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By Root 1461 0

When he was not onstage, they would catch sight of the unmistakable florid face in the audience before concert or play or opera, leaning over the balustrade to search the crowd with his opera glasses, chuckling to himself. Even the old ones may have forgotten what Brahms looked like when he first came to the city in 1862, his music unknown there but his name already legendary. In those days his beautiful North German face was beardless and fresh as a boy’s. Since then the magisterial beard had become part of the city’s landscape like a monument, his quips repeated in cafés, his approvals and disapprovals the stuff of daily gossip, and so for years the Viennese had hardly given him a glance and only the tourists stared. Now he stood before the tumultuous crowd at the Musikverein shrunken and trembling, the hair and famous beard stringy, eyes yellow, face sickly brown and gaunt under the sheen of tears.

The ovation roared on and on until it became almost unbearable, for the audience and for Brahms. Some of them must have been thinking: this wild hurrah for the Fourth Symphony of all things, which had always been too gloomy and austere for the Viennese. After its first performance in the city in 1886, a local wit had set words to the lilting minor-key thirds of the opening: Es fiel … ihm wie … dermal … nichts ein, “yet again he had no ideas.” The city had presented Brahms the back of its collective hand often enough, but that only made the cheers sweeter when it chose to give them to him. On this night it was not for this symphony they shouted. They cried out for all the music and for the man, for Brahms who was dying, and with him an age.

He had vanished from the streets months earlier, now and then struggling out to a concert or a dinner with one of the eminent families that had adopted him. Now he spent much of his time sitting at home by the window, looking out to the looming dome of the Karlskirche across the street and beyond it to the gaslit park and the River Wien and to this hall, the Musikverein, where for twenty-five years he had seen failures and triumphs in succession, and had loved it all and loved the fickle, cynical, inexplicable people who had made music the town’s glory, and its music the glory of the world.

Finally, exhausted, the crowd stuttered to silence and hundreds of eyes turned away in sorrow. Brahms still stood uncertainly in the director’s box. Someone handed him his coat and bowler hat, wary of his bark if they offered to take his arm and help him down the stairs. He made his way backstage to thank the director and players, then accepted a carriage home. A year before, he would have scorned such laziness. After so many concerts he had walked home alone, across the Elizabeth Bridge and the Resselpark, past the Karlskirche to his three plain rooms with rented furniture. Now, leaving the carriage and solicitous friends with a gruff ade, he pulled himself up the three flights of stairs. Maybe once more before bed, as Frau Truxa helped him with his coat, he glanced through the big windows to the silhouette of the great dome he had seen most days for twenty-four years, all the while calling himself a vagabond in the wilderness of the world.

• • •

THE KARLSKIRCHE that lay before Brahms’s window was finished in 1739, erected from the vow of Emperor Charles VI to his namesake Saint Charles Borromeo, to honor the saint and the Austrian Empire, and to reward God for taking only ten thousand souls in the plague of 1713. Once the church had loomed over the vineyards that surrounded the old walled city. Like the polyglot empire it celebrated, the Karlskirche’s exterior subsumes an extraordinary mélange of elements from other times and places: reminiscences of the Pantheon of Rome, the Invalides in Paris, the imagined Temple of Jerusalem. For further touches of Viennese extravagance and incongruity, the stately Classical portico is flanked by two spiral columns modeled after Trajan’s in Rome and topped by Eastern-style minarets, and the wings have pagoda roofs.

The maker of the Karlskirche, Johann Fischer