The boundary between the human and the divine has been questioned, contested, and reimagined in many ways throughout history. I propose to examine how this perceived boundary has been shaped by notions of ability and disability. My case study is Johannes Brahms’s choral composition Gesang der Parzen (Song of the Fates), Op. 89 (1882). Based on a bleak poem from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s 1786 version of Iphigenie auf Tauris, Brahms’s Gesang der Parzen aligns the Greek gods with power and strength, while describing human beings as helpless and despondent, as Margaret Notley (2012) and Nicole Grimes (2019) have argued. Building on their work, I suggest that Brahms portrays the human condition as inherently disabled throughout Gesang der Parzen. 

 

The stanzas that describe the athletic power of the gods employ tonal keys such as F Major (bars 72-80) and C-sharp Minor/Major (bars 81-99). When the text returns to the sorrowful lot of humankind, however, the music takes on a Phrygian color (bar 100ff). Thus, Brahms uses certain musical scales, especially the Phrygian mode, to reflect Goethe's textual dichotomy between the powerful gods and the helpless humans. The association of modal scales with human incapacity was a common trope in 19th-century Austro-German musical culture. Adolph Bernhard Marx (1795-1866), for example, referred to the helpless dependency of the Phrygian mode (The School of Musical Composition, 1841) and the “weak, breathless affect” of the Lydian mode (Ludwig van Beethoven: Life and Works, 1859). Similarly, Brahms’s close friend, the musicologist and Bach scholar Philipp Spitta (1841-1894), wrote about the “solemn and twilight effects of the Phrygian.” By using these modes in Gesang der Parzen, Brahms gestures toward a notion of humankind as disabled, potentially opening a space for disability to be normalized as an intrinsic part of life rather than a pathological condition.