Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [132]
For his part, Johannes was no less pampered on his third visit to the court of Detmold, but he felt more bored than ever with the stilted atmosphere and dusty finery, the aristocratic aesthetes who were his students, the chorus of Highnesses and Excellencies and their friends who could barely sing the Bach and Handel he gave them. Probably the most enjoyable part of this sojourn was a couple of days that began with a visit from Theodor Avé-Lallemant. As Brahms and Avé returned from a walk in the woods with Bargheer, they found a boisterous Joachim waiting in Johannes’s room at Zur Stadt Frankfurt. He was fresh from a tour of England with his new Hungarian Concerto in hand, looking for advice. All that night they happily worked over the piece together.
With his Detmold students Brahms had become curt and snappish, among other faux pas managing to drive away Frau Hofmarschall Meysenbug after a few lessons. Only the genuinely talented Princess Frederike engaged his interest. He pressed the prince to let him conduct the orchestra more, but Leopold resisted in deference to Kapellmeister Kiel, who after some spats over concertos was no admirer of Brahms.
All the same, his creative elation lasted through the Detmold sojourn. Since “Neue Bahnen” he had been awaiting a creative rebirth. In fact it had not quite happened yet, but with the inspiration of various muses—Clara and the singing girls in Hamburg—and his own patient years of waiting and study, he could sense something gathering inside him. After the emotional torments of the last years had sorted out in his creative consciousness, a rebirth would take shape, fueled by the talent that everyone had seen in him from the beginning.
When he received more kind words from Clara about his new pieces he gushed again, “I don’t mind saying that I am very much pleased with my things. I really believe, dear Clara, that I am growing … how delightful it is to work with buoyancy and strength, and to know that you and others are showing such keen interest.… I long for nothing more than to have my things performed.”18
BRAHMS GOT LEAVE from the Detmold court to play a December concert in Hamburg with Grädener’s Akademie. It featured the premieres of the Begräbnisgesang and the Ave Maria in his orchestral arrangement, and Brahms soloed in the Schumann Piano Concerto. His Frauenchor also sang in the program. This amounted to their public debut and one of their few appearances in mainstream concerts—in those days a rare event for any women’s chorus. Most of the Frauenchor performances were in private houses and churches; there was an air of unseemliness about the idea of respectable young women singing on the concert stage.19
As a stopover on the return to Detmold, Brahms spent a day in Hanover with Julius Otto Grimm, who was ready now to end their estrangement over Agathe. The reunion had been engineered by Joachim. After all, Brahms agreed with everybody that his treatment of Agathe had been shameful. Grimm was happy to perform the new choral pieces Johannes had brought with him from Hamburg. Relieved to be back in the good graces of this influential conductor, Johannes made haste to supply Grimm with material.
His creative wave continued to rise at Detmold. He produced vocal works including several of the Opus 44 Twelve Songs and Romances for four women’s voices—another testament to his solo quartet back home—and some of the choruses of Opus 62. And around then he began the piece that would herald his early maturity in chamber music, the B Major String Sextet.
At the end of 1859, Joachim wrote Clara, more enthusiastically than accurately, “Johannes has sent me the greater part of his Serenade instrumentated; most of it is just as though he had never had anything else to deal with but the orchestra. Well, he was born with it, of course!”20 (The labors