Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [178]
The results of the two concerts foreshadowed the rest of Brahms’s conducting career. He was an admirable conductor of his own work but otherwise erratic behind the baton. Supremely sensitive and knowledgeable regarding all the music he performed, he tended to be hazy in the mechanics of conducting and offhanded in rehearsal.48 He occasionally produced an inspired performance, interspersed with scrambling ones. A new age of virtuoso maestros was approaching, heralded by musicians like Hermann Levi and Hans von Bülow. By the end of the century, specialists would supersede composer/performer/conductors like Brahms and Joachim, who conducted on the side and never developed the particular skills the job demanded. (An observer described Joachim’s conducting as limited in much the same way as Robert Schumann’s—he heard what he saw in the score rather than what was actually being played.49)
Besides his shaky performance in the second Singakademie concert, in general Brahms gave the Viennese a heavier dose of older and gloomier music than they were used to. Hanslick was typical of local music lovers in having little enthusiasm for music before Haydn. In those days the public generally considered Bach strong medicine—good for you, but hard to get down. A quip by a local wit began circulating: “When Brahms is feeling really frisky, he sings “ ‘The Grave Is My Joy.’ ”
After the mostly-Bach third Singakademie concert on March 20, Brahms wrote Clara, “The Christmas Oratorio went excellently … but a work of Bach has a difficult time with the critics here. Hanslick may have suffered the pains of the damned during the week, for two days afterwards Herbeck’s St. John Passion was performed.” He added, “I have unfortunately to decide at once whether I shall remain at the Akademie next year. If only somebody else could decide for me!”50 The position was already irritating him, not only the practical responsibilities of arranging for soloists and instrumentalists and the other myriad details of concert-giving, but the very idea of submitting to anyone else’s schedule and expectations.
The choir had requested that the season include an extra all-Brahms program. He scheduled it with misgivings. Requested or not, the concert might be seen as self-aggrandizing. He wrote Joachim ironically, “The concert is supposed to bring in money and be put together in two or three weeks. Before I prostitute myself as a mere Kapellmeister and bore the audience with a long row of choruses, I’d rather be patiently tolerated as a composer. Then the people who show up will know what sort of joke they’re in for.”51 The choir remained enthusiastic about their maestro and savior, and on April 17, 1864, the Viennese public got a collection of Brahms works mostly new to the city: the premiere of the Opus 29 motet Es ist das Heil uns kommen her, two of the Opus 42 songs, two of the Opus 31 solo quartets including the hypnotic, minuettish Wechsellied zum Tanz, the Ave Maria, and two of the Marienlieder. Also in the concert Hellmesberger’s group played the B Major String Sextet and Brahms and Tausig the Sonata in F Minor for Two Pianos—his reworking of the discarded F Minor String Quintet (and not its final stop).
After a private Singakademie concert in May, the directors unanimously elected Brahms conductor for three more years. He accepted, but in fact he was chafing at the job and still, in spite of the remarkable progress of his reputation in town, unhappy with Vienna. He wrote Clara a long rumination:
Life is too gay, and during the short season no person or institution can survive which does not rush to participate in the hurly-burly, instead of doing what they want to do, which is to live quietly and find pleasure and culture in their own pursuits. But everybody wants to live, to dance from one concert to the other, and from one sensation to another. The financial and artistic side of my work is also jeopardized because no really distinguished person with refined artistic feeling is at the head