The Schoenberg/Brahms Critical Tradition Reconsidered

Current scholarship credits Schoenberg exclusively for revealing the extent of Brahms's thematic work. Certainly, both Schoenberg's Brahms lecture of 1933 and its revision as the seminal essay Brahms the Progressive (1947) not only rescued Brahms from the conservative dead end into which the view of his music had fallen in the early twentieth century, but also inaugurated a way of explaining how his music was crafted according to the technique of developing variation. This article challenges that claim. I argue that not Schoenberg but several of Brahms's contemporary critics were the first to point out and give an account of a compositional process in Brahms's music of developing a musical idea, of generating a work from a basic motive so as to imbue the work with an underlying motivic unity. The writings of Hermann Deiters, Selmar Bagge and Adolf Schubring in the 1860s and 1870s can be understood as a significant foreshadowing of Schoenberg's view of Brahms the Progressive. I assert, therefore, that on the basis of a fundamental similarity of outlook on the part of Schoenberg and his nineteenth-century critical counterparts, we should more accurately speak of a German critical tradition, albeit one in which Schoenberg played a valuable role.