Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [118]
Musicians in town became gradually more cordial. Brahms felt one of the group, as much as he was likely to feel part of any group. Yet in the long run, Hamburg could not hold him. His mother had turned into an ailing old woman continually carping at her husband; it was only a matter of time before Johann Jakob left the house for good. When Brahms’s one-time publisher Cranz, owner of the only acceptable piano in town, refused to lend it for the premiere of the piano concerto, Brahms indignantly canceled the concert. “The whole thing is typically Hamburgian,” Brahms fumed to Clara. “Cranz will not give me his Erard, but with the utmost amiability offers me all kinds of old tin kettles.”35
Joachim offered to give a private reading of the concerto with his Hanover court orchestra, as soon as he could find time for it in a rehearsal. All the friends felt beset at the end of that spring—Johannes now tensely awaiting the first run-through of the concerto, Clara suffering an attack of rheumatism, Joachim overworked and ill.36 Moreover, Clara was becoming increasingly involved with Theodor Kirchner, eventually a good friend and champion of Brahms, in those days enjoying the modest success of his keyboard miniatures—which is approximately where Robert Schumann had been when he married Clara. And like Schumann, Kirchner was a fine but fragile artist, chronically depressed and irresolute. In March, Clara sent him a precious lock of Robert’s hair.37
On March 28 a telegram from Joachim summoned Johannes to Hanover for the test reading on the thirtieth. Given the myriad imponderables in writing for eighty players, the anxiety crackling around the first hearing of an orchestral work can be brutal for a composer, so much the worse if it is the first experience. It is as if you have singlehandedly built a temple stone by stone, without being entirely sure it will stand up.
That day, as Joachim led the orchestra through the tumultuous introduction, Brahms sat trembling at the piano trying to assess his orchestration while preparing for the silvery chains of thirds that begin the solo part. In the audience, Clara and Julius Grimm listened for the first time to music they had seen for years on paper in tattered drafts. After all the sweat and apprehension, the reading went splendidly. On the podium Joachim handled the accompaniment well, Brahms played the solo part with aplomb, even the orchestra seemed inspired.
As the music spun out, much of the orchestration sounded better than Brahms had allowed himself to hope. If awkward spots remained, nearly everything worked. So at last he knew that he had some conception of how to write for the orchestra—the great thing, the ultimate medium. After the adagio, Brahms played the finale prestissimo out of sheer relief. Walking with him afterward in beautiful, hopeful weather, Clara found Johannes as elated as she had ever seen him.38 Surely, they thought, the joy of completion and discovery everyone had felt that day presaged victory when the work found its premiere.
DESPITE HIS INDIFFERENCE TO APPLAUSE, Brahms dreamed of a great success with the concerto, and not only for self-important reasons. For him success was not abstract but concrete, played out first in his own mind and judgment, then in the judgment of friends, then in parlors and concert halls in front of people who applauded or did not. Surprising as it may appear for someone as independent as Brahms, he considered the verdict of the middle-class public to be the ultimate arbiter. Certainly he allowed himself to challenge listeners, to stretch their capacities, and he always claimed that he did not like going before the public himself. All the same, if his work did not sooner or later please people in the concert hall and in the parlors of amateur pianists and singers, he believed he was not doing his job.
That is what Brahms implies in a letter to Clara of June 1858. In the first lines he plays his familiar game of reproving someone who loves and supports him, in this case complaining