Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [111]
Photos suggest that Brahms was at the peak of his good looks then, in his mid-twenties. A new element had entered people’s descriptions of him, which also shows up in pictures: the aggressive forward thrust of his lower lip. Brahms was wiry and strong now, no longer girlish, and more than ever he emanated command and a certain imperious distance, for all his diminutive size and high, unchanged voice. Victims found it very unpleasant to face the disdain of that outthrust lip and the blue eyes drilling into them. The singing girls of Hamburg did not have to suffer that. For them his eyes shone with their full forget-me-not radiance, and they never did forget.
In the middle of 1856, Brahms was mainly occupied with hammering away at the Piano Concerto, almost in despair about it but unwilling to let it go. (Toward the end of the year he wrote the robust Variations on a Hungarian Song for Piano, to be paired with next year’s more introspective Variations on an Original Theme.6) The D minor music had flared up as a sonata for two pianos in the wake of Schumann’s suicide attempt three years before, had turned into a symphony, and had metamorphosed again after Schumann’s death. By now the gargantuan first movement was the only music left from the original effort, retooled considerably in the change from symphony to concerto; inevitably, the retooling was something of a patchwork. Besides Joachim, Brahms naturally sent it to Clara for comment. She seems in a lost letter to have criticized his relying so much on others’ opinions. Brahms was not about to stand for that. He considered it his friends’ duty to support and critique his work. In one of his first letters to Clara since leaving Düsseldorf, he made a blunt reply to that missing letter of hers:
My Clara, Your remarks about the value which I attach to your own and J.’s applause are amateurish. You know perfectly well how pleased I am if my things please my friends, and you also know whose praise I value most.… Joachim philosophizes and thinks a good deal about music … and because I think some of his ideas so splendid … I am always encouraged if my things come up to his standard.… The highest tribunal of all, however, is your loving nature and its yea.7
At the end, Brahms softened his bluntness with affection—as he usually did with Clara, sooner or later. He spent that Christmas in Düsseldorf with her and the children. On December 30, back in Hamburg, he wrote her, “I am painting a tender portrait of you which will be the Adagio.”8 So the concerto struggled on. After three years of frustrating work on the successive versions, by May 1857 he had drafts of three movements substantially orchestrated, but he continued darning and patching all the way to the premiere nearly two years after that. Why was he so obsessed by the piece?
THE D MINOR PIANO CONCERTO begins with a shout of unrest, alarm, calamity: a low D in timpani and strings and snarling horns, that tonal anchor immediately undercut by a harmony of B F, peculiarly dissonant in effect for a major chord that sends the introduction reeling into a harmonic instability that does not resolve into D minor until the twenty-fifth measure. Even then the harmony is unanchored, the tonic note weak in the bass. Introducing this harmonic flux, a pounding, declamatory line rises into chains of trills—not the delicate trills of Mozart, but wild chromatic shiverings. Over and over in the first measures the melodic line stresses the out-of-key note A♭, forming with the bass D the interval of a tritone that old theorists named diabolus in musica, the devil in