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By Root 1430 0

stay with Joachim. They played much together in public and private. While he was there another landmark arrived—a performance of the A Major Serenade in New York, not only the first Brahms orchestral piece heard in the United States but the first outside the orbit of Hamburg, Leipzig, and Hanover. Brahms would make some headway in the United States in the next decades, especially when his German disciples began turning up there. As late as the 1890s, though, Boston critic Philip Hale proposed that the new Symphony Hall should have a door marked “Exit—in case of Brahms.”

Early in 1861 Brahms responded to an invitation from Albert Dietrich, by now serving as Court Kapellmeister in Oldenburg. Brahms’s letter to Dietrich demonstrates to what extent he expected his friends to make these invitations, and to provide him with useful introductions and generous fees. With a playfulness appropriate to their friendship, Brahms remained magisterially in control of the arrangements:

I am much drawn to visit you, and to get to know so many whose names I have so often heard mentioned as your friends, otherwise I would say no. So I shall come to you, and shall then stay as long as I can allow myself to be idle.

What shall I play? Beethoven or Mozart?.… Advise me!

And for the second part, Schumann, Bach, or might I venture upon some new variations of my own?

Of course you shall conduct my serenade. We have played my quartets a good deal here; I shall bring them with me, and shall be glad if they meet with your approval.

Apropos! I suppose I must have fifteen louis d’ors remunerations, but would like it arranged that if I play at Court, that would be paid for extra. Money is very necessary to me, consequently my time is precious, and I am unwilling to allow myself to be tempted to concerts; but if the one has to be, the other must follow.42

The Oldenburg concert in mid-March—including the D Major Serenade and Beethoven G Major Concerto—found an agreeable reception, likewise an informal performance of the Handel Variations for the orchestra musicians. Brahms had a good visit with Dietrich and his brood: “Like a child with the children,” Dietrich wrote. There were sociable evenings with family friends, musical and otherwise. At one party a young lady caught Brahms’s eye. After the guests left he rambled to Dietrich: “I should like to marry her; such a girl could also make me happy.” Next day, sober again, he came to himself—the girl does not show up again in the chronicle. Brahms went back to Hamm and the nightingales in the trees, and an early-April concert with Stockhausen that saw the premiere of the first Magelone song.43

THAT SPRING OF 1862 a prophetic series of articles on Brahms appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Despite simmering resentment over the Brahms/Joachim manifesto of two years before, editor Franz Brendel stuck by his determination to calm the waters. The five articles in the Neue Zeitschrift fell within a larger series called “Schumanniana” by one Adolf Schubring. Brahms and Schubring had carried on a friendship in letters since 1856, and Brahms was godfather to a Schubring son, but they still had not met when the articles appeared. Afterward, not surprisingly, they became friends.

Despite inevitable lapses, Schubring’s commentary remains astonishing for its insight, given that Brahms had only published eighteen pieces by then. The series begins by citing Schumann’s “Neue Bahnen” and the ensuing factional responses: elation in the Schumann camp, otherwise disapproval to dismay. Schubring notes “the unfortunate fragmentation of musical Germany. Here, Guelphs! Here, Ghibellines! The battle cry is sounding, and the Schumann banner, which stands between the two warring parties, gets dragged into the fray.”44

In his musical analyses, Schubring identifies thematic logic as the essence of Brahmsian discourse. From a larger perspective, he follows musicological fashion in dividing the work into periods. If that seems nonsensical for a composer not yet thirty, Schubring still astutely examines the development