Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [165]
Two days before, the Gesellschaft orchestra under Herbeck had played the D Major Serenade, not particularly well but to a generally good reception.2 Critic Eduard Hanslick liked the first minuet best, and for all his abstract ideals could wield a flowery metaphor in a review: “The instrumental coloring and the grace of the melody give [the minuet] the characteristic of night music, and it is full of moonlight and the scent of lilac.” The city seemed to be welcoming Brahms entirely pleasantly.
Then came the devastating letter from Avé-Lallemant saying that Julius Stockhausen had been offered the Hamburg Philharmonic. Brahms had to pull himself together for a debut solo concert Epstein had set up for November 29, which fell three days after Stockhausen accepted the offer. His rankling disappointment did not seem to trip Brahms in the least. Assisted by Hellmesberger’s group, he played his A Major Piano Quartet, a Bach toccata, Schumann’s Op. 17 Fantasia, and his own Handel Variations. The audience was polite at the quartet, enthusiastic at the Variations. Just before his despondent letter to Clara about the Hamburg job, he wrote his parents his own review of the concert. Probably he was bucking up their feelings as well as his own; surely Christiane and Johann Jakob had wanted him on the podium in Hamburg as much as he wanted to be there. His letter shows an uncharacteristic bravado:
I was very happy yesterday, my concert went quite excellently, much better than I had hoped. After the quartet had been sympathetically received, I had extraordinary success as a player. Every number met with the greatest applause.… I played as freely as though I had been sitting at home among friends, and certainly this public is far more stimulating than our own.… Tell the contents of this letter to Herr Marxsen.3
Hanslick had met Brahms years before at the Lower Rhine Music Festival, but this may have been the critic’s first encounter with Brahms playing his own work. Hanslick’s review of the recital shows that, like the rest of the world, he had not forgotten Schumann’s “Neue Bahnen.” Brahms’s compositions, wrote Hanslick:
are hardly to be counted among those immediately enlightening and gripping works which carry the listener along with them in their flight. Their esoteric character, disdainful of popular effect, combined with the great technical difficulties, makes their popularization a much slower process than one had been led to expect from the delightful prophecy Schumann gave his favorite as a parting blessing.… Will the natural freshness and youthfulness continue to bloom untroubled in the costly vase that he has now created for them? Will they grow even more beautiful and free? Does that veil of brooding reflection which so frequently clouds his newest works presage a sudden burst of sunlight, or a thicker, less hospitable twilight?4
Here Hanslick sounded themes that were to become staples of Brahms criticism, including his own: Brahms the brooding, thick, and esoteric. The review conceded that this artist “is already a significant personality, possibly the most interesting among our contemporary composers.” But Hanslick came down hard on the A Major Quartet: “For one thing, the themes are insignificant … dry and prosaic.… There is a continual pulling together and taking apart, preparation without objective, promise without fulfillment.” He raved only about Brahms’s performance of the Schumann Fantasy. No doubt Brahms gritted his teeth over all that, but he was not going to let something like a mere lack of insight stand between him and the most