Look at the book of the youngest daughter of Clara and Robert Schumann. Eugenie Schumann wrote a chapter about Brahms and she wrote also about his piano playing. I don't remember exactly, but she wrote about him not practising at all before concerts and not taking the score too seriously. She and her mother told him, he hat to practise, not to improvise. The book is well written and the chapter also offers a new view about Brahms as a person. I really liked it.
Absolutely right. Brahms grew up having to play in dodgy bars for a living so it'd make sense he took the improvisational approach. He could transpose pieces by ear while playing them just by taking a different root note, which he had to do once in a concert when the piano he had was tuned a semitone off during one of his piano concertos.
This is exactly the playing style of my grandmother, who was a pianist trained in the 30's and 40's when this playing style was probably still alive. She would dislocate notes and change the tempo extensively while playing from notes or doing her own arrangements. I definitely have to check some of those old recordings you used to show those techniques. Anyway, brilliant work!
Eibenschütz said of Brahms that he "played as if he were improvising, with heart and soul, sometimes humming to himself, forgetting everything around him. His playing was altogether grand and noble, like his compositions."
This an excellent video; I would take issue with one (repeated) point, though. The assertion that shortening long notes and lengthening short ones “wasn’t done and furthermore sounds like shit” isn’t accurate in the least. String quartet players from that school were taught routinely that “the short notes must ‘explain’ the music; time necessary for them to fulfill that function must be taken from the long notes.” This technique is an old Austro-Hungarian maxim, which we were taught by musicians brought up specifically in the Brahms / Schumann tradition.
Well done, and good reconstruction. Brahms' music was obviously very emotional, and without tempo changes, would sound lifeless - a fault found in many modern performances. It's as if modern performers never had a genuine emotion in their life - worse than robots, as robots have an excuse. The video called "Debussy plays Debussy" is instructive and ear-opening as well. Thanks for having the courage to bring to life the music as it was intended.
Thank you for defining the human beings of the last decades... And in spite of not having emotions, they consider themselves enough qualified to say what is good or wrong in Music..., the music created by the Greatest Geniuses of the past with the deepest emotions, totally oposite to them... Just Amazing I wonder what would say the "great" Pollini if he would Heard an hypothetical recording of Chopin... Totally wrong! Orribile, non rispetta lo spartito. Sbagliato!
Brahms was notorious for having his own way with the tempo, and in chamber ensembles this frustrated his peers to no end. :) Also, he very much _did_ improvise on these "Hungarian" dance themes quite a lot, and was slow in finally writing them down for publication. They were an escape from painstaking craftsmanship that were, for a while, used mainly for personal fun at parties.
Jan Swafford mentions in his Brahms biography that chamber groups were often frustrated by Brahms' rubato and improvising in performances, as well as his loud vocalizing and grunting.
Radu Lupu playing Brahms piano concerto no 1 with The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1996 video RU-vid! This IS The Best Brahms playing ever! Lupu a class of his own!!
@@RaineriHakkarainen :I'll give you that one; Radu Lupu, a matchless pianist. But, the Brahms 1st. ?? My wife presented to me the only gift I wanted for my 24th birthday. I'd only heard of Sviatoslav Richter at the time. But being in virtual love with the instrument, thanks to William Kapell and Horowitz. I was curious. Richter's performance of Brahm's 2nd concerto with Eric Leinsdorf?? Well, I'm an old man now. And it remains possibly my most cherished birthday present. The sound of the piano is just GLORIOUS under his hands. If you dont have it, get it. This concerto is a testament to Brahms as a pianist when he was a younger man, obviously. Even Mischa Dichter had to consult Richter on the right technique to accomplish certain passages in the first movement. And the scherzo?? How did he ( Brahms ) think of that ending. The concerto brings me to tears. No wonder his name ( is ) Brahms.
I'm a music librarian at Sydney Conservatorium of Music and work closely with Prof. Neal Peres da Costa. We are very pleased to hear that the Peres da Costa's book OFF THE RECORD (Oxford University Press, 2012) helps inform your finding. Your presentation is very good, well researched and valuable. I am very impressed. Thank you for posting and sharing your knowledge!
