• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Certainly the temper of the place appealed to him as much as its music: the city that loved rib-sticking food and wine made to be drunk in quantity, the atmosphere of romance, the ongoing intellectual and artistic and political debates of the coffeehouses, and in the Vienna Woods the gardens of little Heuriger taverns surrounded by vineyards and serving endless mugs of new wine; and everywhere music lilting and bittersweet when it needed to be, incomparably magnificent when it needed to be. The city suited Brahms for those reasons, and deeper ones. More and more as nineteenth-century Romanticism slipped toward decadence and denouement, a melancholy prowled beneath the gay mirage of life and art in the theaters and cafés and streets. The quintessential Viennese playwright Nestroy wrote, “The noblest of all the nations is resignation.” The sentiment characterized the place. The gaiety of Vienna was a mask, and Brahms understood masks.

Much of Vienna’s tone and humor reflected an empire not exactly conquered but increasingly irrelevant, stewing in its glory. Brahms resonated with that too: a lost past full of glories haunting the present. The past of Viennese music was the audible embodiment of a splendor, the traditions pervading the Baroque churches and palaces, the court and society balls throbbing to the lilt of waltzes, the concert halls worshipful of the past and leery of the present.

The comic-opera court was presided over by the colorless and implacably dutiful Emperor Franz Josef, in his sixty-eight years on the throne one of the longest-reigning monarchs in the history of the world. The empire slowly withered and staggered along with the royal person. The word helplessness embodies a good deal of the Viennese tone, and its later history: an ancient empire lurching toward dissolution; a middle class frustrated before a social ceiling that left the top of society frozen and unattainable; eleven constituent peoples and their mélange of languages making up an ethnic bedlam—Slavonic, Hungarian, Bohemian, Italian, Jewish—so ungovernable that the name “Austria” did not even officially exist in the later nineteenth century. The muddle is preserved in the untranslatable polycultural stew of Wienerisch, the city’s singular dialect. “Was there perhaps never a rhythmic social whole at all,” Carl Schorske wonders, “only an illusion of unified movement resulting from an accidental articulation of fundamentally incohesive, individuated parts?”7

Yet again there is the paradox of Vienna, that it remained, and remains, such a particular, singular place. And through all its tumultuous modern history music flowered extraordinarily, in the human and professional tragicomedy of triumphs and disasters and struggles and cabals and boundless ambitions. The city possessed a Grossbürgertum eager for art and unprecedentedly educated to it. In Vienna a man like Brahms who felt himself from nowhere, a vagabond belonging to no one, could find a home full of marvelous music and musicians and a strange joie de vivre touched with weariness and despair.

There is still a deeper level of Brahms’s connection to Vienna, why he and the city belonged to each other. Born in poverty, he reached adulthood rooted in the rising middle class, the Grossbürgertum that built the Ringstrasse and all it symbolized, who were the amateur friends of music who primarily founded and ran and often participated in the orchestra and chorus of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Politically liberal, capitalistic, constitutional, long the most dynamic force in the city but by the end of the century incapable of hanging on to power, the middle class believed in hard work, in competition, in success, science, rationality, rules, railroad timetables. They honored the arts and culture extravagantly, but they also respected the military and political strong men.8

If the arts were near the center of life for the Austro-German Grossbürgertum, that class shaped Brahms and his art, and in turn his art confirmed the values of that class. What is his music after all, even