Help! I hate Brahms

Sh, sh, sh! Calm down. I don’t actually hate Johannes Brahms. I marginally dislike rehearsing hour long works for choir and orchestra without the choir present. There’s also the fact that I have to play the viola part, but I’ve made amends with that before, I think…

Okay, Brahms isn’t my favorite. To keep it brief, brevity is not his strong suit. Try looking up any complete work by Brahms on YouTube. You’d be hard pressed to find anything under a half hour in total. He’s long-winded, harmonically disinteresting on the small scale, and pompously proper. For context, Penn State Philharmonic orchestra is preparing to perform Brahms’ Ein deutsches Requiem with some of the campus choirs, a piece easily an hour and a few minutes long, closer to an hour and a half when tackled by many professional orchestras.

It’s a masterpiece, no denying that. But it’s a painful one. Maybe it’s my twenty-first century, first-world problems, entitled American, impatient self, but I have a hard time appreciating that much art in one sitting, written with such an old style and such drawn out musical grammar. Similar sentiments have been said of the great Richard Wagner, a fellow German composer at the time of Brahms. I also tend to dislike the drawn-out textures and the predictably repetitive melodic and harmonic motives incorporated into Wagner’s work. (Philharmonic also recently performed a Wagner overture, which was fine, but not my favorite by any means, even when compared to something much more modern and arguably more difficult to listen to, like Anton Webern.)

Although, I’m not one to cast aside music of any kind, for any reason, and as much as it bores me, I have been listening to the requiem in earnest to gain an appreciation for it, mostly because I have to play it. There’s something about this piece in particular that I just don’t resonate with. I’ve played other Brahms that I think is much more tolerable, such as his Academic Festival Overture. The requiem, being a piece for the dead, makes me wish I was dead (not really, don’t call psychological services, please) lacking intensity and verve that would otherwise be present in a symphonic work or the like. I’ll probably survive, although it would be ironic if I didn’t (okay, I’ll stop doing that, you look nervous).

I’m not the only one that feels this way. I’m a much bigger fan of Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikowsky, who had similar sentiments and probably inspired some of the extensive jabbing I’ve been doing of Brahms so far. Tchaikovsky, in stark contrast to the German, wrote energetic and heroic tunes with harmonic interest and emotional whim which makes his music more understandable to my ear. He favors sentiment over logic, and directness over classicism, while maintaining order through both. He had some choice words to say about Brahms’ music, having nothing bad to say about his person, despite their polar characterizations. My favorite quote of his, regarding Brahms’ violin concerto, reads,

It is like a splendid pedestal for a column, but the actual column is missing, and instead, what comes immediately after one pedestal is simply another pedestal.

I certainly agree, although I must find a way to appreciate his music, and soon. The concert is not so far away: April 14 at Eisenhower Auditorium (shameless plug; everybody should come if I haven’t scared you away by telling you how much I am not a fan of the one piece we are playing – there’ll be other stuff I like and you should, too). Maybe you like Brahms, anyway, I’ve provided a number of listening examples. Let me know your opinions in the comments below.