Silence in Brahms’s E-flat In

Silence in Brahms’s E-Flat Intermezzo

Beethoven gets credit for being the lead advocate of writing silence. Everything Beethoven did, he did with such energy and delirium that it seemed bigger and more emphatic than the genteel pauses in Haydn, or the witty full stops of C.P.E. Bach, where a scale will rush frantically to the cliff’s edge, and then stop dead right before the plunge, that is, before the resolution of the scale. Defying expectations was what C.P.E. Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven did.

But Beethoven added an element of pure silence. A fundamental, primordial soup, a chasm out of which the music rose. My teacher, Russell Sherman, used to say that you had to play silences. Energy builds in the deafening pauses in a concert hall, coupled with fear from the audience that you’ve forgotten the music, which adds to the urgency of getting back to it, so it’s very hard to pause for as long as Beethoven wants you to.

Silences are part of sound (Paul Simon’s sounds of silence). This is true because sound is a frequency, a part of an energy grid which extends throughout everything in the multiverse. Sound is both a wave and a particle, a force and a stasis. Silence is part of that grid as well. We can’t see the grid, nor can we hear most of the frequencies, which lie both above and below our limited ability to hear. But together, the frequencies and the energy glue the multiverse together. This is why music, which is expressed to our hearing as a range of frequencies, is in fact a much more primordial, integral component of the world we think we understand, of what we think we hear and see.

The skein, or cat’s cradle of energy, which we call electricity (to make its identity somewhat familiar), is in fact a much more raw complicity of matter, related possibly to the negative matter of a black hole, which was present before the Big Bang and which allowed the Singularity, the expansion of matter into all of space in less than a second. But in order to make it at least linguistically visible, I’ll call it the energy trellis.

In quantum physics it is now understood that energy exchanges can happen between the far reaches of the universe in an instant, millions of times faster than the fastest speed Einstein knew: the speed of light, which is 186,282 miles per second, enough to go around the circumference of the earth (25,000 miles) seven and a half times in one second. That is, if a change happens to one particle here, its twin particle reacts instantly there, no matter where it is. This reaction isn’t dependent on physical distance, what we would call “reality.” There is a deeper underlying reality.

So a particle which is acted on will immediately influence its twin particle, no matter where that twin is located. As Einstein predicated, particles come in pairs. Their bond defies time and space. When twin particles react together, it isn’t an event which has a speed. It’s an event which celebrates the fact that all locations are infinitely close, and thus can be instantly connected.

I have a friend who sat up in bed one night, gasping. She knew her sister was in trouble. Her sister was being chased down a beach in the Caribbean, a thousand miles away, and my friend knew it, instantly. It didn’t need a phone call. It was an instant connection. If this hasn’t happened to you, it’s impossible to believe. And yet it happens to people all the time. Twins are connected in ways that defy time and space. As are sisters.

Pythagoras called this underlying complicity “the music of the spheres,” constant tones or “fundaments,” like low single notes played by the deep bourdon pipe on an organ, which hold the planets in their orbits and even string the stars together.

We know from recordings made by NASA that black holes vibrate in low B-flat. We also know that the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter hums. Asteroids spin like tops, and hum the way tops hum. When an asteroid loses its spin, its humming also loses its pitch. Now, unaligned with the belt, the asteroid falls to earth, or to Mars or Jupiter, flaming out as a meteor. When it lands on earth it is called a meteorite, a rock and metal artifact of the cosmic tops which are only the most obvious indicators of the forces which shape our lives.

As Tom Stoppard said, things we know about are influenced by things we only know a little about, which in turn are influenced by things we know nothing at all about. Or, to quote Hamlet, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

And so when you play a silence you’re only continuing with music by other means.

