Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [168]
It appears that for a given piece Brahms would generally jot down a few rough ideas, lay them out in his mind, then do a skeletal continuity sketch like the one that survives for the A Major Quartet: melody and figured bass, to settle the unfolding of ideas and the overall form. When he was satisfied with that he would go on to a rough score of the whole with inner parts added. From that he made his fair copy, with further revisions. Then, sooner or later, the preliminary labor went into the stove.
Brahms’s fair copies are not impeccable pieces of calligraphy but rather working documents. He copied in a hurry, without a ruler, the stems canted and the notes made with a quick slash, generally using a quill pen because it was easier on the hand. (In letters he continually complains about having to use a steel pen on the road.) He might make corrections by rubbing out the wet ink with his thumb and writing over the smudge. His copying is always legible, but he did not care how elegant the page looked—neatness was his copyists’ business.
The first performances of a piece were usually done from manuscript, both to give him time for revisions and to collect fatter fees before publishers took their cut. As seen in many manuscripts, in the course of trial read-throughs and first performances and consultations with performers, Brahms went over and over his fair copies making revisions, mostly in dynamics and phrasing and the like, but also note and scoring changes. For larger revisions he pasted patches over the manuscript with sealing wax. When he got the copyist’s score the refining continued, and likewise with the printer’s galleys.
For all his pains in the creative process he still managed to be a sloppy and impatient editor and proofreader, in his editions of other composers’ work and in his own. Sometimes he appears to have corrected galley proofs off the top of his head, if the original manuscript was not to hand. A number of his letters ask friends to send him his own pieces, in manuscript or in print, because he did not have any copies. (He apparently never lost a score, surprising since he sent new pieces to friends constantly, by ordinary mail.)10 Brahms could also be skimpy and arbitrary with dynamic marks, phrasings, and the like; the B Major Sextet, among others, was dispatched to Joachim to put in the bowings, and from there went right to the publisher. Apparently, as far as Brahms was concerned, if the notes and the form were right, the rest of it was icing on the cake and he could afford to be casual about, say, lining up the hairpins for a crescendo. If pressed he might have said: that was good enough for Bach, it’s good enough for me.11
BRAHMS SPENT CHRISTMAS 1862 alone in Vienna, for the first time in his life neither with family nor with Clara Schumann. Perhaps he spent the holiday contemplating his sins. He seems to have been in one of his fractious phases, and his being alone was not an accident. Clara wrote Joachim in December, “I really could not wish for [Johannes’s] presence here at Christmas, because when he was here a year ago, and again in the summer at Kreuznach … he made life with him almost unbearable.”12
On January 6, 1863, he mounted his second solo concert in Vienna, playing the Beethoven Eroica Variations, the Bach Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, and the Schumann F Minor Sonata. For his own offering he accompanied soprano Marie Wilt in songs including “Liebestreu” and played the F Minor Sonata. The audience for this recital included Richard Wagner.
If Liszt had been the advance guard of the New German revolution, Wagner, with his work of the 1840s and ’50s—from Der fliegende Holländer to Tristan und Isolde—became the most