the Boston Globe.
Brahms, about whom I wrote a dissertation, was music’s great historian among composers.
 Like Mozart, whose style was enhanced after his study of Bach, Brahms’ stlyle was deeply informed by his contact with the Baroque master.  
My thesis was that Brahms music, at its core, was more neo-Baroque  than neo-Classical.  
In his early twenties he actually took several years off from composition to explore music from previous centuries, including, among others, the
compositions of Heinrich Schultz. He emerged from his hiatus with a style enriched with contrapuntal sophistication.
  While he examined music from the Renaissance and early and late Baroque, his greatest love was Bach.  He would sit for hours and improvise on the piano and organ in the style of Bach. 
Of course, Beethoven was his spiritual mentor as well. But in no other major  Romantic composer (Reger excepted, if you consider him major) will you find the essence of Baroque style intrinsically infused in his writing.  Aside from the Requiem, the four concertos find obvious references to Baroque contrapuntal and  concertato style. We can  hear conspicuous differences, for example from the early piano sonatas to the later piano concertos.  Whereas Mendelssohn and Schumann, to name two, referenced the Baroque symbolically, Brahms actually got into the nuts and bolts of its construction.
 Ironically, even though he was the leader of the opposite camp, Wagner also demonstrates a strong affinity to the Baroque.  He just didn’t write symphonies, concertos, sonatas, string quartets etc. But one can find copious evidence of Baroque awareness in his operas.

Just a word about Wagner.  His adoption of the Baroque is quite different from Brahms’.  Brahms is more typical of the “fire and fury” of the late Italian Baroque influence on Bach. Wagner’s Baroque leanings are from an earlier period, a lot different in character.

I can not imagine any artist whose art is worth six million lives period !I think artists that can pass it by today are as morally deficient as the vast majority of same who kowtowed to Hitler .More so really in that their lives are not in danger .

Yes, good comments, rvpiano. Both were heavily  influenced by the baroque. Brahms was actually even more influenced by Handel than by Bach.  The influence of Bach on Wagner is well documented, too.

schubert, are you actually trying to say that  you feel Wagner is responsible for the Holocaust?  Even granting that some of his writings (not his musical compositions) influenced Hitler and the Nazis, which as you say many historians do recognize, I think it is a huge stretch to call Wagner responsible for their actions over 50 years after his death. Don't you think they would have believed and done the same regardless of whether Wagner had ever existed? I have certainly never seen any historian suggest otherwise, and I have read and researched Wagner extensively, writing many papers on his music while in school. 

Appreciating the art of Wagner's music is no crime, listening to it is no crime, and performing it is no crime; and being someone who lost many relatives in the Holocaust, I frankly find your suggestion that I am somehow morally deficient VERY offensive.  Parenthetically, I am also surprised the moderators of this forum allowed the post to stand, as they seem to quickly take down posts with much less heinous personal attacks. 

Of course, Wagner's anti-Semetic writings are to be condemned, and no artist would argue otherwise.  But how is the MUSIC itself made any less great, because we disagree with/condemn much of the composer's thought or actions on an unrelated subject, or because someone else tried to appropriate the music for a despicable purpose?  While I fully understand why a survivor of the camps, for instance, might never want to hear the music of Wagner ever again, the music was NOT written for that purpose, and it is a shame to me that some essentially allow the Nazis to appropriate it, as no matter how much we condemn the man who wrote it, it remains some of the greatest music ever composed, and it is not the fault of that music that the Nazis tried to appropriate it. I argue that we should not let them, and that this is a moral choice as well as an artistic one. Condemn the man, not the art.

If we do start condemning art, where exactly does that end?  Where does one draw that line? Do you not listen to Gesualdo, for instance? He murdered his wife and her lover. Tchaikovsky was a known pedophile. Do you not listen to him? Bruckner was probably a necrophiliac. Does this make his symphonies less great? You yourself brought up the misogyny and sexism of Brahms. Are we to throw out the music of all these great artists?