Anne Midgette, writing for the Washington Post, talks about her non-response to the music of Johannes Brahms, which she describes thusly:
Certainly I, for one, have always had trouble pinning him down. And I have always had trouble liking his music.
Not that I find listening to Brahms actually odious. I have been known to muster warm feelings for the Sextet in G or the C Minor Quartet; and I am partial to the later solo piano music. But in general, Brahms is not a composer who makes my heart leap when he walks into the room. Rather, I greet his appearance as you would the entrance of a person at a party whom you’re not all that eager to talk to, even though you may have had intense and intermittently rewarding conversations over the years. As a musician friend of mine said of Brahms’s music, “It just goes on . . . and on . . . and on.”
Apparently Bernard Holland of the New York Times agrees:
For all their sophistication and invention, Brahms’s string quartets are tough love, and hearing consecutively both ends of his Opus 51 — one piece in C minor, the other in A minor — is an awful lot of genial determination at one sitting. To ensure that a large audience at the Rose Theater kept any hint of a smile off its collective face, there was the F minor Quintet for Piano and Strings after intermission, with the pianist Gilbert Kalish.
I can’t find fault with what they say – it’s their own reaction to his music. That’s true for them, if not to me, and I’ve got to respect that. But I find the reserve and austerity of Brahms – his northern Germanic nature, rather than the thigh-slapping Southern, Bavarian Germanic nature of say, Mozart – is appealing to me.
He never quite gets to the heart of the matter – always eluding the crux through sleight of hand – until it can be avoided no longer and there is that ray of sunshine, or the intense gut feeling of despair.
These payoffs are what his music is all about. I think about the decade or so it took for him to use the formal “du” form of address with Clara Schumann, as opposed to the formal “sie”.
It’s easy to get wrapped up in the construction of his music – he’s taking old models and adapting them through constant reworking of themes and rhythms, it’s true – but this is just the elaborate wrapping paper on the gift that reveals the true depths of his feeling.