Epilogue

This brief epilogue addresses the relationship—historical and present—between the exclusivity of the priestly performing persona and the development and perpetuation of canonical compositions. The author suggests that the two reinforce each other; Clara Schumann’s status as a priestess was informed by her selection of certain repertoire, but at the same time her “restrained” performance of the pieces helped mark them as serious works worthy of preservation. Jumping to today’s world of performance, the author analyzes the rhetoric in a New York Times article by Anthony Tommasini comparing two young pianists. The juxtaposition of these sources suggests that some nineteenth-century values of priestly performance, such as “seriousness” and “modesty,” still inform music criticism today.

Prostitutes, Trauma, and Biographical Hermeneutics of the Fin de Siècle

The image of the musical priest contrasts with the biographical anecdote of young impoverished Brahms playing piano in dive bars. Scholars have debated the veracity of this anecdote, while failing to interrogate the cultural and intellectual conditions that allowed it to flourish when it did, after Brahms’s death in fin-de-siècle Vienna. This chapter contextualizes the development of anecdotal variations and biographical interpretations of this life event with contemporary advances in psycho-sexual theories. In short, the earlier, romanticized narratives of a strong Brahms escaping unscathed from adversity gave way to Freudian diagnoses of trauma and psycho-sexual dysfunction which supposedly could be perceived in his music. Ultimately, this contributes to a picture of fin-de-siècle Vienna in which even Brahms, the priest of pure music, was drawn into discussions of degeneracy.

A Post-Romantic Priest of Music

This chapter introduces the concept of the priest of music as it relates to Brahms reception through 1874, the year of La Mara’s substantial biography of the composer. I argue that the concept, fundamentally an early Romantic art-religious creation, was superimposed uncomfortably onto Brahms’s first mature style in the early 1860s. Brahms’s study of counterpoint, recognized by critics as a turn from his earlier Romantic subjective style, inspired narratives of self-improvement and discipline. These narratives combined the ethical implications of counterpoint retained from its original associations with sacred repertoire with the success of the German Requiem (1868) to create the image of an ascetic priest devoted to pure music. As seen in La Mara’s biography of Brahms, critics could modify the outdated Romantic notion of priest to suit Brahms’s post-1850s biographical context and musical style.

Introduction

This introductory chapter establishes foundations of the book: who formed the priesthood of art (Johannes Brahms, Clara Schumann, Amalie Joachim, Joseph Joachim) and the birth of artistic priesthood from the art-religious spirit of German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. In particular, this chapter introduces the notion that the artistic priesthood occupied a kind of alternative gendered space—neither fully masculine nor feminine—and that desirable characteristics of an artistic priest (devotion, humility, spiritial leadership) could be gendered in various ways in musical-critical discourse. After midcentury, changes in music aesthetics and gender roles created pressure to understand Romantic notions of musical priesthood as antiquated and outmoded. In short, Brahms offers a case study in the intersection of art-religious values with a gender dichotomy that became increasingly prescriptive over the second half of the nineteenth century.

Ambiguities of the Priesthood

The unstable category of priesthood brought with it ambiguities and sometimes unfortunate implications. For Brahms the bachelor, whose own performances garnered occasional feminized rhetoric even from Eduard Hanslick, the priesthood could be interpreted as an avoidance of sexuality. This chapter contextualizes art-religious rhetoric of asceticism and martyrdom with burgeoning psychological approaches to artistic identity, including Max Klinger’s own psychological interpretation of the martyr Prometheus in his Brahms-Phantasie. Priestly abstinence is then contextualized with contemporary notions of chastity seen in Paolo Mantegazza’s studies of sexuality and with Friedrich Nietzsche’s ascetic ideals. The author suggests that, on one level, some of Brahms’s most heteronormative supporters such as Philipp Spitta and Josef Viktor Widmann wrote masculinized rhetoric in response to these negative implications.

Priestesses of Art

This chapter delves into the largely unexplored intersections of gender stereotypes and art-religious rhetoric in music criticism. It introduces case studies on the priestesses of art—and champions of Brahms’s compositions—Clara Schumann and Amalie Joachim, showing how for these performers, repertoire selection and performativity influenced the creation of motherly priestesses. In the context of nineteenth-century discourses on gender and sex roles, intensified by the nascent women’s rights movement, we encounter a paradox of the pure style: Priestesses were invested with a kind of natural sensual authority that was suited only to women as primordial life-givers. This analysis establishes a more nuanced gendered context for understanding the priestly rhetoric and its criticism.

Imperatives of Purity and Sensuality

This chapter analyzes the factors contributing to the debates over musical purity and sensuality that had formed a significant thread of music criticism by the early 1850s, when Brahms began his career. The construction of purity developed in two interrelated ways: First, through the German Romantic valuation of music from Bach and earlier; this early music’s contrapuntal techniques and mostly diatonic harmony were praised as pure and moral by a range of commentators from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Justus Thibaut to Dominicus Mettenleiter. Second, in Eduard Hanslick’s famous 1854 treatise, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, he attempted to divorce music from its extra-musical and political contexts; nonetheless, his argument retained the connotations of moral superiority while claiming purity for contemporary instrumental music. Pure music stood in opposition to Wagnerian sensuality, a Young Hegelian development that presented revisionist notions not only of opera but also of music’s meaning and communicative power. In this context, ideas of musical purity came under fire just as Brahms began his compositional career.

The Temptation of Opera

This chapter explores opera—established as the antithesis of musical priesthood—as a site of debate over musical sensuality including the gendered discourse on opera and the critique of purity in those composers who, in Wagner’s words, “failed” to write opera with their “chaste and innocent hands.” A generation of revolutionary music critics, including Rudolf Benfey and Ludwig Eckardt, applied these Wagnerian values to Brahms with negative results, depicting purity as his weakest characteristic. Brahms’s own potential libretti and styles of opera in the 1860s and 1870s seem to explore alternatives to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, from genres such as the oratorio to Singspiel, and topics including Carlo Gozzi’s eighteenth-century fairy-tale plays. Two of Brahms’s works from this period, the Op. 57 Daumer lieder and Op. 50 Rinaldo, contain dramatic and erotic elements that inspired some contemporaries to hope Brahms would take the next step toward an opera.