Anyhow, the one original emotion he brought into music is a curious
mournful dissatisfaction with life and with death. The only piece of
his I know in which the feeling is intolerably poignant, seems to cut
like a knife, is his setting of that sad song of Goethe's about the
evening wind dashing the vine leaves and the raindrops against the
window pane; and in this song, as also in the movement in one of the
quartets evolved from the song, the mournfulness becomes absolutely
pitiable despair. Brahms was not cast in the big mould, and he spent a
good deal of his later time in pitying himself. It is curious that
one of his last works was the batch of Serious songs, which consist of
dismal meditations on the darkness and dirt of the grave and
feebly-felt hopes that there is something better on the other side.
That does not strike one as in the vein of the big men.
Much of Brahms' music is bad and ugly music, dead music; it is a
counterfeit and not the true and perfect image of life indeed; and it
should be buried or cremated at the earliest opportunity. But much of
it is wonderfully beautiful--almost but never quite as beautiful as
the great men at their best. There are passages in the Tragic overture
that any composer might be proud to have written.
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