I’m convinced that music sounds better when it is surrounded by silence. At Tippet Rise, there are no airline flight patterns nearby, no towns or highways. Just sheep and cows. Even the phone

and power lines are buried. So music played outside in the summer comes out of the hum of the insects, out of the haze of the early morning heat, out of color of the endless sky. The curve of the earth seems almost visible under the big sky. You feel closer to the constellations at night, and to the clouds at day. It may seem psychosomatic, but all the phenomena I’ve been talking about are scientific facts, rather than whimsical fancies.

We are star creatures, made up of not only ingredients found on planets but also elements found only in stars. So we resonate with the motion, with the orbits, with the dance of those planets and stars. The Norse believed that the stars were held up on the branches of an enormous tree, Igdrasil. The universe’s electric trellis is that tree. We all sway together in the solar wind, bound up in the same drama.

When I was young, I thought it was smart to deny anything which I hadn’t encountered physically in my short lifetime. Now I realize how wise it is to be open to the invisible aspects of existence. As John Donne wrote, “If thou be’st born to strange sights, Things invisible to see....”

All of this is a long way of saying that, when Brahms integrates silences into his music, it isn’t to ignore the sounds, to rest his fingers, or because he suddenly doesn’t know what to say. The silences are notes, in which overtones and undertones, gamma rays and solar storms, fragments of the northern lights, prominences on the sun’s surface, the buzzing of the spotlights on the stage, the fizzling of high-tension wires, all combine to create a cosmic dance which grows louder the longer the music pauses. We have time to reconsider the tapering off of the notes we just heard, to anticipate how the new notes will rise from the ashes of the old notes, to experience the shock of a world momentarily without a human presence, a landscape suddenly bleached of cities and roads. The primitive hackles start to rise on the backs of our necks. Something is up.

The challenge for composers is to rise to the occasion of their self-imposed split-second sabbatical, to shock the senses, or, as Hamlet says, make mad the guilty and appall the free, confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears.

One place where this tirade of silence occurs is in the Intermezzo in E-flat Major, Op. 117, No. 1. The lyrical Scottish folk tune fades away into a full fermata, a “hold” symbol, as if Brahms wants to give the pianist time to think, to adjust to the intimidating new world of six flats which appears over the horizon right after the fermata. As my wife, Cathy, points out, a fermata in fact looks like a setting sun, sitting on the horizon. In Spanish, it is a corona, or crown. In fact, just before this fermata, the simple E-flat Clara theme has darkened as it descends four times into chaos. The childlike sky of the song which Brahms quotes in a text above the music, Lady Anne Bothwell’s Lament (Schlaf sanft mein Kind, “sleep gently my child”), has developed clouds.

Suddenly every note is flatted, as if the wind has risen and a storm is coming. The melody slows down a lot—ritardando molto—and for 17 measures the Più adagio takes over. Not quite Beethoven’s storm in the Pastoral Symphony, this starkly altered landscape is however equally frightening, if on a smaller scale.

The chords cannot be explained. Can they be derived from the sunny first theme? They are in the same key, but everything is minor. The descending Clara theme has disappeared, and what

appears are only chords that might accompany it in a nightmare. They undulate, oscillate in a demonic lilt. The bass continues to provide the appearance of normalcy by accompanying these chords with arpeggios. But the arpeggios take breaks, they are intermittent, like lightning. The chords bear no hearable relation to the folk song. What is going on?

Although the slowly running arpeggios make sure there is a continuity between notes, the silence is apparent in the treble, almost invisibly mandated by the dislocations between chords. And the silence lies as well in the breaks of the arpeggios below. There is no modulation, no logical reason for the sudden harmonic changes. The comforting harmony of the folk song has been run through a fun house, its traditional chords torn apart.

After five measures of this, the Clara theme appears, disfigured, like one of Berlioz’s demonic references to his obsession with Harriet Smithson in the Symphonie fantastique. Clara has come a bête noire, a monster. Infatuation turns into hideous doubt, and Brahms’s sense of identity is lost. He was never very good with the concept of married love. He has lost his bearings, his harmony. He is an asteroid losing his spin, in danger of falling out of the sky.

