Brahms’s Music in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophy

Vicente Ordóñez ⎯ Universitat Jaume I (Spain)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to consider in detail the role that music, more specifically, the

music of Brahms, played in Wittgenstein’s thought. To this end, the author studies

Wittgenstein’s impressions on classical and modern music. Special attention is given to

Wittgenstein’s comparison between the works of Brahms and others composers’ works

such as Mendelssohn’s or Bruckner’s. In addition, the author reflects on the function

that classical music could play as a means to express values or ethical principles.

Keywords

Understanding, culture, classical music, explanation, genius.

The Viennese journal Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, in its May 2011 edition, is

devoted mostly to celebrating the centenary of Gustav Mahler’s death. The leading

article is entitled ‘Umkämpft, verdrängt, geliebt’: disputed, displaced, beloved Mahler.

In its pages the publisher examines the controversial figure of the Bohemian composer;

the wrath that caused his explorations of new sound territories; the rejection of his most

innovative symphonies; the mistreatment suffered by editors, administrators and music

press, especially from critics such as Robert Hirschfeld, Rudolf Louis, etc., who had

shown great courage in attacking Mahler: his music, they said, was ‘impotent’,

‘mawkish’, ‘banal’, ‘a big joke’; his status as stateless —Mahler, certainly, exemplified

better than no one Edmond Jabés’ archetype of stranger: someone who raises all sorts

of suspicions and fears around him; who keeps distances with communities, authorities,

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associations or groupings; who is the absolute otherness or l'étrange–je. This is not the

place, however, to argue about the details of the life and works of Mahler. If we take

Mahler for the purpose of the present discussion it is just because it is the first glimpse

of musical decline as Ludwig Wittgenstein understood it. In the miscellaneous of the

autobiographical and philosophical notes of Wittgenstein edited by Georg Henrik von

Wright (Vermischte Bemerkungen or Culture and Value in its English Edition), we

found the following reflection:

If it is true that Mahler's music is worthless, as I believe to be the case, then the question

is what I think he ought to have done with his talent. For quite obviously it took a set of

very rare talents to produce this bad music. Should he, say, have written his

symphonies and then burnt them? Or should he have done violence to himself and not

written them? Should he have written them and realized that they were worthless? But

how could he have realized that? I can see it, because I can compare his music with

what the great composers wrote (Wittgenstein 1980: 67).

Mahler had what Wittgenstein called talent but, then, why was his music worthless?

Was it because to create one has to be possessed by genius? But how could we judge a

composer’s work? Because criticizing and judging a piece of music is nothing but an

aesthetic judgement. And, according to what Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus,

aesthetics, as ethics, cannot be expressed (6.421). How could we judge, then, the

productions of a composer, his symphonies, fugues, chamber pieces, and sonatas?

Confronting them, comparing them with those of other composers —with the great

composers? Let us consider how music breaks into Wittgenstein’s thought by the hand

of one of the greatest composers considered by him: Johannes Brahms.

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The decline of the spirit in music

In a letter by Sergei Prokofiev to Paul Wittgenstein dated 1931, the Russian composer

tried to figure out what shall be the impression that Piano Concerto No. 4 will have on

Paul Wittgenstein ⎯a piano piece commissioned by the one-armed pianist and created

therefore specifically for him. Prokofiev argued that Paul Wittgenstein should keep a

certain distance to the passages that could be difficult to understand. The problem, he

claimed, was that Paul Wittgenstein was nothing but a musician of the 19th century; he,

Prokofiev, being of the 20th (Waugh 2009: 189). The same assessment is valid for his

brother Ludwig. Music ended for Ludwig Wittgenstein in the 19th century with the

works of Brahms and, to some extent, with the blind organist Josef Labor. The

compositions of Labor aside, Brahms was, with Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and

Schubert, the last of the great masters respected and admired by Wittgenstein. Mahler

and, broadly speaking, modern music, caused in Wittgenstein rejection, contempt and

mishandling. Why? In order to comprehend properly this issue we should pay attention

to what Wittgenstein understood by culture. Culture, he wrote in an early draft of the

printed foreword to Philosophical Remarks, is

like a big organization which assigns each of its members a place where he can work in

the spirit of the whole; and it is perfectly fair for his power to be measured by the

contribution he succeeds in making to the whole enterprise. (Wittgenstein 1980: 6)

