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All the same, time exacts its toll and the bravos fade into history and dust gathers on the monuments, and the excitement once palpable in the streets threatens to become a ceremonial relic, a marble cenotaph. That process had begun when Brahms died in Vienna, by then himself almost a monument of the past. It took the city only eleven years to erect its memorial to him. Today his marble double faces the Musikverein, scene of his frustrations and triumphs. He is seated lost in thought, with the Karlskirche at his back, and the Muse lies prostrate at his feet.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Farewell

SOON AFTER BRAHMS CAME TO VIENNA in September 1862, long before he admitted he had settled there, he became a fixture of the musical scene. He presented himself as composer-pianist, and the city often liked his piano playing better than his compositions. For a long time Brahms may have been the only person to call himself simply a composer, but neither to him nor anyone else did it appear possible to get by on writing music. So, away from Hamburg, he resigned himself to what he called an “amphibian” existence, concertizing and teaching for his keep.1 His sporadic efforts to establish himself as a conductor remained inconclusive. During the 1860s, on a good night, he was still a splendid pianist, his repertoire ranging between Bach and himself but centered on Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. If no virtuoso on the level of Clara Schumann or Joachim, he could still put across a piece by sheer insight and musicianship and force of personality.

His first two performances in town came by way of Conservatory professor Julius Epstein, a darling of the town as pianist and teacher. Brahms met him through his one-time Hamburg chorister and devotee Bertha Porubzsky, now Faber. Like so many others, on their first meeting Epstein experienced the Brahms Epiphany: this slight, quiet blond youth who played the piano with such authority, who appeared so certain of himself, who wrote things so manifestly fresh and vital.

Epstein lived in Schulerstrasse, in the building where Mozart had composed The Marriage of Figaro in the 1780s; where Joseph Haydn had said to father Leopold, “Before God and as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer I have ever known or heard of”; where Mozart had declared after listening to a teenager named Beethoven play, “Someday the world is going to hear something from that one.” Brahms likely knew all that when he showed up at Epstein’s for a rehearsal by the Hellmesberger ensemble, bringing with him his G Minor Piano Quartet. If Julius Epstein was a generous and earnest sort, Josef Hellmesberger was a hardbitten old pro. Son of a famous musical family (his father had taught Joachim), concertmaster of the Philharmonic, leader of the most celebrated string quartet in town, Hellmesberger was a master of the intrigues and political maneuvering that pervaded the musical life of the city.

On this first meeting at Epstein’s, things went profitably, almost like Brahms’s old days, and the event contributed another piece of history to the Figarohaus. Hellmesberger’s group read through the G Minor Quartet. After the rondo alla Zingarese the violinist leaped up, threw his instrument on the bed, embraced Brahms and theatrically proclaimed, “This is the heir of Beethoven!” A fine start, though hardly representative of how their relations were to play out over the years. Clara Schumann, who performed with Hellmesberger in Vienna, despised the man—to a large degree because he blew hot and cold about Johannes’s music and refused to stick his neck out for it, as she did all the time. From this first encounter onward, Hellmesberger and Brahms would be much involved in each other’s history, but the violinist watched out very carefully for his own interests and would never be in anyone’s pocket. Brahms understood that and behaved accordingly.

So, shortly afterward came Brahms’s first performance in Vienna, on November 16, 1862—the G Minor Quartet with members of Hellmesberger’s ensemble,