Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [151]
Most strikingly of all, as of 1862, when Brahms had just arrived at his early maturity, Schubring discerned his essential direction:
Brahms may well have felt that the path he had trodden up to now was a remote dead-end of Romanticism … he turned [his work] back to the eternally clear forms … of the classics.… He understands how to be Classic and Romantic, ideal and real—and after all, I believe he is appointed to blend both these eternal oppositions in art.
Much of the subsequent history of Brahms criticism has built on that insight of 1862—the joining of Classic and Romantic, which Nietszche characterized as the eternal dichotomy of Apollonian and Dionysian spirits: restraint or ecstasy, ideal form or unfettered intuition. That raises the question, To what extent did Brahms himself build on Schubring’s insight, in trying to reconcile apparently antithetical spirits? Brahms had an ongoing correspondence with the critic, read the articles, visited him shortly after they appeared. Certainly Brahms had already taken to the path Schubring describes, but criticism of this subtlety could sharpen his focus, confirm his path. Schubring not only may have begun mature Brahms criticism but at a critical point may have helped the composer understand his own maturity. If that is true, Schubring’s articles proved nearly as important to Brahms’s creative life as Schumann’s “Neue Bahnen” had—maybe even a more productive contribution, because more accurate and less intimidating.
In April 1862 Brahms sent the critic a copy of the Handel Variations, saying, “I am fond of it and value it particularly in relation to my other works.” (This shortly after Clara’s performance, when Brahms told her he could not stand to hear it.) While in this and similar ways he transparently courted Schubring, Brahms generally behaved toward him as he did toward all critics; he stroked them but did not genuflect, kept a certain imperious distance. That is observable in a note Brahms wrote Schubring in 1869. The critic had gotten carried away with thematic derivations in Ein deutsches Requiem, and Brahms dispatched a reprimand: “I disagree that in the third movement the themes of the different sections have something in common.… If it is nevertheless so … I want no praise for it.… If I want to retain the same musical idea, then it should be clearly recognized in each transformation, augmentation, inversion. The other way would be a trivial game and always a sign of the most impoverished invention.” For pre-Freudian Brahms, an unconscious motivic relationship is a meaningless relationship. He wants credit only for the ones he wilfully crafted.
There is one more thing to note about Adolf Schubring: he was by profession a judge, not a musician. In other words he was another of the cultivated Austro-German amateurs of those days. If professional performers were the cutting edge in spreading Brahms’s music, middle-class amateurs were the core of his audience. Thus the conclusion to Schubring’s 1862 articles boded very well indeed for Brahms’s future:
The greater public … does not yet seem to have any idea what a colossal genius—one completely the equal of Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann—is ripening in the young Hamburg master.
In June 1862, Brahms made his usual visit to the Lower Rhine Music Festival, held that year in Cologne. There he met the operatic soprano Luise Dustmann, a great friend of Wagner, and eventually likewise of Brahms. Luise impressed him with her enthusiasm for Vienna and its musical and other pleasures. They began a flirtatious relationship that lasted for years