And on the occasion of his death,
valediction went no further than frigidly applauding his creditable work
for the organ, his erudition and productivity that almost rival those of
the eighteenth-century composers. The final attempt to interest the
public in his work, made during the succeeding season, brought but few
people to repent of their former indifference. A revival of interest is
scarcely to be expected.
For it was not a Brahms the world had gotten again. Indeed, it was a
personality of just the sort that Brahms was not. The resemblance was of
the most superficial. Both men went to school to Bach and the polyphonic
masters. Both were traditionalists. There the kinship ends. For the one
was a poet, a sturdily living, rich and powerful person. The other was
essentially a harsh and ugly being, eminently wanting the divine flame.
For Brahms, erudition was only a means to his end, a fortification of
his personal mode of expression. He saw that the weaknesses of many of
the romantic composers, his kin, of Schumann his spiritual father in
particular, were due their want of organizing power, their helplessness
in the larger forms. And eager to achieve large, solid, resisting form
in his own work, he went to the great masters of musical science, to
Beethoven and Haydn and in particular to Bach, to learn of them, that he
might do for his day something of what they had done for theirs.
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