Wilkes denied that
he ever was a Wilksite; Wagner certainly never was a Wagnerite; there
are people who ask whether Christ was ever a Christian. But Brahms
became more and more a devoted Brahmsite; he accepted himself as the
guardian of the great classical tradition (which never existed); and
he wrote more and more dull music. It is idle to tell me he is austere
when my inner consciousness tells me he is merely barren, and idler
to ask me feel beauty when my ears report no beauty to me. He had no
original emotion or thought: whenever his music is good it will be
found that he has derived the emotion from a poem, or else that there
is no emotion but only very fine decorative work. In most of his
bigger works--the symphonies, the German Requiem, the Serious songs he
wrote in his later days--he sacrificed the beauty he might have
attained to the expression of emotions he never felt; he assumed the
pose and manner of a master telling us great things, and talked like a
pompous duffer. An exception must be made: one emotion Brahms had felt
and did communicate. It was his tragedy that he had no original
emotion, no rich inner life, but lived through the days on the merely
prosaic plane; and he seems to have felt that this was his tragedy.
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