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Wagner the author of “Jewry in Music” was not the sort to keep his opinions to himself. Everything he did was geared to the public, however arrogant, blundering, self-defeating, and malevolent some of those efforts turned out in practice. His attitude toward Brahms’s music was simple contempt, as his wife’s diaries display over and over. One day after playing through the Second Symphony Wagner exclaimed to Cosima, “ ‘There is nothing in it, but the public cheers!’ … [she added:] The symphony … we find utterly shocking.”22 After hearing another piece played for them by Anton Rubinstein, Cosima observed for herself and Richard: “To laugh at clumsiness, bombast, and falsity in art is no pleasure. Not a single melody, beginnings of themes from Beethoven and other masters, the composer’s realization that it is not his own, hurried resorts to oblique harmonies and contrived curiosities.”23 Once in 1880 when Brahms was advertising in the paper for opera librettos, Wagner unbelievably declared: “I have described my views on composition in the [Bayreuth] Blätter, and now he thinks he’s got a recipe.”24

Beyond sniping in private, when Brahms had become an actual rival Wagner was quite prepared to be malicious in print. In his essay “On Poetry and Composition” of 1879, after Brahms’s Hungarian Dances and neo-Handelian Triumphlied had become immensely popular, and after the First Symphony had been dubbed “Beethoven’s Tenth,” Wagner produced his most pungent diatribe. In it he manages to conflate Brahms and his own favorite subject, the Jews: “Compose, compose, even when you have no ideas!… I know famous composers whom you can meet at concert masquerades, today in a ballad singer’s disguise … tomorrow in Handel’s Hallelujah wig, another time as a Jewish czardas player, and then again as genuine symphonists decked out as a number ten.”25 Wagner was shrewd enough to perceive Brahms’s masks and borrowings; he lacked the magnanimity to see the integral style his rival made of them.

Wagner had decreed art the new religion and the artist its high priest, the crown and savior of nations, “demonically suffering, godlike.” He insisted on visibility and acceptance not only of his work but of himself and his ideas. To Wagner the public had a duty to follow the artist wherever he led them, whether or not they understood his art or his godlike utterances. Brahms’s very determination to disappear behind his music was something else Wagner held against him. Brahms was no less a leader than Wagner, and in his most ambitious and innovative work challenged listeners no less. But Brahms still considered it his duty—as had his heroes in the past—to meet the public partway, to write music ultimately comprehensible to his middle-class audience. Now and then he was even willing to amuse them with light music. All this baffled and outraged Wagner—the humility of Brahms’s doctrine of craftsmanship and allegiance to the past and the public, his seeming indifference to politics, his willingness to turn out commercial items.

So in February 1864, early in the struggle, the Brahmsian and Wagnerian camps sat embodied on two sides of a room in Vienna. (Brahms did not have a camp at that point, but it was developing.) Within a decade of that meeting, many had come to believe—correctly, as it played out—that which side won the battle would in some degree determine the future of music.

All that was latent in the Penzing parlor in February 1864. Soon afterward a smaller and more mundane matter divided Brahms and Wagner, as token of the larger rivalry. Knowing Brahms’s enthusiasm for historic manuscripts and first editions, Tausig gave him Wagner’s handwritten score of the “Venusberg” music, written for the Paris production of Tannhäuser, and the manuscript of Wagner’s concert ending for the Tristan Prelude. Cornelius meanwhile gave Brahms, warmly inscribed, a deluxe printing of the Tannhäuser score.26 From that point if not earlier, Brahms made himself a