Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [127]
because I have lost all my strength and all my steadfastness.
I would like to stop living,
wish in this moment to expire.
We hear in no. 4 of that set:
Where is the rose my loved one wore on her heart, and that kiss which intoxicated me, where is it now?
And that man I used to be
for whom I have long since substituted a different self, where is he now?
Then, in the next song of Opus 32, we hear Brahms’s answer, his cry of freedom and prophecy of triumph in a surging allegro:
Alas, you want to hold me fast again, you impeding fetters?
Up and out into the air!
Let my soul’s desiring flow forth in thundering songs, breathing ethereal fragrance!
For Agathe, renunciation won the battle; for Brahms, once more, smashing the fetters. Both of them were devastated. From then on, in his lieder Brahms sang more of love lost than won. But only after five years did he write the songs of Opus 32 and say his true farewell to Agathe—after callous words and sad songs, ravishing music for strings.
CHAPTER NINE
Rebirth
AT THE END OF MARCH 1859, Brahms had two extraordinary concerts at home, the first featuring the D Minor Piano Concerto with the Hamburg Philharmonic, Joachim conducting. In Hamburg only ten years before, Brahms had debuted as a composer with the little “Fantasia on a Favorite Waltz.” Now, on his next appearance in town as soloist and composer, he offered his immense and notorious concerto. After the debacle in Leipzig, Brahms was stunned to find some homegrown enthusiasm gathering around him. The concert was a sellout, with hundreds turned away. Directly afterward he wrote Clara that he, Joachim, and Julius Stockhausen (who contributed an aria) had all been encored and the reviews appreciative: “In short, the Leipzig critics have done no harm.”1
A couple of days later the three friends presented a program including Tartini’s virtuosic “Devil’s Trill” Sonata from Joachim, Schubert and Schumann lieder from Stockhausen, and the small-orchestra version of the D Major Serenade. Rehearsals and concert in the small hall were again packed, and the audience applauded everything warmly. “You would not have recognized the people of Hamburg,” Brahms wrote Clara.2 Receipts from the concerts turned out inspiring too, and in his euphoria Brahms proposed giving the Serenade a try in Leipzig.3
Clara replied from Dresden. She had been brooding about the debacle with the concerto and wrote him: “If I were you I would not move a finger to let Leipzig hear another note from you. The day will come when they will clamor to hear you. Overjoyed as I would be to hear the Serenade I would rather forgo this pleasure than have you produce it before such an unfriendly audience. You must strike Leipzig out of your map—this much pride you must and can have.” She reported that out of duty—Wagner had been flattering her lately—she had gone to see Lohengrin in Vienna and “could see only too well how such an opera succeeds.… The whole thing is full of romanticism and thrilling situations, so much so indeed that even the musician himself at times forgets the horrible music. Nevertheless, on the whole, I like Lohengrin better than I do Tannhaüser, in which Wagner goes through the whole gamut of abominations.”4
Brahms, not well acquainted with the operas yet but ready to countenance Wagner up to a point, took care to not to interfere with Clara’s disgust. However he respected Wagner’s craft and imagination, he usually allowed his friends to flay the competition unimpeded. Of course, at that point Brahms was no rival at all to Wagner or to Liszt. His reputation in the greater musical world still went hardly beyond Schumann’s “Neue Bahnen.” A potential challenger to those revolutionaries he certainly was, and no doubt he planned to become one in fact. As part of that ambition he was working himself up to a fight. This year he wrote Joachim, “My fingers often itch to do battle, to begin to write anti-Liszt.”5
WITH HIS LARGEST PUBLIC SUCCESS filling his confidence and his pockets—and in Hamburg, of all