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notwithstanding, political exigencies tinted both perspectives. Richard Specht notes that the composers really closest to Hanslick’s heart were ones like Auber, Rossini, and Johann Strauss—music light, tuneful, un-challenging. Hanslick resisted Brahms’s more difficult work, though readers of his columns may not have suspected it. To composer/critic Richard Heuberger Hanslick complained once, “I have just come from [a concert] where Brahms’s new quintet was played. I could scarcely bear to stay to the end, so much did his music bore me.… Brahms no longer has any ideas and is becoming more and more leathery. After this piece, the Suite by [Ignaz] Brüll that followed was a veritable feast.”43 Next day a befuddled Heuberger read Hanslick’s review, with extravagant praise for the Brahms Quintet and a hasty couple of sentences on Brüll.

In 1875, conductor Hermann Levi wrote Brahms: “That notice of Hanslick’s of Frau Joachim’s concert, where he classes you with Franz and opposes you to Schubert, is worthy of having appeared in a local Munich paper. I hope you have broken off your friendship with him, for anyone capable of writing this sort of thing cannot possibly have an ounce of understanding for you.”44 This was no news to Brahms, but he was too canny to break with the most important critic in Vienna.

To the end composer and critic would walk in step, one of Brahms’s few friendships without an interruption somewhere. Each relied on the other as friend, and no less as ally in battle. All the same, the only work Brahms would ever dedicate to Hanslick, in 1865, shows that he knew his man: it was the sixteen light, tunefully Schubertian piano waltzes of Opus 39.

HAVING ACCEPTED THE CONDUCTING POSITION with the Singakademie, Brahms wrote urgently to old friend Albert Dietrich for advice on conducting and repertoire: “I am extremely shy of making my first [professional] attempt in this line at Vienna of all places.”45 Dietrich, however, had fallen into a period of mental turmoil and was of little use to anyone for a while. Recently Clara’s half brother Woldemar Bargiel had also suffered a breakdown. For Brahms, who had a healthy man’s lack of sympathy with illness, one madman in his life had been enough. He had a horror of watching anyone else go the route of Schumann. To Joachim he wrote, “Good lord, the ghastly specter strikes out! First it seized poor Bargiel, and one can’t help marveling at his getting free of its embrace, and now it has our poor, dear friend in its grip.”46 (As Bargiel had pulled out of it, so eventually did Dietrich.)

In August, Brahms returned to Vienna to take up the conducting position. The ailing Singakademie had dubbed him, apparently without irony, “der Retter,” the Savior. As it had once been with his career as Schumann’s Messiah, this tenure as salvationist did not turn out as expected. Though he got off to a shaky start, the Singakademie never doubted their conductor’s musicality or energy, though they did wonder about the depth of his commitment.

For his debut concert on November 15, 1863, Brahms conducted the Bach cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis, Schumann’s Requiem for Mignon, Beethoven’s Opferlied, and three songs by German Renaissance master Heinrich Isaak. The program went agreeably for choir, audience, and critics in unison. For the next concert Brahms had about seven weeks to prepare. By the time he spent Christmas with Bertha Faber and family, he was anxious about the performance on January 6. For that program he had chosen short pieces, mostly old, by Mendelssohn, Johannes Eccard, Giovanni Gabrieli, Giovanni Rovetta, Beethoven, Bach (the motet Liebster Gott wann werd’ ich sterben? “Dear Lord, when shall I die?”), and Heinrich Schütz’s electrifying “Saul, was verfolgst du mich?” (“Saul, why persecutest thou me?”). This time the performance turned out disastrously. The Gabrieli broke down and had to be started over. A critic called the singing “almost without nuance” and described the effect of the Schütz as “an oasis passed by all too quickly in the middle of a hyperaesthetic desert.