LDV64.5

GEOFFROY COUTEAU, AMAURY COEYTAUX, RAPHAËL PERRAUD, NICOLAS BALDEYROU 19 In this respect Brahms is the antithesis of Beethoven, who twists musical material and form together when he flexibly combines them. Brahms has a ‘feminine’ attitude – let us dare to use the image – which ‘absorbs’ any conflict in favour of redeeming harmony. This is best reflected in his four concertos, where the ‘brilliant’, exterior element is always at the service of the whole and gains its raison d’être only from its relationship to that whole. For Brahms, the key word is interiority ; there is no music without it; it is the alpha and omega of his œuvre and the cause of his astonishing precocity. This is what must have struck Robert and Clara Schumann when they met him in 1853, this awareness and sense of vocation amazing in a young man of twenty, so regally beautiful in both his piano playing and his person, yet who cared not a whit for his beauty. In him there is no seduction, ever. Even Schumann was capable of being lighter – which is saying something! Brahms did not wait for the weight of years to be wise and mature. Serious . (When all is said and done, the Vier ernste Gesänge , his final large-scale work, written in 1896, a year before his death, bears a title that summarises his entire output, which is just one big serious song!) It seems that he was so from the outset. One need only listen to his Ballades of 1854. They could equally well date from forty years later. Brahms thus offers us the astonishing and unique spectacle of a genius who was always one and the same. Grave. ‘Life is grave, one must gravitate upwards’, 3 said the French poet Pierre Reverdy. One might apply the adage to Brahms, who gravitates ever upwards, right from the start. 3. La vie est grave, il faut gravir – the pun ( gravir means ‘to climb’) is virtually untranslatable. (Translator’s note)