The ground-breaking researcher Kurt Hofmann, founder (with his wife Renate) of the Brahms Institute at Lübeck and the museum at Meiningen Schloss, has died in his sleep at the age of 92.
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Great that such gifted people dedicate their energies to a truly great composer.
Brahms is often considered so-so, OK, and the association with the term ‘genius’ does not come to mind easily, if compared to composers like his ‘rival’ Wagner, or his ‘ancestor’ Beethoven. But in his own way, he was a true genius, with a daring project: developing further – on the highest level – the classical tradition of Bach, Mozart, beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, in a time when this was considered rather ‘outdated’ and any view on the past by a contemporary composer seen as demonstrating a peculiarly conservative stance and refusal to embrace progress and modernity.
Wagner said, from his imagined high seat on the imagined olympos of Musical Greatness: ‘Kinder, schafft neues!’ That Brahms did so excatly, was completely missed by Wagner and his acolytes, and still quite some listeners think: ‘oh yes, he was conservative, but I like it, so what!’ In fact Brahms was not conservative at all and strongly resisted the upcoming nationalism, antisemitism, and scientific materialism. He belonged to the ‘Bildungsbürgertum’ which was, in his time, enlightened, progressive, educated and well-read, and refrained from excess, be it cultural or political (things in which Wagner excelled). He created an oeuvre which synthesises the many strands of the classical tradition and gave it his personal touch, unobtrusive and thorough, and carried by profound musicality and scholarship. That is why his works continue to be part of the mainstay of the repertoire, and why the efforts of people like this scholar are worthwhile for music life to the utmost.
You are fighting against a straw person, Mr. Borstlap, when you posit that many serious classical music listeners think of Brahms as merely “so so”. And besides his wonderful synthesis of classical traditions and his lovely personal touch, he is, from what I understand, celebrated for the radical flexibility of his rhythms, which constitutes his own powerful progressivism alongside the chromatic radicalism of Wagner…so perhaps you can’t claim him as an icon of moderation.
Yes the rhythms in his works are wonderful and stand-out from the general squareness of his contemporaries. The subtle complexities of his textures are another feature.
It is not so many years ago when there was still a sizable anti-Brahms contingent, perhaps most notably Benjamin Britten who said (I paraphrase) that from time to time he would play through the whole of Brahms just to remind himself of how bad it all was — basically the same opinion Tchaikovsky had expressed decades earlier — and the influential (in his time) critic B.H. Haggin, who dismissed Brahms as a mere facsimile of profundity and who was not shy in taking credit for convincing Szigeti and Schnabel to drop a scheduled Brahms Sonata from one of their New York joint recitals (one that was recorded).
This is sad.
Today we have a lot of researchers and scholars studying the dead composers, but no living composer of the Classical tradition worth mentioning.
This is not true, they still have to be noticed – which will come after modernism has completely crumbled and its supporters died.