This concept of culture bears a resemblance to the concept of culture as formulated by

Spengler in The Decline of the West. Spengler interpreted culture as an organic structure,

as a biological entity independent and autonomous that reached its peak in its own

development or whole life-cycle —alle Gestalten sind ähnlich, und keine gleichert der

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andern, sang Goethe in The Metamorphosis of Plants: all forms are similar and none is

like another, yet all show identical appearance. Following Goethe’s remarks, Spengler

believed that culture was also a form that not only guided those who belong to it, but

that brought together the energy of its members and took their individuality to a new

dimension. Spengler determined the structure of culture morphologically and introduced

in its logical sequence not only the moments of overabundance and fullness, but also of

impotence, extinction, crisis and regression. In fact, ‘we are now experiencing the

decrescendo.’ (Spengler 1927: 424) This declining time, opposite side of culture, was

what Wittgenstein pointed with the term Unkultur. ‘In an age without culture on the

other hand forces become fragmented and the power of an individual man is used up in

overcoming opposing forces and frictional resistances.’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 6)

Wittgenstein considered that this might not have to do with a valuable judgement. He

just noted that the spirit of European and American civilization reflected the crisis of the

modern subject, who did not have the structure available for introducing a meaningful

action.

In this context music, as happens to philosophy or science, found itself in a

process of total disintegration. This is relevant because culture, in Western civilization,

was synonymous with musical culture. It was towards the end of the 18th century and,

mainly, from the outbreak of the Romantic Movement, that in Central European

countries musical expression became the most important of the Arts. There was a multi-

faceted and heterogeneous line ranging from Palestrina’s vocal music to the polyphonic

constructivism of Frescobaldi, the contrapuntal works of Bach and, from there, to

Wagner’s Parsifal or Brahms’s Deutsches Requiem. Only through sounding form in

motion we were able to reach the purity of true emotions, the indefinite, the unlimited

⎯as program music and absolute or pure music followers will defend. In

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Wittgenstein’s opinion, music was not just the epitome of culture, but also the most

sophisticated of all Arts. His student and friend Maurice Drury explained that by

watching Wittgenstein, one could understand that music was something very deep and

central in his life. ‘I will never forget how many times he quoted Schopenhauer’s

judgment, namely: that music is an expression of the inner nature of the world.’ (Nyíri

1986: 186) Also, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin considered that for the

Wittgensteins as a family ‘culture was pre-eminently musical culture.’ (Janik &

Toulmin 1973: 172) Indeed, music was not only a random entertainment that involved

the entire family in the Musiksaal but, fundamentally, the way by which the

Wittgenstein’s communicated among themselves. From that perspective, therefore,

music was not just the finest existing art: music itself was the highest form of life.

It was in this cadence and environment of harmony and rhythm that Wittgenstein

felt, perhaps with greater intensity, the deep crisis affecting the Western spirit of the 20th

century. Only when the decline of culture took on a real shape could it be understood

that, in European and American civilization sport, science, industry, dance music,

architecture, engineering, etc., have moved to centre stage. The consequences were

catastrophic. And they were because they affected the ontic structure of the modern

subject itself. This crucial point could explain the insistence of Wittgenstein by

exposing what for him could not be but fraud: modern music as a spurious art which

degenerated of their origin. In his diaries of the 1930s edited by Ilse Somavilla

(Movements of Thought) it reads:

The music of past times always corresponds to certain maxims of good & right at that

time. Thus we recognize in Brahms the principles of Keller, etc., etc. And that is why

good music which was found today or recently, which is therefore modern, must seem

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 absurd, for if it corresponds to any of the maxims articulated today it must be dirt.

