Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [101]
AFTER THE HOLIDAYS Clara left for Vienna to present her first concerts there in nine years. They generated something like the furor she had experienced in her teens. At the first of her six appearances the audience recalled her fifteen times.22 Just as gratifying for her, the Viennese showed themselves at last prepared to applaud her husband’s music.
Eduard Hanslick, the city’s most powerful critic, admired the purity of Clara’s playing, her indifference to virtuoso fireworks, her grasp of contrasting styles. On her programs she included Brahms’s C Major Sonata, two sarabandes and a gavotte from his never-published suite in A minor, and much work of Robert’s. During her time in the city she visited the tombs of Beethoven and Schubert, sending Brahms leaves gathered from the graves. (The graves were not yet in their final location in the Central Cemetery.) At a fancy Vienna soiree Clara encountered Liszt, who, seeing her disgust at not being center stage, ironically suggested, “Why not play a couple of bad pieces by Liszt? That would be appropriate here.” Oblivious to irony as always, Clara snapped, “You’re right, but I can’t do that.”23
As 1856 arrived, Brahms surely felt something had to happen for him. So it would, mostly for the worse. Elsewhere this year Heinrich Heine died and Freud was born, Wagner wrote Die Walküre and Liszt the Dante Symphony. The world would not see much new and significant from Johannes Brahms. His beautiful but laconic Four Ballades, written in 1854, would be published this year, then nothing more until 1860. Starting in January, he continued his reluctant impersonation of a virtuoso, playing Beethoven’s G Major Concerto at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, with his own cadenzas (he worked the B-A-C-H motive—B-A-C-B—into the first movement cadenza).24
Afterward, on a stopover in Hanover, he first met pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, who in 1854 had emerged from Russia to create a sensation across Europe. Now Rubinstein was in town for a concert of his music with Joachim and the Hanover court orchestra. He and Brahms grated on each other. Rubinstein reported to Liszt, “I hardly know how to describe the impression he made on me. He is not graceful enough for the drawing-room, not fiery enough for the concert-room, not simple enough for the country, and not general enough for the town. I have but little faith in such natures.”25 At times over the years, the two men would approach cordial relations, but never based on admiration for each other’s creative work. Rubinstein found his competitor’s music dry and unmusical; Brahms considered the other a remarkable pianist, but his enormous compositional output facile and slipshod—which more or less matches history’s conclusion.
Back home in Hamburg, having met Eduard Hanslick at the Lower Rhine Music Festival, Brahms attempted to read the critic’s famous booklet on aesthetics, On Beauty in Music. He wrote Clara that in it he “found such a number of stupid things on first glance that I gave it up.”26
He also reported to her a soiree at the house of her friend, the soprano Livia Frege. He had played works of Woldemar Bargiel—Clara’s half-brother—and Joachim, with responses from the guests ranging from ennui to outrage. “Frau Frege had already sung both my songs and yours. I am only very moderately interested in singing.… She did not sing my best [“Liebestreu”] particularly well, and as for the others they interested me only remotely.” Altogether Brahms found the pieces he inflicted on the party “a subtle revenge for so many boring hours in L[eipzig].”27 Going on to a concert in Kiel, he first performed his B Major Trio in public, then at Hamburg played Mozart’s D Minor Concerto with his cadenzas. Like it or not, he had a solo career now that brought in a little income. Certainly he noticed that for the single Mozart performance in Hamburg he received the equivalent of 160 marks, while Boosey & Hawkes had paid him 136