Atonal discordances mangle the chords, which themselves are inexplicable. It is as if Brahms has become Schoenberg. This is Liszt’s music of the future.

Ten years before, Liszt had written the czardas, which he titled both macabre and obstinate, distended Hungarian folk songs where he removed any reassuring harmonies and let the sheer atonal devil dance.

Goethe had started it with his novel Elective Affinities, where he removed all the adjectives, leaving the nouns to fend for themselves. This new novel led ultimately to the nouveau roman

experiments of Marguerite Duras in Paris. As Walter Benjamin said in his celebrated essay on Goethe’s novel, the technique spoke for unimaginable freedom, and was the only way to transcend myth. The myth which had to be transcended was the dangerous nationalism which was to end Benjamin’s life. He tried to escape fascist Germany by traveling from France to Spain, from which he would ship out to America, but Franco had canceled all transit visas, and that night in his hotel Benjamin took an overdose of morphine. Ironically, the day before his visa would have worked, and the day after his party was allowed passage, possibly because Spanish officials were shocked by Benjamin’s suicide. So he was trapped by the myths he had written for himself, which he had understandably extrapolated from the disintegration of society around him. But that was many years later, in 1940.

Still, the seeds of discord and anarchy had been sowed, and they are here in the most idyllic of intermezzi.

Brahms was on the opposite side of this trend to atonality, ironically, which led from Liszt and Wagner to Schoenberg, Varèse, Berg, and others, predicting the chaos which the composers saw all too clearly in the breakdown of the Habsburg empire, the loss of social order which led to World War I and the demons of anarchy.

Brahms was determined to be the voice of reason, of nostalgia for the past, in the midst of the despair around him, as was Rachmaninoff only a decade later. Brahms’s intermezzi, the last gasp of civility before Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 put into sound what everyone already knew in their hearts, were an attempt to compose modern discontent away, to outwrite the noise and anguish of the increasingly virulent mobs, to hold back the night.

Brahms had already put more emphatic pauses into his first Piano Concerto back in 1858. But in this innocent intermezzo, the pauses seem uncalled-for, brazen, Satanic. He is negotiating against himself, playing the devil’s advocate with Clara’s theme. That is the dark side of silence: it is the sleep of reason.

Then the midsection, descending towards darkness, abruptly shifts into the light with the return of the initial theme.

Such schoolteacher talk obscures the extraordinary revelation of this transfiguration. Out of madness and that fermata, the setting sun has risen again. As Othello says of Desdemona, “And when I love thee not, chaos is come again.”

There is another way in which silence creates a negative space which ultimately allows positive space to surge through it.

Brahms saw that so many traditional Irish and Scottish folk songs are made up of those downward notes which were Robert Schumann’s Clara theme. This especially lovely version starts out with the folk song itself, creating a mathematical set of expectations for a comforting life, even if it is composed of another nation’s harmonies, values from an ancient Celtic tribe.

But then Brahms brings in the silence, the music of the future, the black hole.

When the original theme returns, it is a full religious resurrection, not only of the theme and its Celtic values, but of Viennese sensibility. Brahms has attached his, and our own, expectations to this lyric Scottish template, and merged our lives with the age-old rituals of the past. He has created a new culture out of the cloth of another century. We rise with Brahms, Robert, and Clara from the ashes of a child’s tune into a reality where that tune has become our own hopes and loves, a reality which couldn’t exist if it hadn’t gone through the darkness of those disconnected silences.

It is like Pamina and Tamino, the princess and prince of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, who must go through the Masonic ritual of enforced silence, which is usually dramatized as a linear tunnel or a prison of different harmonies and arias, before they can emerge into the light of love and trust. And so in this most iconic of all the intermezzi Brahms disorients us in order to recreate a new, shared world out of an old, discarded harmony. A zeitgeist out of four notes.

Which world the intermezzi to follow will continue to enlarge.