(Wittgenstein 2003: 67)

Music that arose without spiritual substrate, without ethical or esthetical background,

was absurd and mendacious, a dissonance that strove to achieve an existence so

voluminous that, finally, it ended up looking mystified. According to Wittgenstein, 20th

century music was, in a certain way, the development of a significant volume of

footnotes left by the great masters of the 18th and 19th century. Modern music was very

different from the measured and proportional melody that did not want to express it all,

but rather suggest ⎯or from the fanciful and voluble irrationality the Romantics called

Humoresque. The roots of classical music germinated in the land of Goethe, Hebel,

Schiller, Hölderlin, Uhland, Möricke or Keller. The language of modern music, instead,

was foreign to Wittgenstein. ‘At the time of the civilization, at the age without culture in

which the spirit withdrew’, says Vicente Sanfélix, at this age ‘Arts decline and the true

and strong natures which expresses the value of the human being just follow a private

interest in the context of a mass society.’ (Sanfélix 2005a: 293) If the culture that

protected the spirit of European and American civilization was bankrupt, the music that

resulted from that civilization could only be the expression and maximum realization of

the same bankrupt.

Understanding Brahms

It is well known the rejection that academic life caused to Wittgenstein, who publicly

boasted of having not read a single line of the Corpus Aristotelicum. However, he

showed lively interest in Western films, in German romantic poetry, in gardening or in

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American detective publications ⎯Detective Story Magazine was, apparently, his

favourite. His former pupil Norman Malcolm provided those magazines to him

regularly. In the course of the correspondence between the two philosophers, it seems

that Malcolm had sent him, not his favourite detective magazine, but another one.

Wittgenstein admonished him: ‘I wonder why you tried to be original instead of

sticking to the good, old, tried out stuff.’ (Malcolm 2001a: 87) Beyond the anecdotical,

the sentence summarizes accurately the attitude of Wittgenstein to music. An annotation

of his diary of 1931 described this attitude as follows: ‘when for a change the later ones

of the great composers write in simple harmonic progressions, they are showing

allegiance to their ancestral mother.’ And added: ‘especially in these moments (where

the others are most moving) Mahler seems especially unbearable to me & I always want

to say then: but you have only heard this from the others, that isn’t (really) yours.’

(Wittgenstein 2003:93) Wittgenstein commended the simple harmonic developments of

the last great composers because the alternations and modulations of their musical

pieces occurred to relative keys: there was a real tonal core from which the music

constantly departed and to which it always returned (let’s think about Brahms’s first

major project of chamber music, the String Sextet Op. 18: despite the diverse

transformations, the variations are structurally strict). Wagner and, mainly, Mahler and

Strauss’ music was seen as marking a crisis in the tonal language. In modern music, but

above all, in the music of Mahler, the progressive destruction of tonality seemed to

Wittgenstein more than he could bear. It was as if the abandonment of the unified key

system would lead to a chaos of new sounds, instead of respecting that good, old, tried

out stuff.1 Brahms’s music was such a different kind of thing. The master of Hamburg,

far removed from the new ideals of music-drama and symphonic poems of the

Neudeutsche Schule of Weimar, was connected with the classical tradition: he was the

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great scholar, not only of the masterpieces of Bach and Handel, but of the Renaissance

and early Baroque music. But he was not just a performer. Actually, from

Wittgenstein’s perspective, Brahms could be to music what Alyosha Karamazov was to

morality: crystalline purity, thoroughness, total integrity or translucent clarity. In his

notes of the 1930s, a passionate Wittgenstein wrote: ‘the strength of the thoughts in

Brahms’s music (…). Brahms’s overwhelming ability.’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 23-25) The

compositions of this kind of young and ideal hero taken from a novel by Jean Paul, as

Hanslick characterized him, represented the culmination of the classic overpowering

model. Schoenberg, in his essay Brahms the progressive, was the first who emphasized

the innovations introduced by the German composer in musical language.

Asymmetry, combinations of phrases of differing lengths, numbers of measures not

divisible by eight, four or even two, i.e. imparity of the number of measures, and other

irregularities already appear in the earliest works of Brahms. (Schoenberg 1984: 416)

It is clearly unlikely that Wittgenstein was alien to the peculiarities of the Brahmsian

sound world. In his memoirs, the dramatist Max Zweig explained that he met

Wittgenstein during his stay in the Moravian city of Olmütz ⎯at Paul Engelmann’s

house in particular, called not without some irony Mauritzplatz Palace. Wittgenstein

was sent in the middle of the First World War in order to do an official course. Zweig

explained that he once witnessed a conversation between Wittgenstein and the concert

pianist Fritz Zweig on the ‘similarity and difference of the music of Schubert and

Brahms; but the understanding of this talk presupposed a deep knowledge of music, so I

couldn’t follow it.’ (Zweig 1987: 78) We could assure that a person who had been

educated in the Viennese Bildungsbürgertum of the 19th century, with an extraordinary

musical sensitivity and a perfect pitch, as Wittgenstein had, was able to penetrate the

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core of the music of Brahms and glimpse its mainsprings and nuances. In his diaries he

wrote:

Music composed at the piano, on the piano, music composed thinking with the quill &

music composed exclusively by hearing within must bear a completely different

character, & create a completely different sort of impression.

