Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [161]
WHEN BRAHMS ARRIVED in the city in 1862, two organizations dominated Viennese concert life—the Opera/Philharmonic and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (Society of the Friends of Music). At the end of the decade both were slated to move to new quarters the Ringstrasse development planned for them, the Hofoper and the Musikverein. In 1862 the Opera still mounted its productions at the historic Kärntnerthor Theater, where Beethoven had premiered the Ninth Symphony. The Opera orchestra, conducted by Otto Dessoff, became the Vienna Philharmonic for eight instrumental concerts a year at the Kärntnerthor, the tickets precious and generally reserved for prominent families. The orchestra of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, still mostly amateur in the 1860s, presented its concerts under Johann Herbeck in the Redoutensaal of the Imperial Palace, a room seating six hundred and imperially decked out with long mirrors, Gobelin tapestries, and crystal chandeliers à la Versailles. Everyone was familiar with the proclivities of both groups: the Philharmonic conservative and largely devoted to the pedestaled dead from Mendelssohn backward, the Gesellschaft more receptive to living composers.
Likewise, among the amateur choral groups in town two dominated, the Singverein associated with the Gesellschaft der Muskfreunde and conducted by Herbeck, and the Singakademie, perennially overshadowed by the Singverein. The Gesellschaft, largely founded and run by amateurs of the Grossbürgertum but also with aristocratic members, sponsored a library, a museum, and a Conservatory headed by Philharmonic concertmaster Josef Hellmesberger.
All the same, in the Vienna of Brahms’s day the majority of performances were given in smaller chamber and recital halls, and in private soirees in homes and palaces. By 1890, there were around 240 public concerts a year in Vienna in the Bösendorfer, Ehrbar, and Musikverein halls, but only seventeen of them full-scale and professional. If Brahms wanted to hear Beethoven’s Ninth in town, he had thirteen opportunities in the thirty-four years he was based in Vienna, and it took around ten years to have a chance to hear all nine Beethoven symphonies played professionally.10 Many of the amateurs hearing an orchestral program in the later nineteenth century had played or heard the same works in their homes, or had taken the music-appreciation classes that proliferated at the time. Often they came to the concert hall for the full, live experience of music they already knew and loved from piano arrangements. If the public was slow to appreciate living composers, Brahms knew that if he kept supplying them with music for the concert hall and the parlor, both serious and light, they would come around to him. Slowly, they did.
Nineteenth-century Europe created modern musical organizations, modern concert life and concert halls and music education, and the modern sense of a canon of historic masterpieces. As integral accompaniment, that process generated a lively interest in music criticism. Of the critics in Vienna, only one was inescapable in Brahms’s years there: Eduard Hanslick, Professor of the History and Aesthetics of Music at the University of Vienna, critic of Die Presse from 1855 to 1864 and of the Neue Freie Presse until he died in 1904.11 The latter was one of the leading papers in Europe, and Hanslick one of its leading lights.
Born in Prague in 1825, son of a middle-class philosopher/musician and trained to the law, Hanslick developed a fervor for Schumann’s music and writings that tempted him into journalism. He came to Vienna to finish his legal studies and there expected to hear marvelous music night and day. Instead he found, “How trivial was public musical life at the end of the thirties and in the early forties!… Cut off from all great intellectual