Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [155]
I feel I must send you the enclosed letter [from Avé]. It represents a much sadder event for me than you can imagine or perhaps grasp.
As a man I suppose I am a little bit old-fashioned … but I am as attached to my native town as I might be to my mother.
Now you must be aware that as early as this autumn the Singakademie were seriously thinking of engaging a second conductor … and just before I left Hamburg to come here I was asked privately whether I would be inclined to accept. And now this hostile friend [Avé again] comes and ousts me—forever.
How rare it is for the likes of us to find a permanent niche and how glad I should have been to find mine in my native town. Happy as I am here with so many beautiful things to gladden my heart, I nevertheless feel, and shall always feel, that I am a stranger and can have no peace.…
If I could not fasten my hopes on my native town, what claims could I have elsewhere? Where should I care to go even if I had the chance?
Apart from what you experienced with your husband you know that, as a general rule, what our fellow-citizens like best is to get rid of us and allow us to flit about in the wilderness of the world.
And yet what one wants is to be bound, and to acquire everything that makes life worth living. One is naturally frightened by the thought of solitude. An active existence in lively association with others and with plenty of stimulating intercourse, the happiness of a family circle,—who is so little of a human being as not to long for these things?58
Brahms never lost that sadness, that rage, that regret, for the rest of his years as an exile in the wilderness of the world. He believed the podium in Hamburg represented his last best chance to be a complete human being. He was mistaken about that, mistaken that he would have enjoyed the job, mistaken about his need for family and home. But that was the way he was made, to yearn for things even as he fled them. He had been handed a destiny, some of it glorious and some of it wretched. Yet if like all men he felt what he had lost and grieved for it, fate once again had dealt him the right card. It took Brahms over a decade to understand it, but when he wrote his anguished letter to Clara from Vienna, he was already in the place he belonged.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
City of Dreams
AFTER THE DRAMA AND TURBULENCE OF THE 1850s, when Brahms bounced from obscure music student to Messiah to frustrated lover to blocked composer and reluctant soloist, the main thing he aspired to in his creative and personal life was this: no more turbulence, no more drama. To that end he was willing to pay the requisite price, which was loneliness. In the decades after he first came to Vienna in 1862, amid the gemütlich cafés and elegant concert halls and a growing crowd of admirers, Brahms carried around with him an unremitting, inescapable solitude. He was a man with many friends and no intimates.
His final conquest of the city took many years and was never unopposed. Still, with him the story would not go as it had with his father’s migration to Hamburg, a slow rise to a middling position. The Old World’s capital of music welcomed Brahms from the beginning, and the Viennese were prepared to give him applause, favor, and finally love when he had earned them in competition with the local lights—who happened to included Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Slowly and warily, he came to love the city in return.
But no more drama. Brahms wanted time and peace for his work and to an extraordinary degree he found them. Time and luck smiled on him as they had not on his predecessors. At twenty-nine, Brahms’s age when he came to Vienna, Schubert had two years to live and Mozart six, Beethoven was going deaf, and Wagner had fled Paris after nearly starving. In 1862, Brahms had over three decades of vigorous health and relatively unfettered time ahead of him. In those years he would often be generous with his time and fortune, but only when and where