Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [110]
CHAPTER EIGHT
Premiere and Postlude
BRAHMS RETURNED FROM DÜSSELDORF in late October 1856 to pick up his life in Hamburg, to carry on the Sisyphean labor of his D Minor Piano Concerto, and maybe somewhere in it all to confront his conscience after leaving Clara Schumann to her desolation. Clara wrote Joachim: “When Johannes left me in the morning, my heart bled. On that day and the days that followed, I lived through those three years of suffering again.”1 There were other places Brahms might have gone, Göttingen where Julius Otto Grimm lived, or Hanover with Joachim. He chose to stay in his hometown, which remained his base through the next years of wandering—like a vagabond, he would say, bitterly.
His mother found him “brummig”—grumpy—around the house.2 Her son had come back looking as boyish as he left, but not the same inside. This new Johannes was subdued, chronically grumpy. Young Kreisler no longer dragged friends out at midnight to bathe in the light of the moon. Johann Jakob, rarely in the house anyway, would have greeted the boy and left him alone, hardly noticing the change that Christiane saw without understanding it.
On October 25, Brahms soloed in Beethoven’s G Major Concerto with G. D. Otten’s Akademie orchestra, and he appears to have been inspired by that magnificent, introspective, antivirtuosic concerto. His playing found a poetic intensity that people still spoke of years later. He could not duplicate that success the next month, when he played Schumann’s A Minor Concerto with the Philharmonic to little effect; at the same concert Joachim made a sensation with his trademark Bach Chaconne for Solo Violin and the Schumann Fantasia.3
By then, drafts of the piano concerto were traveling regularly among Brahms and Julius Grimm and Joachim, a thicket of scribbles and strikeouts accumulating on the pages, the friends supplying the orchestral proficiency that still eluded the composer. (When Joachim first saw the draft of the Concerto he burst out laughing at the first page.4) Much of his time in Hamburg Brahms spent socializing with musical acquaintances, especially music teacher Theodor Avé-Lallemant and conductor Karl Grädener, both influential men in town. Brahms retained the gift of befriending the right people to help him on his way. At the same time, he retained his propensity for treating friends cavalierly while depending on his talent and occasional charm to keep them on his side. Usually it worked, as witness Clara and Joachim.
There were other Hamburg acquaintances too, in the end perhaps more useful to Brahms than the leading musicians in town. As often with him, the immediate stimulation came from women. In this case they were not virtuosos like Clara but a collection of young amateurs who loved to sing. It began with Friedchen Wagner, daughter of a well-to-do family Brahms had gotten to know. The Wagners were of the German music-fancying middle class, and Friedchen was twenty, bright-eyed and effervescent, a good enough pianist to get Brahms’s attention. In 1855 she had met him at Otten’s house and, as he walked her home after some duets, convinced him to give her piano lessons. Friedchen remembered many duets with the two of them seated side by side, and playing Bach’s Triple Concerto with Johannes and brother Fritz.
Friedchen liked to spend her evenings singing with her sisters Olga and Thusnelda. Maybe it was in the autumn of 1856, after Brahms returned from Düsseldorf, that she made another request of him. It must have been made charmingly, because Brahms agreed to arrange some German folk songs for the sisters, gratis of course. He was already working on a set for solo voice and piano that became the 28 Deutsche Volkslieder, from which he probably adapted ten