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By Root 1630 0

about Clara’s very efforts in his behalf: “All I would beg of you is not to allow your own enthusiasm to fire others to a pitch which they will afterwards misunderstand. You expect much too prompt and warm a recognition of any talent which you happen to appreciate.” He had come to feel she was pushing too hard about his work. But describing himself airily as a “talent which you happen to appreciate” was too much. For her, Johannes no less than Robert was a holy cause. Clara responded with outrage: “Anybody reading what you have written me about my enthusiasm would think me an extremely hysterical person who worships her friend like a god.… Do not try to kill it with your cold philosophizing.” In her letters for a long time after, Clara made him suffer for his words—at the same time as she lavishly praised his new work and practiced the piano concerto.

Maybe this time Brahms was not as imperious as he seems in trying to damp down Clara’s proselytizing. He says she should not fan the sort of emotional, partisan enthusiasm that has little substance behind it. Any hint of propaganda reminded him unpleasantly of the New Germans. He continued:

Art is a republic. You should accept this principle much more wholeheartedly than you do. You are much too aristocratic.… Do not confer a higher rank upon any artist, and do not expect the minor ones to look up to him as something higher, as consul. His ability will make him a beloved and respected citizen of this republic, but no consul or emperor.39

In those few lines we find something as close to an artistic credo as Brahms ever expressed, one characteristically forthright and remarkably mature. Probably it had evolved less through experience in the musical world, of which he still had relatively little, than through years of reading and of dialogues with Joachim. The idea of a republic of art suited Brahms’s democratic convictions, his love of the process of music-making from the composing desk through rehearsals and even performing, his respect for the fraternity of musicians (always from his own corner, a little apart), and his essential humility.

Brahms was a traditionalist who worshipped the masters of the past, but he took for granted that he must bring something original to his tradition. He was a craftsman among craftsmen, doing his job as best he could in all humility, though to him the work was not ordinary but something at the highest level of human endeavor. Music was Brahms’s religion—but music as a private spiritual and intellectual quest, and a shared undertaking. If he assumed a kind of mantle as a priest of art, he did not extend that priesthood outside the confines of his study and the places where music is played. In other words, Brahms did not envision artists in Wagner’s monomaniacal terms as prophets redeeming Germany and through Germany the world, but rather art as a communal undertaking to exalt the individual mind and heart and soul.

Thus his term: a republic. If in some degree Brahms preached through his hat in saying there are no consuls in art—he had been a golden child and famous at twenty—he still saw his profession as something musicians share democratically, everyone working for the good of music itself. It was his job to write it and that of players to play it, and the part of the public to decide whom to pay for it. He lived that conviction to the end, even if he was often crotchety about the contributions of his fellow composers to the process.

So for Brahms the final court of any musician was the ears, hearts, and minds of listeners—above all of cultivated Austro/German music lovers, who in the later nineteenth century made up a large and remarkably sophisticated audience. It was a time of unprecedented music-making in Europe, not only in new, grandiose concert halls but in homes and private soirees, all that activity new not so much in kind as in scope. Brahms aimed his music primarily toward the thousands of middle-class amateurs he knew could understand his forms and sometimes his modulations, a good many of whom could sing and play his music