I definitely think that Bruckner composed by hearing within & imagining the

orchestra playing, that Brahms composed with the quill. Of course that presents matters

much simpler than they are. Yet it hits upon one characteristic. (Wittgenstein 2003: 85)

It is interesting to note how Wittgenstein connected the difficulty of the composition

with the aridity of writing music. If Bruckner created music with his inner ear it was due

to the reproductive imagination: he was able to apprehend the sounds of his mind and

turn them into musical notes. This subjective experience had nothing to do with the

experience of composing a piece of music thought out with pen on paper: if the first

practice could be achieved without real effort, the second required thorough

concentration and rigour. For this reason, Wittgenstein will defend the fact that the

compositions by Brahms were long-winded, indeterminate and abstract. If the music of

Beethoven or Schubert could be used by the culture industry, Brahms’s evolving

musical style could hardly be used for the same purpose: its harshness and strictness had

a bitter taste, something that prevented its understanding. But, why is it difficult to

understand Brahms’s music? Is it because of the complex rhythmic structure of his

works? And where, then, is the problem with its abstraction? Probably music illustrates

better than any other art the complexity that has accompanied its understanding. Ray

Monk reproduces a conversation between Moritz Schlick and Wittgenstein in the

context of a discussion on theological ethics issues. The point was to explore whether

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die Erklärung, the explanation of musical narratives, was possible or not.

What is valuable in a Beethoven sonata? The sequence of notes? The feelings

Beethoven had when he was composing it? The state of mind produced by listening to

it? ‘I would reply’, said Wittgenstein, ‘that whatever I was told, I would reject, and that

not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation’. (Monk 1991:

305)

As we are used to make of synesis or understanding an action linked to the phenomenon

of explanation, the breakdown of that causal link baffles us. How is one to know the

causes or motives that make possible the righteous judgment of a work of art? The

attempt to establish a series of explanatory guidelines that constitute the scaffolding of

the proper understanding is probably a chimera. The same fact passes unnoticed in the

field of language: as language users, we believe that we not only to understand but also

control language. But language is, as Wittgenstein claimed, a labyrinth of paths. And if

we accept, like Borges, that a labyrinth is a carved house to confuse humans, language

itself takes the form of a maze in which one is lost without being aware of one’s own

loss. Then, how can we be sure to understand the Goldberg Variations, the Eroica, the

ballets of Stravinsky or even Don Cherry’s Symphony for improvisers? To explain to his

Cambridge students how, after a long period of twisting and turning, he came to

understand the poetry of Klopstock, Wittgenstein said:

Take the question: “How should poetry be read? What is the correct way of reading it?”

(…). I had an experience with the 18th century poet Klopstock. I found that the way to

read him was to stress his metre abnormally. Klopstock put ˯ ̲ ˯ (etc.) in front of his

poems. When I read his poems in this new way, I said: “Ah-ha, now I know how why

10
 he did this.” What had happened? I had read this kind of stuff and had been moderately

bored, but when I read it in this particular way, intensely, I smiled, said: “This is grand,”

etc. But I might not have said anything. The important fact was that I read it again and

again. When I read these poems I made gestures and facial expressions which were

what would be called gestures of approval. But the important thing was that I read the

poems entirely differently, more intensely, and said to others: “Look! This is how they

should be read. (Wittgenstein 1966: 5)

Gestures, facial expressions, screaming, movements and interjections... the process of

understanding of any artistic manifestations is an ambiguous observable fact that is

expressed in a variety of ways. Sounds, such as concepts, flow from each other. The

difficulty relates to capturing the connections, the series and the body of meanings. To

adopt one of the central issues of the Tractatus, it could be argued that Wittgenstein

pointed out that understanding music can be showed, not explained or said.

