Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [153]
As he prepared to leave, someone, perhaps Theodor Avé-Lallemant, made a preliminary inquiry if Brahms wanted the job of assistant conductor of the Hamburg Singakademie; that would give him a leg up for the orchestral position. Certainly that appeared auspicious. Avé, who had much influence in these decisions, wrote an acquaintance, “Brahms … thinks of going to Vienna … then I shall be quite alone, but thank God I have learned to know the man so well.”52 Brahms felt he could depend on his old friend, who knew him so well, to promote his cause.
Just before he left Brahms wrote Albert Dietrich:
Dear friend, I am leaving on Monday for Vienna! I look forward to it like a child.
Of course I don’t know how long I shall stay; we’ll leave it open, and I hope we can meet some time during the winter.
The C Minor Symphony is not finished; on the other hand, the string quintet … in F minor is [so he thought then].… Enclosed are my Handel Variations; the Marienlieder have not come yet.53
In saying good-bye at home, where his mother was recovering from a fall and broken bone, Brahms counseled his father, “Now if things should be going badly with you, music is always the great consolation. Go and study my old score of [Handel’s] Saul. You’ll find great comfort in it.” Some time later, when Johann Jakob followed the advice, he discovered that Hannes had filled the leaves with banknotes.
His favorite pupil and Frauenchor founder Friedchen Wagner entreated him not to leave. On his departure Brahms consoled her, in both tangible and symbolic form, with the manuscript of his organ prelude O Traurigkeit, O Herzeleid (O Sorrow, O Grief). Only after several days of Herzeleid herself did Friedchen discover the gift where he had concealed it under the lid of her piano. When Brahms did generous and affectionate things, and he did many, he tended to carry them out in secret and leave the scene. More and more, in person, among his peers, he was prepared to be charming and sociable in good bourgeois fashion, or to be impossible, and not much in between.
BRAHMS TRAVELED TO VIENNA VIA DESSAU, where he visited critic Adolf Schubring, probably to express appreciation for the Neue Zeitschrift articles. He arrived in Vienna in the middle of December 1862, planning a short exploratory visit.
After his lifetime of experience with mercantile Hamburg, at last Brahms saw the City of Dreams, where of all places in the West great music was the most famous industry. Dazzled as any musical tourist, he walked through the streets with their endless landmarks. He knew all the places, all the stories. Here behind the Baroque facade of the Lobkowitz Palace Beethoven first conducted the Eroica for his aristocratic patrons, and in a small plain room of the Schwarzpanierhaus he died shaking his fist at the sky. Twenty-four years before, in the alcove of another small room, Schubert had muttered, “Here, here is my end,” and died at thirty-two, eight months after his first triumph in Vienna. Here was the Ester-hazy palace, built by Haydn’s employers. On Domgasse, those small stone steps rising from the courtyard echoed to The Marriage of Figaro as Mozart composed it; five years later and a minute’s walk away, in a chapel attached to the towering Gothic mass of the Stephansdom, Mozart’s mourners filed past his coffin before he was buried in a communal grave. Here by the river the first Theater an der Wien produced the triumphant premiere performances of Mozart’s Zauberflöte, and the new theater that opera helped build on the