Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [183]
Your accounts of your life have interested me very much, and I am glad that you have found several friends.… Your mistake in the Adagio from the Sonata Pastorale has made me laugh very much, for—fancy! the same thing happened to me when I was first studying this sonata.… I played the last six bars in the major.… A thing like that is certainly annoying, as it is due to want of attention, but it should not make one furious. That would be unseemly in any man or woman, but especially in a woman, to whom only gentleness is becoming.
In another letter Clara instructs Eugenie, “When people pay a child compliments on her parents’ account … a look of pleasure in her face is quite enough; no clever repartees are expected from a young girl.” And again, “You say you wish you were dead—do you think so little of your sisters’ lot in life? Are they not a prop to me, and the dearest friends of my heart? And are you not as dear to me as they?”63
In Baden-Baden Brahms shared the Schumann household daily, at meals and music-making. For the children he was simply a fixture and always had been—part of the family, taken for granted.
His name was widely known, but not his face or his music. In other words, Brahms was not yet a celebrity, was still being discovered by musicians and the public. He made important connections that summer of 1864. Among the luminaries around Clara was Pauline Viardot-Garcia, a friend since their teens. Clara called Pauline the most talented woman she ever knew. A pupil of Liszt and friend of Chopin, gifted as mezzo-soprano soloist, opera singer, pianist, composer, teacher, and painter, Viardot had retired from opera and now taught voice in Baden-Baden. For all his resistance to lady artists and forceful females in general, Brahms was taken by her talent and her flamboyance, maybe even her looks: Viardot had a face heavy-lidded and spanielish; one observer cited her “picturesque weirdness.”64 That she owned the original score of Mozart’s Don Giovanni endeared her to Brahms even more.
In 1864 Pauline was engaged in building her “Palace of Art” and writing operettas with librettos by her devotee, the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. He summered in Baden to be near her.65 Viardot produced, directed, designed, and performed in her own operettas. Later Brahms directed one of them in a private performance,66 and she soloed in the premiere of his Alto Rhapsody. By the 1890s she and Clara ended up what Pauline called “the oldest friends in Europe.” As two extravagant egos, they naturally had their spats en route. In November 1864, Clara indignantly wrote Johannes, “Madame Viardot consecrated her Palace of Art (as she calls it) the other day, and when she invited high society (the Queen of Prussia etc.) to the first ceremony she naturally did not want me; and afterwards she had a reception for the ordinary folk, for which I was considered good enough.”67
“Waltz King” Johann Strauss, Jr, also had a grand villa in Baden-Baden. Anton Rubinstein rented another, and was often found dispensing his considerable wealth in the casino. Brahms may have met Strauss that year, among those he got to know and in some degree impressed. On a short earlier visit he had stayed at Rubinstein’s villa. (In that period Brahms and Rubinstein formed something of a friendship despite their annoyance with each other’s music.)
That summer came a renewed acquaintance with Julius Allgeyer, a friend from Düsseldorf days, then working at his brother’s photography atelier in nearby Karlsruhe.68 By then the dour, slow-speaking Allgeyer had become a prot