So how do we explain to someone what “understanding music” means? By specifying

the images, kinaesthetic sensations, etc., experienced by someone who understands?

More likely, by drawing attention (zeigt) to his expressive movements. (Wittgenstein

1980: 70)

On Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein wondered how to understand a picture, a

drawing: ‘here too there is understanding and failure to understand.’ (§526)

Wittgenstein is not saying that there can be no understanding. If it is true understanding,

however, it is not due to explanation, but to instruction or training in a particular context;

to rule-governed behaviour; to language-games; etc. Anyway, to be able to understand a

proposition or a figure, to capture the essence of a musical theme, does not imply that

11
much of its meaning should not get completely out of hand. To this end, either it is

necessary to be submerged in a particular culture oneself. This is the direction in which

we should place Wittgenstein’s reflections on the works and the personality of William

Shakespeare: ‘I believe that if one is to enjoy a writer one has to like the culture he

belongs to as well. If one finds it indifferent or distasteful, one’s admiration cools off.’

(Wittgenstein 1980: 85) Only as a members of a specific culture could we, not only

enjoy, but also understand any artistic expression in a proper way.

For how can it be explained what ‘expressive playing’ is? Certainly not by anything that

accompanies the playing.—What is needed for the explanation? One might say: a

culture.—If someone is brought up in a particular culture—and then reacts to music in

such-and-such a way, you can teach him the use of the phrase ‘expressive playing’.

(Wittgenstein 1970: 29)

Music —a language where languages end, in Rilke’s inspired expression— is an

experience that requires a definite area and an explicit formative stage to be understood.

Why did the music of Brahms have something that other music did not have? The good

music, the music with which Wittgenstein identified himself, was the music that it was

capable of expressing values because it gave a particular answer to the spiritual

problems and needs of the human being. Wittgenstein held the opinion that the music of

Brahms displayed a series of positive values as a result of its inclusion in a particular

culture, whose decline obscured its understanding more and more.

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Sons of god

In Wittgenstein’s personal notebooks, the name of Brahms was frequently associated

with others composers’ names: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Bruckner, etc.

Somehow, Brahms’s music came close to the romantic conservatism of Mendelssohn,

who represented better than any other, perhaps, the model of classical perfection.

Mendelssohn was idolized and repudiated alike. On one hand, Schumann appreciated

the refined, enlightened and Mozartian style of Mendelssohn. On the other hand,

Wagner attacked him because of what he considered Mendelssohn’s incapability for

true art: in Das Judentum in der Musik Wagner claimed that he could not create music

capable of moving heart and soul. Wittgenstein mentioned that between Mendelssohn

and Brahms was an evident affinity, a close kinship or Verwandschaft:

there is definitely a certain sort of kinship between Brahms and Mendelssohn; but I do

not mean that shown by the individual passages in Brahms's works which are

reminiscent of passages by Mendelssohn, ⎯ the kinship I am speaking of could be

better expressed by saying that Brahms does with complete rigour what Mendelssohn

did only half-rigorously. Or: often Brahms is Mendelssohn without the flaws.

(Wittgenstein 1980: 21)

Wittgenstein seemed to agree with Mendelssohn’s opponents’ arguments, and believed

that there was a lack of depth and emotion in his music. Mendelssohn did not have the

primitive instinct and strength that characterizes the pure artist: he was an untragic

composer. Because ‘within all great art there is a WILD animal: tamed.’ (Wittgenstein

1980: 37) And in Mendelssohn there was not. Could we find in Brahms this wildes Tier,

this animal-in-a-cage which defines the pure artist? Ray Monk has described one of

13
Wittgenstein’s first images of what a pure artist should be. When Wittgenstein was a

child he was woken at three in the morning astonished by the sound of the piano. The

player was his brother Hans. Hans was sweating, remembered Wittgenstein, because he

was playing in such an excited and almost manic way, that Ludwig recognized in his

brother the condition of genius (Monk 1991: 13). Similarly, Max Kalbeck, in his

detailed biography of Johannes Brahms, wrote how Brahms was caught unawares by

him in his Ischl summer house: Kalbeck, watching without being observed, moved

closer to the room in which Brahms was creating a fascinating piece on the piano.

