Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [169]
In 1863 there were surprisingly benign feelings between Brahms and the Wagner camp. After all, Brahms found a good deal to admire in his rival’s music: the uniqueness of voice and technique, the theatrical instincts, the ingenuity and sure-handedness with the orchestra, the epic imagination. Brahms did not hate Wagner’s music but rather the trappings and hysteria of his cult. Probably he also knew enough about Wagner’s boundless ego to hate the extravagance, manipulativeness, pretension, antisemitism—everything for which so many despised Wagner in his own time, and for which history has judged him severely since. Outside the Wagner camp, there is a tone one finds again and again, lying between the words of Brahms and of others who wrote with a certain respect for Wagner. The tone suggests a grudging admiration for the achievement combined with disgust for the man. Wagner was hard to like but impossible to ignore. He made sure of that.
In December 1862 Brahms wrote Joachim from Vienna: “Wagner is here, and I shall probably be considered a Wagnerian largely because of the contradictions to which any intelligent person must be provoked by the irresponsible manner in which musicians here rail against him. I am also particularly in touch with Cornelius and Tausig, who claim not to be, nor ever to have been, followers of Liszt.”13 The two men he mentioned were both part of Wagner’s circle, and more Lisztean than they admitted. Both also became close friends of Brahms—because he liked them, maybe also because he found it useful to have connections in the enemy camp.
Brahms originally met the gentle-spirited, chronically impoverished composer Peter Cornelius during the 1853 visit to Liszt at Weimar, and appreciated him immediately. It is a sign of his personal affection that during their short friendship Cornelius was one of the relatively few musicians close to Brahms who had neither influence, skill, nor money to do anything for Brahms. The small, fiery virtuoso Karl Tausig had studied piano with Liszt, and lived in his teacher’s house during several half-barbaric child-prodigy years. Once during that time Tausig sold the manuscript of Liszt’s Faust Symphony to a servant, who disposed of it in a batch of wastepaper. Liszt’s response when the manuscript was miraculously recovered: “Kärlchen, you’ll either become a great imbecile or a great master.”14 Tausig had grown up the latter, a diamond-brilliant, steel-fingered virtuoso in the Liszt mold, always with a touch of the wild child—something Brahms enjoyed as much as the playing.
In 1863 Brahms wrote the two sets of Paganini Variations for Tausig, an essay in exactly the kind of keyboard pyrotechnics that the rest of his piano music avoids (perhaps the reason Brahms insisted on calling these variations Studies). Clara, for whom the Paganini Variations were too Lisztean for comfort but too delicious to resist, always called them Hexenvariationen, Witch’s Variations. She took them up with the full ferocity of her determination.
Brahms enjoyed visiting Tausig’s sumptuous Vienna apartment, where he spent hours playing four hands with his host or lounging on the sofa sipping old cognac and smoking Turkish tobacco, listening to the pianist dispense the latest dirty jokes. It was delightful, being young geniuses together. After some initial interest, Brahms resisted Tausig’s attempt to convert him to Schopenhauer, the consecrated philosopher of Wagnerians.15 Brahms was ready to read anything and to debate ideas all night, but using philosophy to motivate