Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [124]
When he left Detmold for Hanover on January 1, Brahms first stopped off in Göttingen to embrace Agathe after three months of love-making restricted to letters. Innocently and unwisely, Julius Grimm and his wife leaned on Johannes a little: there’s talk around town, if you don’t do something Agathe could be compromised. Graciously or otherwise, Brahms took the hint. We know nothing about how it played out, but during that visit he proposed and Agathe accepted. Secretly they bought engagement rings and exchanged them. He had a photograph taken in Göttingen, the ring on his finger conspicuously displayed. For all the couple’s secrecy, surely the Grimms guessed, and surely word went out that Brahms had found his mate, and the perfect one too.
ON JANUARY 8, Brahms took a tender leave from Agathe and went to Hanover to prepare for the concerto premiere. Everything seemed hanging in a balance, love weighing against his first premiere of a large, ambitious piece. He was still reworking the concerto’s “unfortunate first movement, that refuses to be born.”59 His mother wrote from Hanover that his old teacher Marxsen sent best wishes, and she knew things would go well: “you were always so certain of your affairs.”60
At the premiere on the 22nd the Hanover response appeared polite but puzzled. In the words of one critic, “The work, with all its serious striving, its rejection of triviality, its skilled instrumentation, seemed difficult to understand, even dry, and in parts eminently fatiguing.” Brahms may have felt relieved to have gotten off that well. He knew what the public expected from concertos: virtuosic brilliance, dazzling cadenzas, not too many minor keys, not too long, not too tragic. To the degree that those were the rules, the D Minor Concerto violated every one of them. The piece was bound to take time to make its way. After all, for decades even the Beethoven Violin Concerto had been too much for the public, until Joachim forced them to accept it.
The day after the premiere in Hanover, neither success nor disaster, Brahms took the train for Leipzig. Optimistically, he told a reporter that he was thinking of spending the entire winter in the city.
The first omens of what he was in for appeared during rehearsals at the Gewandhaus. The old hall was a long room with a balcony set back, the seats laid out in rows facing the center aisle. As in many older halls, the orchestra sat on a low platform at one end, very close to the audience. The crowd practically breathed down a soloist’s neck. Since the time when Mendelssohn occupied the podium and made Leipzig the musical capital of Germany, to have a success at the Gewandhaus was by definition to have arrived.61
A number of people showed up for the first rehearsal of the concerto, but there were none of the usual smatterings of applause. For the second rehearsal nobody at all came, and the orchestra remained stone-faced throughout. Conductor Julius Rietz had no liking for the piece, and after the concert said so.
As Brahms arrived for the performance on January 27 he hoped to find Clara there, but she had not come. The concert began and he waited through the opening pieces, anxiously looking for her in the hall. When his turn came he stepped onto the platform to polite applause. The conductor raised his baton; the ominous low D filled the hall. Brahms sat through his orchestral introduction which seemed longer than ever, trying to subdue his nerves. He began the first solo and the chains of thirds fell into place; he was playing well. With his mind on his job, he went through the first movement pleased at how the piece was going from all of them.
In those days audiences customarily applauded between movements, and sometimes called for an immediate encore. After the first movement there was a resounding silence. After the adagio, the same. When the finale