While this music was taking shape and the performance became more passionate, the

strange roars, the groans and moans were so loud that, in its climax, degenerated into

noisy howling: ‘his eyes were lost in emptiness and shone like those of a Raubtieres or

predator.’ (Kalbeck 1913a: 248) Wittgenstein would probably be thrilled with this

passionate and angry image of the temper of Brahms ⎯an image that might well be a

symbol of the great art that, unlike Mendelssohn, Brahms did possess.

If Brahms had something that Mendelssohn had not, it is not clear whether in

Wittgenstein’s opinion Brahms could be considered a genius. The idea of genius,

ultimate expression of a central theme of the romantic era, was one of Wittgenstein’s

biggest obsessions. Following Weininger’s considerations2, in his diaries Wittgenstein

showed a racial prejudice about it: ‘amongst Jews “genius” is found only in the holy

men. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented. (Myself for

instance.).’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 18) Although he had been educated in the Christian

tradition, Mendelssohn, like Wittgenstein, belonged to an ancient Jewish family. Those

roots, said Wittgenstein, were like a stumbling block: Jews rarely have the power to

create true art. According to Wittgenstein, one could not find among them this colloidal

and synthetic quality called genius. But there is more. Wittgenstein pointed out that we

14
might not lose sight of the necessary framework for the possible appearance of a genius:

the audacity, the courage or nerve ⎯der Mut⎯. Mendelssohn was a talented composer,

but he was not a musician of violent and strong will. His music was, therefore,

powerless: in his musical thought there was such a lack of courage, energy and attitude,

that he could not ever be seen as a genius. What was, in Wittgenstein’s opinion, the

paradigm of genius? Who had enough talent, character and courage to be considered a

genius? Who were the true geniuses? Mostly those whose seeing is nothing but

foreseeing; whose telling is nothing but foretelling; whose knowing is nothing but

foreknowing; those who write in the obscure language of prophecy and whom

Wittgenstein called ‘the actual sons of god’: Mozart and Beethoven (McGuiness 2008:

34). And Brahms? Was he one of the chosen few? The music of Brahms had such

suggestion and power, that it nearly brought Wittgenstein to kill himself. Wittgenstein’s

suicide attempts were common, and if Wittgenstein’s evocation of his childhood is to be

believed, he considered the possibility of committing suicide as early as ten or eleven

years of age, even before Hans and Rudolph’s death (Monk 2009: 37). In his essay A

reading against Shakespeare, George Steiner explained that Wittgenstein confessed

once to Norman Malcolm that the slow movement of the third Quartet of Brahms had

led him twice to the brink of suicide (Steiner 2001b: 96). Music as powerful as

Brahms’s chamber music (the String Quartet Op. 67 in b flat major can be described as

ineffable or mystic), which had the ability to activate Wittgenstein’s self-destructive

impulses, could not be a mellow and lukewarm music: its intensity led epekeina tes

ousías, beyond the essence, beyond the entity or being. This could be the reason why

Wittgenstein considered it überwältigend: overwhelming, emotionally striking or

stunning. The music of Mendelssohn, despite its excellence and perfection, happened to

be an exercise in virtuosity ⎯Wittgenstein will say about his compositions that they

15
were made of musical arabesques. Even Wagner did not have the strength of thought

that Wittgenstein attributed to Brahms. ‘Wagnerian drama too is not drama so much as

an assemblage of situations strung together as though on a thread which, for its part, is

merely cleverly spun and not inspired as the motifs and situations are.’ (Wittgenstein

1980: 41) According to Wittgenstein, the inspired spontaneity of Wagner’s leitmotivs or

leading themes was neither necessary nor sufficient to create a genuine work of art.

Because it was quite unlikely that the Gesamtkunstwerk could just thread from a

miniaturist technic based on recurring musical fragments, melodic sequences or single

sounds. It would be not a highly complex problem to bear in mind the leitmotivs of

Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, which are clear, not just rhythmically, but melodically. In

The Ring of the Nibelung, Hans von Wolzogen, editor of the Bayreuther Blätter,

identified not less than ninety Leitmotive that were, however, barely defined. Regarding

the Wagnerian epic cycle Wittgenstein wrote: ‘thus the only lasting & authentic

passages in the “Ring” are the epic ones in which text or music narrate. And therefore

the most impressive words of the “Ring” are the stage directions.’ (Wittgenstein 2003:

109) The merit of Wagner’s proposal, though, lay in having positively correlated epic

myths and leading themes. The ability of Wagner to connect two separate areas,

however, showed his talent, not his genius. In his annotations of 1943 Wittgenstein

emphasised:

Genius is what makes us forget the master' s talent.

