Brahms's Serenade of Solitude: Kreisler's Philosophy of "The Artist in Love" and the Adagio non troppo from the Serenade in A Major, Op. 16

Abstract

Johannes Brahms signed many of his early musical manuscripts under the nom de plume Johannes Kreisler Junior. The name alludes to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s arch-Romantic hero, the fictional Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler, and adopting it signaled the aspirations of the young composer. It served as the means by which Brahms laid claim to the ideology and philosophy the character represented: for him, this meant especially the artist’s separation from society and troubled preoccupation with love. My dissertation interprets the third movement, Adagio non troppo, of Brahms’s Serenade in A Major, Op. 16, in connection with the composer’s well-known affinity for, and his interest in, the writings of Hoffmann. He composed the Adagio non troppo in the wake of breaking off his engagement to the soprano Agathe von Siebold, and the composer fashioned the movement as a Kreislerian rumination on romantic failure. Beginning with the title of the opus, “Serenade,” Brahms opens hermeneutic windows between orchestral and vocal music, the concert hall and the outdoors, and high art and popular tradition, which invite us to be alert for allusions in the Adagio non troppo. As middle movements within multimovement instrumental works, nineteenth-century adagios occasioned heightened subjective expression; their long-breathed melodies associated them with song, and their non-standardized forms supported a wide range of musical and extra-musical allusions. Indeed, many of this movement’s idiosyncrasies, including its striking basso ostinato and truncated sonata form, exhibit connections to Hoffmann’s Kreisler stories. Brahms uses genre, musical rhetoric, musical topics, and key characteristics to support Hoffmannian and biographical interpretations. In addition to the Kreisler subtext, the movement emerges as an anchor point within an expansive, self-referential web that includes Ein deutsches Requiem, the Second Symphony, and numerous songs. Central to my analysis is the remarkable modulation from A minor to A-flat major for the movement’s second theme. Through a consideration of Brahms’s solo songs, it becomes evident that he associated these keys with specific subjects: maidens and failed love (A minor), and yearning and memory (A-flat Major). These themes govern the intertextual narrative and musical rhetoric. Taken as a whole, the movement commemorates his love for Siebold and stakes claim to Hoffmann’s philosophies of yearning and the “artist in love.”