Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [156]
Brahms was a faithful minister to his music and eventually Vienna rewarded him for it. Otherwise no drama, no distraction if he could help it. He waged a perennial battle to escape the emotional consequences of life and love, to dominate his life and everyone in it with the same relentlessness that he dominated the fabric of his music. If in the end the world wanted to make a living monument out of him, he found that another useful way of keeping the world at bay. The loneliness he would endure, if never relish.
His life was composing, after that family and friends and study and performing. His music naturally evolved over the years, but more subtly than with other composers of his stature. In nearly four decades after his mid-twenties, there is no journey in the development of Brahms’s work nearly as great as the difference between the Beethoven of the First Piano Concerto and of the late string quartets, the Mozart of Il re pastore and of Don Giovanni. Few composers could have spent twenty years and more on a unified piece, as Brahms did at least three times. It worked because his language and ideas had not changed enough as to make the seams stand out.
Inevitably, now and then, life broke in on his lonely peace and his bachelor routine. Brahms had more unlucky infatuations to get through, but the episodes were unwanted and he escaped them as soon as he could. Night after night he took his bows before audiences, or left a jolly company or the clamor of a bawdy house, and walked home with relief to his narrow bed, to rise next morning before dawn and light a cigar and make strong coffee and contend with the sea of notes again. Always, he slept well.
IN NOVEMBER 1862, Brahms wrote Julius Grimm, “Well, this is it! I have established myself here within ten paces of the Prater [at No. 55 Novaragasse, today Praterstrasse] and can drink my wine where Beethoven drank his.” From beginning to end he loved Vienna’s Prater, once the hunting preserve of emperors, in the nineteenth century a four-mile-long wooded park dotted with cafés and beer gardens and restaurants. Like every Viennese, Beethoven and Schubert had relaxed there after work and listened to music gay and melancholy from little orchestras. Many of Brahms’s works would be laid out in his mind during early-morning walks on the paths of the Prater, turning the luminous input of inspiration into solid notes and forms. Sometimes he spent all day eating and drinking in the park, roaming the woods in his rocking stride, his head thrown back, swinging a hat in his hand.
Brahms was a particular aficionado of the gypsy bands at the café Czarda, where over the years he sat for countless hours steeping himself in that exotic, perfervid music for violins and cimbalom and bass, its rhythms soaring free of the tyranny of musical notation. Otherwise, he could lunch with the babbling hordes in the beer gardens and have his coffee under the trees listening to the Ladies’ Orchestra. He picked up the Viennese inflection for its favorite brew: Kaffee. At the cafés there was always good beer and wine, and the Viennese specialties of goulash, beef with vegetable garnish—Tafelspitz—and pork knuckles.
No less did Brahms enjoy the vulgar side of the park, the dusty, crowded Wurstelprater on the western end, its games and rides and food stands and Punch-and-Judy shows (Wurstl is the Viennese name for Punch). There children screamed with delight, lovers walked arm in arm, and Brahms took a turn now and then on the carved horses of a carousel. Eventually, writes biographer Max Kalbeck: “All the restaurant proprietors, stall owners, clowns, carousel operators,