Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [170]
I am very well satisfied to have been the first to introduce the Variations to the public; in the first place, I had the devil of a time with them, and then I am glad that they have caused such a commotion. Everybody considers them unplayable, yet secretly they nibble at them, and are furious that the fruits hang so high.… Perhaps we can meet somewhere? Do you still remember the first Pressburg trip, when we three [Cornelius probably the third] got so tremendously drunk? and you insisted on your “Kaffee”?—I do hope we can have such good times together again—life is too sullen.16
Likely it was Cornelius and Tausig who enticed Wagner to Brahms’s solo recital in January 1863. That Wagner listened to the F Minor Sonata carefully, and maybe had a look at the score, is audible in a few measures of Die Meistersinger.17 And naturally the enticing would have gone in the other direction too. In March, Brahms showed up at a party organized to copy music for some of Wagner’s Vienna concerts, and sat quietly to the side writing out instrumental parts for Die Meistersinger. Wagner claimed hardly to have noticed him. In later years Brahms spoke of other encounters, said he listened with pleasure to Wagner’s endless monologues, heard him tell Cornelius and other disciples, “You must work in another direction than I.”18 Brahms would cite that directive, from the highest authority, to reinforce his own opinion that Wagner was a great genius but a dangerous example.
WHETHER OR NOT there were other meetings between Brahms and Wagner, the historic one came a year after Brahms’s concert of January 1863. It took shape rather like a conference of opposing diplomats. Tausig and Cornelius laid the groundwork, and the meeting proper was set up by Wagner’s Vienna champion Dr. Joseph Standhartner. Presumably the intention was simply to introduce two important figures of their respective generations and see what happened. As of then Brahms was hardly a serious rival to Wagner, and it appears the older master did not particularly hold the New German manifesto against him—Wagner had understood well enough that it was aimed at Liszt.
The meeting was arranged for a house in Penzing, near the Schonbrünn Palace, where Wagner had settled while he put together some Vienna performances. (These came in the wake of the collapse of the planned Tristan und Isolde premiere at the Hofoper in 1862. After seventy-seven rehearsals the opera was declared unperformable.19) Wagner had decked out the Penzing place, as was his custom, with a remarkable nonchalance about money. Though quite broke, he kept decorators busy rigging his rooms with silks and satins and wall hangings, until the interior looked like some fantastic seraglio. As negotiations over the meeting with Brahms took shape, Wagner pressed Dr. Standhartner to expedite things.
On February 6, 1864, their encounter turned out a muted and polite affair, with a few observers swiveling their heads back and forth at every exchange. Both principals were small in stature compared to their reputations and the impression of their photos. At thirty, Brahms was still in his beardless blond youth. At fifty, Wagner looked flinty and peculiar, with a face like a hatchet and a penetrating, calculating gaze. For all his physical vigor, his health had always bedeviled him, everything from chronic skin disease to heart trouble.
That day Wagner was in his most charming mode. After some pleasantries he asked the younger man to play piano for him. Brahms obliged with some Bach and then his Handel Variations, as usual sounding his best among musicians who appreciated the subtleties. Wagner, a fine conductor but proverbially wretched pianist, may have felt jealous of the keyboard skills that gave Brahms an advantage in promoting his own