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By Root 1512 0

von Erlach, was a historian of architecture as well as a visionary practitioner. If, for all its amalgam of historical elements, the exterior of the church is still a splendid and harmonious exercise in public architecture, to enter the sanctuary is to be drawn into the mystery of faith. In the interior, Fischer von Erlach fashioned cold stone into an uncanny evocation of the immaterial. As with most churches, the interior concerns itself with light as quality and symbol, but few have exploited light like this one. A worshipper first sees the veined marble of the walls, the sunburst altarpiece with floating cherubs and the saint in glory. Then the eye and the spirit are drawn upward, seeking the light. From any point in the sanctuary most windows are hidden in deep galleries or recessed in the cupola. You move to find one window and others disappear. Wherever you stand, light floods in from mysterious springs, a radiance whose source, like the divine radiance, is hidden from us.

Fischer von Erlach’s sermon in stone was created to make tangible the invisible, unknowable presence at the center of existence. As such it is not only a symbol of divine mystery but a prophecy of the German Romantic spirit that a century later, Johannes Brahms inherited. Like E. T. A. Hoffmann’s stories, Schubert’s last songs, the poems of Heine and Eichendorff and their settings by Robert Schumann, the church is haunted by the Unseen.

But as Hoffmann’s ghostly and vertiginous tales reveal, for artists of the nineteenth century that mystery had come to appear as much demonic as divine, as much menace as salvation: the sublime emanating not pure radiance as in the Karlskirche, but an ambiguous twilight before a night threatening despair. The German Romantic era of magical poetry and triumphant music was also an age of madness and suicide. Likewise the architectural themes from across centuries and cultures that Fischer von Erlach integrated so masterfully in the Karlskirche, the highest monument of the city’s Baroque glory, had become in the crumbling empire of late-nineteenth-century Vienna the kitsch eclecticism of the Ringstrasse.

Brahms was born into the atmosphere of German Romanticism and, laboring in a long period of sporadically interrupted but still unprecedented peace and prosperity across Europe, turned that spirit to his own eclectic and history-haunted purposes—his singular integration of conservative and progressive, Classical and Romantic, atavistic and prophetic. By the night of his last concert in the Musikverein, history appeared already to have rushed past Brahms and left him at once victorious and irrelevant, stranded on his lonely promontory. In that year approaching the last turn of century before the millennium, Europe was falling toward unimaginable catastrophe, and the arts toward the corollary of Romanticism: the ferment and fever called Modernism.

Brahms saw it coming. And he could not believe that the triumphs he had experienced in his lifetime could endure, that his work could find a place in a such a world. He feared that the future would sweep away his public and his art, leaving him little more than a footnote in history. Perhaps that too lay behind his tears at the Musikverein on March 7, 1897, when with the Fourth Symphony—his last testament to the highest level of idealism and craft, and to something in the direction of despair—Brahms heard his music played in public for the last time.

CHAPTER ONE

Homeland

IN 1826 JOHANN JAKOB BRAHMS, aged nineteen, his gray eyes full of hope and good humor, arrived in the port city of Hamburg carrying musical instruments and a Certificate of Apprenticeship. He intended to make his fortune in music, which appeared to him the grandest of professions. Through the course of a long career, Johann Jakob was to discover that in fact there was no fortune to be found in that trade, at least not for a man more zealous than talented, more dogged than resourceful, with a flair for fruitless schemes. He was prepared to work his way up from the bottom, and so he would. In