Absolutely brilliant video. I don't pretend to have any special interest in Brahms other than knowing of his music, but to see you applying such knowledge and incredible investigative logic to decode what was originally played was really interesting! I also can't believe how easy you made it to follow such complex and advanced musical theories. The on screen visualisation of the notes, again while I didn't understand them, I understood watching the timer move along coupled with your audio. And all in under 10 minutes. Really excellent stuff!
Agree with you, and he doesn't waste time like so many other videos where they spend 90% of the time telling you what they are going to explain at the very end.
Brilliant!!! You just pointed a fact that most people are unaware of...the same is true in vocal art with different schools and characteristics. Chopin had vocal bel canto as a reference...The concept of interpretation and artistic sense underwent major changes...Pugno, Koczalski and de Pachmann, just to name a few, are not "eccentric". De Pachmann's playing was, according to Liszt, very similar to Chopin's own...
It surely sounds like a man really enjoying playing the piano. Trying, creating and daring looks like his fundamental ingredients. This is what makes the huge gap between Brahms and people only playing the exact score. This gave me allot of new insight for continuing my piano journey
Emil Danielsen Yes certainly, I've been practising dislocation for about a year now and you can hear it in a lot of my recordings. Hopefully one day I can do it as well as the experts
amazing video! please make more on Grieg, Debussy, and other historical interpretations by the composers themselves. Great job, you already got your place in musicology history. Best wishes
I don't even have much of an interest in piano music, bar listening on occasion, but honestly this was an excellent 10 minutes. I was fascinated. Thank you James, people like you keep art alive.
I was skeptical of this when it started but it's actually excellent, brilliant explanations. I'd love to hear your analysis of some of the students of Clara Schumann I've been listening to and wondering how they could play the way they do because it sounds so different from how I'm used to hearing Schumann and Brahms.
the answers to your 3 Q's= Brahms didnt care. Today we idolize and slavishly perform music exactly as written, or God forbid, lightning from on high strikes us. Recall Mahler re-orchestrated Beethoven's 5th dramatically, adding TIMPANI to the legendary opening 4 notes. Today, you'd be booed off stage. Brahms was having some wine with his friends, in a light mood, hopped on piano bench and just went at it. Occam's Razor, no over-anaylizing or complications necessary.
What an incredibly insightful upload! Many thanks for posting this. I had been wondering how Brahms would have played his own works and your explanations and musical examples give a great insight. Fabulous!
Most musicians don't know that rhythm was much more loose in the 19th century than they are taught. Composers often complained about how performers would be rather free with the tempo, while at the same time composer-performers would take just as much liberty with the tempo as the regular performers.
Excellent work James, as somebody who's doing a PhD in reconstructing American Harp Guitar performance 1890-1920, I totally agree with your conclusion. Please do more videos about historical performance reconstruction and hopefully a greater understanding and appreciation of music of this period will come about.
Brilliant! I'm sure it took an unimaginable amount of time to work through this, but very so worth it. Thank you. I wonder how these techniques (dislocation) would have been used in the concerti when played by the composer?
Many thanks for your great work in decoding Brahms's playing! One observation: The very much shortened note at the end of the long phrase sounds exactly like the effect Brahms's friend Joseph Joachim achieves in his violin version of that piece. I am sure they tried to play it similarly in that place. The effect is a bit like that of howling.
Hello, this is really interesting. I only know the basics of music theory but not the details. But i'm really interested in old and new recording techniques. This cylinder is really damaged i can confirm. At that time the recording length was up to two minutes maximum. Sometimes this was speed up or slowed down in order to capture the whole duration of the music. Thanks for your knowledge and insight. It's not easy to hear the notes behind all this noise. Congratulations.
This is Brahms pretty much drunk or recording device itself is way off to be at a stable speed, but you did an amazing job replicating those things. Now about tempo changes, this is something very important for performance but not excessive or accidental.
The fact that you describe 19th century performance practices as “crazy nonsense” shows you have no understanding of 19th century artistic aesthetics. Pianists alive then would probably find much of our playing dull and sterile.
Brahms has a very great respect for Johann Strauss. Brahms always greatly respected the essential inspiration in music. His own playing was constantly described as being passionate and transporting.
Yes, I thought this was amazing, and I'd love to see more. I am also fascinated by Brahms as a composer and wish there was more content on him. Best of luck!
