Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [171]
They were remarkable variations and Wagner recognized that. At the same time, perhaps hidden in his remark was a barb something on this order: I and my compatriots have revolutionized music, delivered it from the stale abstractions of the past into a world of infinite freedom, and achieved a unity of the arts toward which the entire history of humankind has evolved. Then this boy comes along writing sonatas and variations and fugues like some damned periwigged composer a hundred years ago, and Schumann declares him the Messiah. In his memoirs, Wagner wrote that he could tell from the Handel Variations that Brahms was “no joker.” That is the nicest thing he ever wrote about his rival.
The two men shook hands, parted with flattering words, and never found it necessary to pursue their acquaintance. Brahms maintained a private respect for Wagner that mounted over the years; over and over he declared to friends, “I am the best of Wagnerians.” He claimed to have said it to Wagner too. Brahms meant that he saluted the musical achievement and ignored the rant and cant—or rather ignored it with one exception, a long time back: it seems that he had read Wagner’s seminal essay “Opera and Drama,” probably around the time it came out in 1851, because he copied down a few lines in “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein”:
The generator of the artwork of the future [Wagner writes] is none other than the artist of the present, who anticipates the life of the future and longs to be contained in it. Whoever cherishes the longing within himself already lives in a better life; but only One can do this: the Artist.20
On at least that point of idealism the two men probably agreed. Both looked to art as a prophecy of a better life, and both expected themselves to be contained in that future. It was the nature of their hopes for the future that diverged radically. For Wagner the better life was in the social and political world, a new artistic/political dispensation led by visionaries like himself—above all by himself. Brahms’s sense of the better world created by art was personal, private, interior: from the heart and mind of the individual creator to the heart and mind of each listener. As he wrote Clara: art is a republic.
Still, whatever his respect for Wagner’s achievement, over the years Brahms never tried to dilute the poison in Eduard Hanslick’s pen or Clara’s hatred for the operas, and never defended Wagner publicly. (Their relations resembled those between Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Picasso and Matisse, always one side more generous than the other.) Few people suspected how rivalrous Brahms actually was. If he generally appeared free of envy it was because, for all the frustrations of his career, few composers have ever had a more enviable one than his, and he knew it.
One has to sniff out Brahms’s competitiveness. For one example, he prized many excerpts from Wagner operas, among them the Ride of the Valkyries with its exhilarating orchestral fireworks. At the same time he claimed to be often bored with the operas as a whole. Yet in his later years he insisted that it was a mistake to perform parts of them separately: “One can’t do a greater disservice to Wagner than by bringing his music into a concert hall. It is created solely for the theatrical stage, and that is where it belongs.”21
The logical result was to tie up Wagner entirely: the operas don’t necessarily work, but neither do the famous excerpts. The game here seems to be that Brahms was willing to respect Wagner’s achievement considerably—always with reservations—as long as his rival was shut away in the opera house with his “great moments and very dull quarters of an hour” (as Oscar Wilde put it). In the halls where orchestral and chamber works were heard, Brahms wanted no living competitors. Toward Bruckner, his only challenger