Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [173]
A year after their meeting, Wagner was preparing a production of Tannhäuser in Munich and needed the Venusberg music. Furious to learn that Brahms possessed the manuscript, Wagner ordered Peter Cornelius to get it back. Meanwhile, on his own, this Wagner disciple had been bruised once too often by Brahms’s rough friendship. Cornelius wrote in his journal in late 1864, “With one person I am now definitely through, and that is Mr. Johannes Brahms. He is a completely selfish and autocratic individual.… May he walk the path of his glory! I will henceforth neither disturb nor accompany him.”27 Cornelius’s letter to Brahms asking him to hand over the Tannhäuser manuscript, declaring it had not been Tausig’s to give, was distinctly frosty. No doubt Brahms knew why, but it was rarely in him to explain or apologize. He refused to part with the manuscript and Tausig took his side. There the matter lay for some time.28
AT THE END OF 1862, Brahms was not thinking of Wagner particularly, but rather practicing for concerts and contending with chronic feelings of aimlessness and homesickness. In December he wrote “An die Heimat,” published in the Three Quartets of Opus 64: “Homeland! Homeland! Wondrous-sounding word! How on feathered pinions you draw me back to you.” He wrote Joachim, “Everything is perfectly nice here, but I’m still going back to Hamburg.”29 Yet he lingered in Vienna, playing concerts, usually to good if not fevered receptions. A women’s choir formed by his pupil Julie von Asten diverted him; for them he composed the canonic Salve Regina. 30 Women’s choirs often inspired him to sacred canons—suggesting a kind of pious, virginal purity.) By the following March he felt good enough about Vienna to write Adolf Schubring, in the careful and positive tone he generally used with this critic:
The gaiety of the town, the beauty of the surroundings, the sympathetic and vivacious public, how stimulating all these are to the artist! In addition we have in particular the sacred memory of the great musicians whose lives and work are brought to our minds. In the case of Schubert especially one has the impression of his still being alive. Again and again one meets people who talk of him as of a good friend; again and again one comes across new works … which are so untouched that one can scrape the very writing-sand off them.31
He was not exaggerating. Schubert had composed so much and in 1828 died so young that it took most of the remaining century to track down the manuscripts shoved in cupboards and drawers all over Europe. Robert Schumann had unearthed the C Major Symphony in 1839; only in 1865 was the Unfinished discovered and premiered at the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, to become the most popular of all Romantic symphonies.
Early in Brahms’s Viennese stay, publisher Carl Anton Spina lent him a stack of Schubert manuscripts to look over. Brahms opened some of them to find the ink-blotting sand still stuck to the paper, and realized with a shiver that he might be the first person since Schubert to lay eyes on those pages. The sand itself he reverently preserved in a little box, as a talisman of a personal connection, hand to hand. Among the manuscripts he considered Schubert’s Easter cantata Lazarus the great discovery. He sent Dietrich some excerpts he had copied out and gushed, “Oh, if I could send you the whole, you would be enchanted with such loveliness!”32 The impact of Lazarus on Brahms would be observable in his cantata Rinaldo and in the Deutsches Requiem. And from then on, Schubertian lyricism would be a steady presence in Brahms’s work—though less in his lieder, for some reason, than in the cantabile moments of his instrumental music.
In the middle of all the performing and the heady excitement of discovery, Brahms lost another bachelor friend to marriage, this one the biggest blow of all: Joachim wrote in February 1863 that he had become engaged to contralto Amalie Schneeweiss,