Genius is what makes us forget skill.

Where genius wears thin skill may show through. (Overture to the Mastersingers.)

Genius is what prevents us from seeing the master' s talent.

Only where genius wears thin can you see the talent. (Wittgenstein 1980: 43)

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Wagner, contrary to what Spengler and, above all, Weininger considered ⎯’Wagner,

the greatest individual since Christ’ (Weininger 2005: 310)⎯ was an author who,

despite his enormous talents, abilities or skills, was not a son of god. Paul Engelmann

recalled that, if in their meetings they enjoyed Fritz Zweig performances’ at the piano or

organ ⎯interpretations that included Mozart, Schumann, Schubert or Brahms⎯ ‘in our

conversations we execrated Richard Wagner, that destroyer of music and culture, who

at the time was still considered the pope of music. Wittgenstein did not join in this

execration, but he did not much object either.’ (Flowers 1999: 8) Wittgenstein

recognized Wagner’s merit of having connected myth and Leitmotiv: here would be his

mastery. However, Wagner was not for Wittgenstein one of those big suns who come

around cyclically and who are the central core of a culture ⎯as Goethe was; also

Möricke, Lessing, Mozart or Beethoven. But, again, was Brahms one of them?

Nuances

Beethoven's music signified to the restless young German composers of the 19th and, to

some extent, of the 20th century, the stone veneer that covered the actions of those who

wanted to revitalize with adolescent enthusiasm, strength and passion, the withered life

of men. Thus, to write a sonata for piano, a string quartet or a symphony, was

tantamount to being measured by the compositions of Beethoven that, somehow, were

the standardized prototypes a musician should follow. Brahms venerated Beethoven: at

his modest Karlgasse’s house there was a portrait of Bach and a bust of the Rhineland

musician. This admiration implied a dual responsibility: to wrote, not only a symphony

that reflected the internal evolution of the Beethovenian Symphony, but a work that

lived up to Schumann’s expectations. In the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann

17
hailed Brahms as a ‘Messiah’, the true Apostle, the one over his cradle graces and

heroes have kept watch (Platt 2003a: 310). Schumann's recognition and admiration were

a great joy to Brahms. Anyway, the responsibility almost overflew the creative capacity

of Brahms, who will spend more than fifteen years composing his first Symphony. In

his correspondence the weight, the load and requirement is felt on several occasions

⎯sometimes, Brahms referred his symphonic works not with the usual Symphonie, but

with the term Sinfonie, as if wanting to remove transcendence from the creations he

engendered. Wittgenstein, who bring together the attributes that, according to Gracián,

make a prodigy (the ready wit, the profound judgement, and the quaint discerning),

seemed to apprehend the fragile musical ambivalence and the self-critical spirit of

Brahms ⎯’it often makes me sad that I no longer know at all how one composes, how

one creates’, he wrote on one occasion to Clara Schumann (Brahms 2001: 104).

Wittgenstein thought that Brahms and Wagner ‘have imitated Beethoven; but what in

him was cosmic, becomes earthly with them.’ (Wittgenstein 1980: 81). Wittgenstein

understood the enormous difficulties that the creative process entailed. However, he

complained of Brahms’s lack of courage in harmonic and melodic fields. The

admonishment seemed to address, primarily, the performance of the scores for each of

the instruments in the orchestra.

If Brahms’s instrumentation is accused of lacking a sense of color, one must said that

colorlessness is already in Brahms’s themes. The themes are already in black and white,

just as Bruckner’s are already colorful. Even if Bruckner had for some reason written

them down in one system only so that we knew nothing of a Brucknerian

instrumentation.

