Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [137]
But their manifesto, however noble in intention, came in too little and too late, and turned into a debacle. How it happened remains obscure. Brahms was distracted in those days by composing, by the Frauenchor, by a big concert at the end of March in which he conducted Grädener’s orchestra accompanying Joachim in his newly revised Hungarian Concerto. The two had been careless about sending the manifesto around to prospective supporters—some emphatically rejected it, and one of these was apparently offended enough to sabotage it.
By whomever and for whatever reason, the manifesto was leaked to the Berlin Echo and/or the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik when it had only four names on it: Brahms, Joachim, Grimm, and their conductor friend Bernard Scholz. As a result, a parody of the manifesto was published in the Neue Zeitschrift on May 4, 1860, actually two days before the leaked original, its pathetic four signatures huddling at the bottom, appeared in the Echo.
The Zeitschrift parody may have been ham-fisted (“All is out!—I learn that a political coup has been carried out, the entire future world rooted out stump and branch, and Weimar and Leipzig … struck out of the musical map of the world.…”), but it sufficiently called attention to how puny and small-minded the manifesto appeared. Brahms and Joachim had attempted to assault the mighty New German propaganda edifice with a thumb of the nose, and a careless one at that. Even after the manifesto finally collected a number of impressive names—among them Bargiel, Grädener, Theodor Kirchner, Niels Gade, and Clara Schumann—it could be nothing but a futile gesture.
The repercussions did relatively little to harm the careers of Brahms and Joachim, though it made them look plenty ridiculous. It did more damage to music itself. In those years music was more important, more powerful, more visible in the spectrum of Western art and culture than it had ever been before. In such a milieu factions are inevitable, but before the manifesto the parties had overlapped and sometimes cooperated: Liszt had once been a friend of Schumann and remained generous and broad-minded; Raff originally was a Mendelssohn protégé; Schumann had championed Berlioz; and Franz Brendel of the Neue Zeitschrift tried to keep channels open among all parties.
All the same, in 1859 Brendel had organized the twenty-fifth anniversary of the journal Robert Schumann had founded, and did not invite Brahms, Joachim, or Clara Schumann to the ceremonies.30 If there had been skirmishes like that before the manifesto, after it a war raged: the War of the Romantics, one side lined up behind Liszt and Wagner (the unity of the arts, loosening the bonds of abstract form), the other side at length behind Brahms (“absolute music,” traditional forms, and especially sonata form). The lines were drawn and defended with power struggles, propaganda, demonstrations, and sabotage. In the later stages of the war, both sides resorted to organizing cadres to disrupt the other side’s concerts. Finally by the end of the century, the musical battles were subsumed into larger political tides.
The War of the Romantics was never an equal contest. The conservative faction was more inclined to stay home and study counterpoint than go out and man the barricades. Only in the concert hall did the conservatives win out. Naturally the party of dissent needed a leader and found one—but not Brahms himself, who after his thrashing over the manifesto retired from public musical politicking once and for all. It would be critic Eduard Hanslick, author of Beauty in Music, who became the tireless helmsman of the abstractionists.
For himself, in the six years before 1860 Brahms had experienced sufficient calamity and humiliation to sink most people, not to mention artists: the madness and death of Robert Schumann, the break with Clara, the fiasco of the D Minor Piano Concerto in Leipzig, the disaster of Agathe, the years of creative groping, now the embarrassment of the manifesto. After all that, his election as Messiah seemed little