Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [176]
If Vienna was drawing him back after all, it could not hurt to pay court to its preeminent critic. In a letter from Hamburg informing Eduard Hanslick that he had accepted the position, Brahms added a flowery tribute to the critic’s famous On Beauty in Music, the pamphlet about which he had once written Clara: “I found such a number of stupid things on first glancing through it, that I gave it up.” Now, on his way to Vienna to conduct concerts, Brahms wrote the man who would be reviewing those concerts,
I must also send you my most sincere thanks for your book Beauty in Music, to which I owe many hours of enjoyment, of clarification, indeed literally of relief. Every page invites one to build further on what has been said, and since in doing so, as you have said, the motives are the main thing, one always owes you double the pleasure. But for the person who understands his art in this manner, there are things to be done everywhere in our art and science, and I will wish we might soon be blessed with such excellent instruction on other subjects.41
The letter is a brilliant exercise in Brahmsian irony. On the surface it appears an earnest endorsement, and so Hanslick received it, even quoting it proudly in a memoir. In fact, in his circuitous way Brahms is saying that he considers the critic’s book no more than a well-intentioned starting point in thinking about music, and does not see Hanslick as the man to continue those speculations.
As the letter reveals, Brahms and Hanslick in this first year of real acquaintance were already using the familiar du. In this case the intimate word denoted not only affection but mutual dependence. Brahms needed Hanslick for obvious reasons, and for all his social ineptitude he remained resourceful in courting useful people when he set his mind to it. By then the critic had probably realized that he needed this composer too. As the Schumanns, Joachim, and any number of others had long since concluded, regardless of how they felt about Johannes personally or how much they liked a given piece, he was the only figure of stature standing against the New Germans and Wagnerism. (After all, that conviction of Joachim’s and Robert Schumann’s had been a large reason for his premature fame, before he had done much to earn it.) Despite his regard for Wagner, Brahms was ready to become antipope as long as he did not have to fight the battles himself, and could maintain a posture of lofty detachment. He allowed Hanslick to become leader of the Brahmsian camp.
Hanslick’s final moment of conversion may have come with an 1863 concert where he heard Wagner conduct excerpts from the Ring and Tristan in a matinee, then took in Brahms’s B Major Sextet that evening. The critic wrote of the sextet: “We believed ourselves suddenly transported into a pure world of beauty, it seemed like a dream; so contrasted was their music, so wholly at variance also was the personal appearance of the two. With rather awkward modesty, Brahms approached the piano. Only reluctantly and timidly did he respond to the stormy call to come forward.”42
Brahms genuinely liked Hanslick, Hanslick genuinely admired Brahms as composer and man. Genuine and honorable affection