I have been wandering about the recording for quite a while and thought maybe Brahms was distracted since the whole concept of recording was so new. Not to mention I have read various accounts of him forgoing practice later in life and often missing notes. Either way I wish the recording was in better shape. This is an interesting and sensible take on it. Thanks for sharing.
There still was an expectation in those days that the performer was a co-composer. That is to say, that much like the Baroque and Classical eras, performers were free to interpret the score in their way - even to the point of improvising on and freely interpreting the score! The fact that Brahms does this, shows that this was the excepted convention of the day! No boring metronomes and stuffy editors to tell you how to play! Music is about interpretation and cooperation with the vision of the composer - if we all play like midi recorders music loses its joy and magic!
Not really sure why your video was recommended. Maybe the algorithm can read my mind. I don't play, but I love music...and history.. and I have cylinder players. This was really interesting. Thanks
Of course it could just be that Brahms was a much better composer than he was a performer. Nonetheless, your research and presentation is brilliant. You deserve to be called a musicologist: young but certainly not inexperienced.
Excellent- this is wonderful- thank you for this. I’m currently surveying they early Liszt opera fantasies and am currently enveloped by this world and these performance practices. 👏🏻👏🏻
I applaud your energetic application of scholarship, intellect, dissatisfaction with explanations that are "absolutely convenient", and desire to get asymptotically closer to the truth. Even though I play the double bass (not a polyphonic instrument except to the extent that I occasionally borrow Bach from my fellow string players), this discussion provides food for thought that may inform my performance practices. Thank you!
Fantastic work! Thank you! Please make more videos , especially featuring Chopin style (e.g., Koczalski, a Mukuli studient, Moriz Rosenthal, a Liszt pupil, et. al. ) Shouldn't we try to emulate as closely as possible the playing style of the composers? Chopin playing today is generally as strait-laced as that of playing Bartok or Stravinsky.
Robert Klein thanks! The playback speed also affects the key of the piece, so as long as it was recorded in the correct key we can be confident the tempo is accurate
Thanks. I suppose the pitch to which the piano is tuned might also have some effect (i.e. A=440Hz or 432Hz or even 415Hz). I'm fascinated with performance tempo and metronome indications of the 19th century, so I find this Brahms recording very interesting!
You might wish to read the article my wife and I have online called The Craft of Musical Communication in it you will find the technique called Vacillare a 17th century Italian technique in which the right hand leads the left hand in keyboard music so a large percent of the performance time and the left leads the right for a small percentage of the time thus vacillating. In one text from 1736 the singer endeavors to sing before and after the beat and never on the beat. If you play with vacillare all the time you get the off kilter effect of dislocation but making far more sense of it than your very good performance of the Brahms, who is clearly playing with vacillare.
A lot of that playing is actually reminiscent of one of the greatest pianists who lived into the latter half of the 20th century - Cziffra! His playing had the most rhythmic freedom of any pianist, especially of that era. He was Hungarian and his recording of his own evolved improvisations on Brahms' Hungarian Dances were recorded in the 1980s. I recommend everyone check them out because they are original paraphrases - but the rhythmic freedom and expressive devices he uses in playing them are quite reflective of that Hungarian style plus that 'lost' old style.
I think the analysis is correct, or close to correct. It's still a little rough around the edges, but I'm hearing the underlying interpretation ideas, and they're consistant with the parts of the recording that are comprehensible. I can hear hints of the other notes in there, so I think that with some careful work with music sequencing software and with score in hand there is still more that can be extracted and reconstructed from the recording. Also, tools such as fourier transformations and statistical analysis can extract information beyond the human ear, especially since we have a decent idea of the specific frequencies we're looking for (pitches of piano notes, though there are pecularities in the nature of piano tuning which must be taken account of). Signal analysis is actually a heavily researched field, since we have a lot of interesting in listening to weak signals, such as from distant space probes, or transmitting data at a higher rate, which means fewer samples per bit, meaning it's more sensitive to noise. It's also very important in astronomy, where you're interested in faint distant objects or small exoplanets passing in front of stars and blocking a tiny bit of their light, these visible only as a statistical anomoly in the noise. Analyzing a recording like this isn't an especially common usage of the associated math and algorithms, but the underlying principles are basically the same even if the data comes from an unusual source.
I read in Roland Gelatt's book From Tin Foil To High Fidelity that at this particular recording session, when Brahms listened to the recording, it was noted he 'fainted dead away'.
