Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [100]
As Brahms busied himself practicing and traveling and concertizing, his letters to Clara became newsy and practical, with little talk of love. Even when he warmed up, he hedged: “I regret every word I write to you which does not speak of love. You have taught me and are every day teaching me ever more to recognize … what love, attachment and self-denial are.… I wish I could always write to you from my heart to tell you how deeply I love you, and can only beg you to believe it without further proof.”17 Which is to say: there was going to be more self-denial, and fewer proofs.
As Robert Schumann grew weaker and relations between Brahms and Clara steadily more ambiguous, Joachim’s feelings about Liszt came to a head. After hearing him conduct a performance of his symphonic poems and choral music, Joachim wrote Gisela von Arnim of his contempt for
a man whom I had often called friend, in whom I had gladly pardoned colossal follies out of respect for his powers. I had to admit that a more vulgar misuse of sacred forms, a more repulsive coquetting with the noblest feelings for the sake of effect, had never been attempted. At the conductors’ desk Liszt makes a parade of the moods of despair and the stirrings of contrition with which the really pious man turns in solitude to God, and mingles with them the most sickly sentimentality, and such a martyr-like air, that one can hear the lies in every note.18
No doubt Joachim growled likewise to Johannes. At some point Brahms browsed through some of the propaganda with which Liszt buttressed his revolution. The tracts appealed to him even less than the music. He and Joachim found the whole notion of propping up notes with words fraudulent. That included program music, for which Brahms developed a particular distaste—though in practice, if he liked a piece he was willing to forgive a program.
In the middle of December Johannes returned to Düsseldorf carrying Christmas presents for Clara and the children, and his new toy soldiers to parade for them all.19 That month Richard Pohl, who wrote as “Hoplit” for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, completed a series of three articles on Brahms, critical but respectful. Among other things Pohl made a point of Brahms’s individuality: even if inevitably aligned with the Schumannites, “Brahms is … no imitator of Schumann.” Brahms could hardly quarrel with the critic’s conclusion that he “should have been regarded as an artist not yet mature.” He had been saying the same thing to Clara for a long time; contra Schumann, his Bildung was incomplete.20
For two years Brahms had lived with that realization. Schumann had nominated him for Messiah, but no one could advise him how to do the job. Of his living peers, Schumann was incapacitated and the others—mainly Wagner and Liszt and Berlioz—were of an older generation and resided in the enemy camp. Brahms felt baffled by the question of where to turn. As he stewed over that cloudy question, he decided that a still more intensive study of counterpoint, with its intricate demands and rules for corraling notes, could stand in for composing and teach him something of use, if he could only figure out how to use it.
On Christmas Day 1855, it was once again Brahms and Joachim with Clara and the children. She gave him the first volume of the complete Bach Gesellschaft edition, which Robert had helped instigate. The most monumental scholarly project in the history of music, the Gesellschaft issued sixty volumes between 1851 and 1900, and Brahms subscribed to the entire series. In the course of those fifty years those volumes inspired and transformed him, along with the whole of Western music. Joachim’s gift that Christmas was didactic and antiquarian, a 1739 copy of Handel’s Hamburg compatriot Johann Mattheson’s Der Vollkommene Kapellmeister, “The Complete Music-Director.”21 Joachim knew that Johannes had been searching for the book, and not just as an item for his collection. Like a Baroque apprentice,