Brahms's First Symphony and September 11, 2001

Here is a beautiful piece of writing about a piece of music. The writer is Bernard Holland of the New York Times; the music is Brahms's First Symphony. It is as far from a blow-by-blow description as one could get. And yet it captures the quality of the temporal flow of that work; and for anyone familiar with the transition to the last movement of that symphony, Holland's analysis of its effect could not be more precise.


Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

September 15, 2001 Saturday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section B; Column 5; Arts & Ideas/Cultural Desk; Pg. 11

LENGTH: 854 words

HEADLINE: CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK;
As Brahms Goes By: It's Oddly Comforting

BYLINE: By BERNARD HOLLAND

BODY:

As television viewers surfed from one disaster coverage to the next on
Tuesday, they might have come across a performance of a Brahms symphony in
midswing. The juxtaposition was startling, the shock palpable. At one moment,
experience of the world seemed to spread exponentially: questions breeding more
questions, anxieties unresolved and trailing away into new anxieties. With three
measures of music, indeterminacy and the unknown condensed suddenly into a
small, dense, unreal ball of certainty. Brahms in the midst of exploding
buildings was gloriously irrelevant, a foreign world. One could not bear, or
afford, to dwell on it and so surfed on. Yet to know that it had been there was
comforting.

Music's relation to good and evil is misunderstood, because at heart
there is no relation at all. People can write moral messages and set them to the
music. People can surround music with stage pictures and come up with deeply
ethical operas like "Fidelio." But no matter how much we want to associate our
favorite art with the best instincts of humanity, the person who helps the old
lady across the street will be no more genuinely moved by a Haydn string quartet
than the person who kicks her into the gutter and steals her purse. It's not the
kind of thing we want to hear, but this is a time for clearheadedness.

In ancient times, pop tunes shared scurrilous doggerel and the most holy of
biblical texts. SS officers wept at the beauties of the Schubert C major
Quintet. Dreadful men like Richard Wagner composed some of the most
soul-stirring music. Virtue has no lock on musical beauty.

So how do we explain the shock of this interloping fragment of Brahms? It did
not endorse good nor did it reject evil, but for a moment it fundamentally
rearranged our minds. In the turmoil around us, there had been shady beginnings
and no ends in sight. Situations changed minute to minute. Here was the process
of life itself contracted and multiplied in intensity but in the end the story
of us all. We essentially dangle through life. Our control over it is illusory.
We have little idea of where we go or what will befall us. French executioners
until recent times crept sock-footed along death row, startling the condemned in
their cells and dragging them out. How different are our own deaths from this?

Those few moments of televised Brahms dangled as well, but with a difference.
Sonata form is essentially the struggle to reconcile opposing forces, but this
particular struggle was well under way as we tuned in. We did not hear where
these several chords came from or where they would end. But in another way we
did. We knew the piece, had heard it hundreds of times, so that superimposed on
the uncertainty of the moment was also the knowledge that everything would turn
out well. What so startled the listener in this moment of turmoil was to come
across something that would end in a way already known to us.

People have been asking "What is art?" for a long time, but here is a modest
proposal. Art is our small, fragile claim to control over our lives. Terrorism
offered us only uncertainty. Brahms brought the chill of uncertainty soothed by
the knowledge of an outcome. Aristotle's dictum -- that art has a beginning, a
middle and an end -- may sound simple-minded, but it is deeply profound. No
statement ever penetrated to the significance of a novel, a painting or tone
poem more efficiently.

The artist plays god, and "play" is the significant word. For the artist in
us is also the child, and the Brahms First Symphony is one of the games that is
played. Suddenly creation is in our hands. We are the authors of our own Big
Bang. We line up the experiences along the way, and it is our will that brings
things to a stop. Outside the studio (or the playpen) time drags us helplessly
along; the composer manipulates the clock at will. In the bigger view of things,
the artist's effort to give limits to what we see and hear is ephemeral. The
Brahms First is a toy we have made. Once it leaves our ears, we have no more
control over our fates than we did before it started. Art may not change the
world, but for a few minutes at least it makes us feel good.

If we use different words, music may after all have some of the moral
qualities we want so much to assign it. Change "good-evil" to "order-disorder"
and the proximity starts to narrow. Think of your body, for example, in terms of
political virtue. We remain healthy so long as our livers and kidneys function
as the orderly bureaucrats they are trained to be. Disturb their routines, and
you are in trouble. Spray paint a Braque painting, and again you have replaced a
calculated plan with chaos. Bomb a city, and the equation of evil with disorder
becomes even closer.

This is what that fragment of Brahms said to us. Heard in peaceful times, it
would have been one more reassurance that God is in his Heaven and everything
below will be all right. What surrounded Brahms on that day, I am afraid, made
its solace real but fleeting. Music is a form of protective gear against sudden
violent death. It is thin and penetrable, but it may be all we have.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

GRAPHIC: Photo: Johannes Brahms (Camera Press)

LOAD-DATE: September 15, 2001