Dolce and Johannes
Having passed my eyes over a number of Brahms’s chamber pieces in the last week or two, I have a rather uninsightful observation to make: Dude loved “dolce.” This expression marking is ubiquitous in the sonatas and intermezzi I’ve been dealing with; it’s almost like he wanted to coat the music in some kind of glaze, then roll it in confectioners’ sugar. “Espress.” is all over the place too, but that instruction has a long and storied pedigree and an abundant literature, including a lengthy and fascinating passage from Adorno. But “dolce” seems more like a personal tic, albeit one surely conditioned by sociocultural currents in the late 19th century. I’m sure there are plenty of sweets in Schumann, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and so on, but as many as in Brahms? Sounds like a job for a computational musicologist.
I’m not the first person to notice Brahms’s sweet tooth: Author/musician Louise Marley, whose website is worth a look in an absolutely not at all tongue-in-cheek way, published a short story called “p dolce” in 2007 that (according to review blurbs) casts Brahms’s predilection for “p dolce”—or maybe his predilection for Clara Schumann!—as a romantic mystery. I haven’t read “p dolce,” but I have read a couple of scholarly articles on Brahms and his milieu; if anybody can fill me in on Brahms and “dolce,” please fire away in the comments area. (Granted, it’s also possible that all or some of this is attributable to an overly enthusiastic Brahms editor.)
More broadly, I wonder if anyone can think of comparable notational tics evidenced by other composers. Certainly an audience member might in the context of an all-Brahms program, say, detect a certain conventionalized large-R Romantic interiority that features a particular disposition of sentiment and irony, etc., etc., but I doubt that even a very astute listener could pinpoint Brahms’s fondness for “dolce” in so many words; it’s an idiosyncrasy at the level of the score but probably not at the level of the performed work. Brahms can’t be alone: Who else has a quirky palate when it comes to expression markings?