Classical Music for Aficionados

To me Brahms, as a person , is the most interesting of all the great composers , I have read most of what has been written about him in English and some in German.He felt music was going the wrong way and when I read his reasons why , I agreed .

I believe we all look at things from our situation in life, a musician like yourself sees one thing , an historian like myself sees something else.Small poor example, first time I read of teen-age Brahms playing in cafes on Album notes
I knew at once that their were no cafes in Hamburg dock side area, at that time the biggest harbor in the world .What there was were a plethora of low-down brothels as nasty as there were on the planet .No wonder Clara Schumann , misogamy etc.I’m anti-Wagner because the most famous man In Germany wrote more hyper anti-Semitic pieces that he did music. Historians I studied under were the best in Germany, they drew a straight-line from him to Hitler .He is the only composer I abhor .

I imagine than when a skilled musician sees some thing in Music they judge ,the music as music alone .A historian might be prone to look at its effect in general as that is his skill . Of course , the musician knows more in his realm ,
what you correctly see as a fabulous twist in , say Mahler, I might hear as a dog chasing his tail

P.S . I don't know the bloggers name as I never heard of him .

@schubert ,
Great points raised.
Though I think just about every composers life is interesting. They are artists after all. (and, as a gardener, I am hypnotized by the diaries of plant explorers in the 17th, 18th centuries-Even Captain Bligh had breadfruit named for him-Blighia).
Besides anti Semitism, Wagner was just an out and out deadbeat. I never found a place for him in my listening.

No wonder Clara Schumann , misogamy etc.

What were you trying to convey? I am a bit confused?
Bob

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.