One could say now: well then everything is okay for to the black and white

themes belongs a black and white (colorless) instrumentation. But I believe that

18
 precisely in this lies the weakness of Brahms’s instrumentation, namely in that it is

frequently not decidedly black and white after all. Thus arises the impression that often

makes us believe that we are missing colors, because the colors that are there don’t have

a pleasing effect. In reality, I think we are missing colorlessness. And often this shows

itself distinctly, for example in the last movement of the Violin Concerto where there

are very peculiar sound effects (once as if the sounds were peeling like dry leaves from

the violins) & where yet one senses this as an isolated soundeffect, while one senses

Bruckner’s sounds as the natural clothing of the bones of these themes (Wittgenstein

2003: 115)

In the text quoted the comparison, by no means fortuitous, between the works of

Brahms and Bruckner it is noteworthy. The controversy raised between them ⎯a

controversy, as Margaret Notley shows in his essay Brahms and Lateness, that goes

beyond aesthetic considerations: if Brahms is tied to the liberal establishment, Bruckner

is linked to the Pan-German movement and the anti-Semitism of the Christian Socials

led by Karl Lueger. The dispute had all the ingredients of a sordid radio soap opera:

Brahms was criticised, certainly, on Hugo Wolf’s Wiener Salonblatt pages. But

Hanslick, Kalbeck and Dömpke attacked Bruckner wrathfully ⎯Dömpke went so far as

to refer to Bruckner as an ‘Untermensch’ and said that he composed ‘like a drunk.’

(Notley 2007: 16) But not only that: Kalbeck echoed a letter sent by Brahms to Elisabet

von Herzogenberg. In that letter Brahms claimed that it makes no sense to talk about the

compositions of Anton Bruckner nor him as a person. Er ist ein armer verrückter

Mensch, wrote Brahms: ‘he is a poor lunatic.’ (Kalbeck 1913b: 408) Brahms rejected

the chromaticism and the dense sonority of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner: his

predilection for grandeur and monumentality was nothing but the reflection of

Bruckner’s Catholic education in music. Brahms also looked down upon the

19
compositional architecture and musical logic that supported his works: he condemned

his symphonies as formless.

It is, moreover, not by accident that Wittgenstein compared two composers’

music: Brahms’s grey colour palette, on the one hand, and Bruckner’s playful colour

and vastness on the other. Contrary to what one might think, the fact that Brahms’s

music was colourless or black and white did not imply any disadvantage at all. Actually,

Brahms’s dramatic oeuvres could be the personification of Schelling’s aesthetic ideal;

namely: that music is pure form and movement freed from all material content. Brahms,

who used musical elements that apparently establish the continuity with tradition, had a

musical theoretical-background that looked forward and seemed the incarnation of

modernism. What happens is that Wittgenstein felt a huge gap between Brahms’s

abstract instrumentation and the firm conviction of carrying it out to the end, something

that coincided largely with what some critics had reproached Brahms for —from

Wagner to George Bernard Shaw. In this respect, Nietzsche wrote: Brahms has die

Melancholie des Unvermögens, ‘the melancholy of impotence; he does not create out of

plenitude, he is thirsty of plenitude.’ (Nietzsche 1999a: 47) Although that might not be

the meaning of Wittgenstein’s words, he could share, probably, this final view. For

Wittgenstein, Brahms failed in the field of instrumentation: he had no strength and

determination to take his music to the very end. This lack of courage resulted in an

imbalance between what Brahms’s music was and what it should be.

Brahms, whom Wittgenstein came to know personally and whom he very

much esteemed and admired, was the last of the great composers. However, he

recognized in his works the reverberation of the spiritual atrophy that, briefly, will lead

the Western world to an irreversible transvaluation of all values. As the point of the

curve in which the sense of its curvature changes, the music of Brahms represents the

20
pinnacle of a culture that is already in decline ⎯is the dangerous dialectic of inflection:

completion, but also decline or depression. Perhaps this is the reason why Wittgenstein

once even said: [about the music of Brahms] ‘I can begin to hear the sound of

machinery.’ (Monk 1991: 13)

Notes

1. Wittgenstein’s consideration on Mahler’s music must be taken cautiously. John

King remembered that “he [Wittgenstein] had one particularly a striking portrait

of Mahler, but as I knew little of Mahler or his works he made little comment

except to say that you would need to know a good deal about music, its history

and development, to understand him.” (Wittgenstein 1981: 86)

2. In Sex and Character, Weininger wrote: “this lack of depth also explains why

the Jews are unable to produce any really great men and why Judaism, like

Woman, is denied the highest degree of genius.” [2005:285]

21
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