First impressions | 28 October 2006

‘Late Art’ has nowadays become a weary cliché: the notion of a closing vision — summatory, transcendent, prophesying future or making retrospective farewell — is too truistic to go much beyond the obvious facts of any case.

Let’s try ‘Early Art’. It implies a quality of freshness, juvenescence, stretching the muscles, rejoicing (often pugnacious) in strength or Schmerz; and more, the bloom of the young animal in its pride: things soon disappearing in the no doubt deeper, more characteristic achievements of maturity, which can’t in themselves be regretted but don’t stifle a sigh for what’s lost.

One composer notoriously never surpasses the tender brilliance of his early music: Mendelssohn. With two other romantics, Wagner and Verdi, the earliest phases are so variously uncouth that there’s no compunction about jettisoning them. These composers can only improve! But many masters touch early upon something unique that then has seemingly to be abandoned on the hard road to maturity.

These thoughts were initially prompted by the imaginative coupling of Beethoven’s and Bruckner’s nine symphonies broadcast from the Edinburgh Festival. Accustomed to Bruckner’s later course — ever-slower, longer, more richly intricate in harmony and polyphony, sublimer in expression — it’s astonishing to hear his first two symphonies, bubbling with physical energy and playful exuberance, never for a moment stolid or stodgy, sometimes positively frisky, notably in their finales, whose stop/go/stop trajectory from no. 3 onwards gives his most ardent lovers plentiful pause for doubt.

And isn’t the same true, mutatis mutandis, with Brahms? Whatever the marvellous gains of the ripe harvest, lost for ever are the open-air brio of the orchestral Serenades, the mighty and vindicated ambition of the first Piano Concerto, the passionate generosity of the first two Piano Quartets, all composed before he was 30.