Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [139]
1: In consideration of her great merit in connection with the Ladies’ Choir, and in consideration of her presumably highly defective and unfortunate constitution, a subscription shall be established for the never-enough-to-be-favored-and-adored Demoiselle Laura Garbe, in accordance with which she need not pay the fine every time, in lieu of which a moderate accounting shall be praesentiret at the end of the quarter:4
Pro tertio: the moneys so collected shall be given to the poor, and it is to be desired that none of them get too much …
To whom it may concern: such is our opinion and we await your judicious and much-to-be desired approbation thereof.
In expectation whereof, in deepest devotion and veneration to the Ladies’ Choir, their ever-ready scribe and time-beater is always theirs to command.
Johannes Kreisler, Jun.
(alias Brahms)
The Frauenchor had a halcyon spring with their leader. There were excursions and picnics in the country that ended with singing in the moonlight. Brahms, sometimes rowdy by the end of the evening, might climb into a tree to conduct. “The girls are so nice, fresh and enthusiastic, without being soft and sentimental,” he wrote Clara. “On the way home … we usually have a lot of fine singing and serenading.… My girls, for instance, will walk quite calmly into a garden and wake the people up at midnight with their singing.”5 The choir members made up silver badges with the letters H F C for Hamburg Frauenchor circling a B for Brahms.
The season ended in late May, when he went to the Lower Rhine Festival in Düsseldorf and afterward stayed away from Hamburg for the summer. But he brought the ladies’ solo quartet with him to the festival, where Clara arranged for them to sing his part-songs in a private recital, Joachim and Stockhausen among the audience. (When one of the quartet took sick before the performance, Clara sang the part herself.6)
That year the festival featured the Schumann B Major Symphony, and Joachim played his Hungarian Concerto. Though the concerto garnered some hearings and enthusiasm over the next decades, it was too hard, and too unreliable a crowd-pleaser in other hands, for many soloists beyond its composer to take on. In the end it had been Johannes more than anyone else who encouraged Joachim about his compositions—and in the next years that enthusiasm faded. As Clara had left behind her composing and Johannes eventually his solo career, Joachim finally decided to stick largely to playing the violin and conducting.
For two months after the festival, Brahms settled into a Rhine vacation near Bonn with Joachim, Dietrich, and Stockhausen. It began in blossoming spring, with warm nights and the song of nightingales and the Siebenbirge in the distance. Clara wrote him as he got down to work, “men like you are always watching Nature and drinking in her charms.… In this way a fine stormy sky can lead to a symphony—who knows what may have happened already!”7 (This again, by Clara’s standards, a knee-slapping letter.) Resisting the temptation of a symphony or any other orchestral work, Brahms instead finished the B Major Sextet.
He was anxious now to get new work in print. That summer he offered a stack of music to his main publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel, including the D Minor Piano Concerto. To his disgust, they only accepted the D Major Serenade. “I’m sorry,” he wrote Breitkopf, “that you have so little faith in my concerto. But I would not have thought that the outcome could be so terrible. Of the other pieces I sent, you vouchsafe not a word. I believed I had given you my best and most practical things.”8 The firm of Rieter-Bierdermann took the Ave Maria, the Begräbnisgesang, the Op. 14 Songs and Romances, and, grudgingly, the piano concerto (only the solo part—the full score did not appear for fourteen years). He got modest fees from these sales, but still made most of his income from performing—and did that as little as possible.
Another work Breitkopf rejected, to its everlasting contrition, went to a firm owned by the father of a new