Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [154]
In Vienna, then as now, one could almost see little Mozart bustling through the streets in his dandy’s clothes, see the chubby bohemian Schubert with his curly hair and minuscule spectacles, see Beethoven strolling distractedly up broad Kärntnerstrasse, his tall hat crooked back on his head, clutching a roll of music behind his back. In Vienna in 1862 you could speak with old people who said: yes, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, I saw them, I heard them play, I was there when Beethoven tried to mark time for the premiere of the Ninth Symphony at the Kärntnerthor, and he was so deaf he didn’t know it was over, and they turned him around to blink uncomprehending at the roaring ovation. The streets echoed with the memories of giants, and their footsteps, and in the city their music and the applause had never stopped.
Besides touring Vienna, listening to the echoes, Brahms called on leading musicians, who proved curious to meet him. Immediately he made the acquaintance of people destined to be lifelong friends and colleagues. A typical mix of Brahms acquaintances, they included chamber and orchestral violinist Josef Hellmesberger, pianist and professor Julius Epstein, musicologist Gustav Nottebohm. He renewed his acquaintance with conductor Karl Grädener, who had moved to Vienna from Hamburg, paid a call on critic Eduard Hanslick, and had a reunion with his cherished Hamburg chorister Bertha Porubzsky, who was now engaged.
From home Elise wrote: “Mother and I were sad after you left, we were so used to your having coffee with us.… You haven’t written us anything about the beautiful young Vienna girls.” Later Elise reported that some Frauenchor alumni had sung his duets for her and Mother, and his favorite Laura Garbe wanted something to remember him by—a few notes, a lock of hair.54 Clara Schumann wrote from Düsseldorf that she had bought a little house in the resort of Baden-Baden, and at Winterthur and Bâle, “I was particularly charmed with Kirchner’s organ playing.”55 On November 16, Brahms made his Vienna debut, playing the G Minor Piano Quartet with Hellmesberger’s group.
A day or two after that came the news of the failure or insult or historic blunder that threw his life into turmoil, years of wandering, and endless bitterness. Theodor Avé-Lallemant wrote apologetically to say that they had offered the podium of the Hamburg Philharmonic to Julius Stockhausen.
Brahms was thunderstruck. Certainly his friend Stockhausen was a superb musician and singer, but he had never held an orchestral position in his life. The members of Brahms’s circle were as stunned as he was. Joachim wrote Avé, “The insult to Johannes will not be forgotten in the history of art.”56 Clara, in Hamburg at the time, got the news from Avé himself. They sat talking about it late into the night, Avé offering a number of reasons, perhaps convincing, for the board’s decision: there was much to be done in developing the orchestra and that was not Brahms’s forte; let Stockhausen build up the group, then Brahms could take it over. Avé probably did not mention the more likely reason, that Julius Stockhausen was internationally famous and unequivocally admired, and Brahms neither.
Brahms could accept no rationalizations. He still longed—or convinced himself he did—to stay in his hometown, to lead a musical life there, to settle down as a proper Kapellmeister. Not least, perhaps, with this position he had dreamed of a kind of redemption for his father and family: to turn Johann Jakob Brahms the Bierfiedler and descendant of peasants into the father of the conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic.
Brahms could not shake the suspicion that his family’s place on the social scale had something to do with it. Maybe he was right. He had come from people you saw playing tunes in the street, and for some in Hamburg that was all Johnny Broom and his family would ever amount to.57 It is as if when he heard the news he suddenly saw no redemption for his family’s name, and for himself infinite loneliness stretching