Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [184]
In Baden-Baden Brahms and Turgenev amused themselves speculating over their cigars about operas. Eventually the novelist drafted six pages of a libretto, a drama about an inn in the Alps, but the project evaporated.69 All the same, just as Brahms kept notebooks of quotes, aphorisms, folk sayings, jokes, and poems for prospective lieder, he began keeping another one of ideas for operas.
Yet another connection from this summer turned out for many years the most productive of all for both men. Brilliant, mercurial Hermann Levi had just become court Kapellmeister in Karlsruhe, which involved operatic as well as orchestral conducting. Years before, Levi had introduced himself to Brahms in Hamm; this summer they became intimates. From the beginning Brahms valued Levi’s ebullience and wit as much as his skill on the podium. Eugenie Schumann recalled Levi’s bleating, infectious laugher and his practical jokes. There was the time Levi hid himself as Brahms walked in to meet him for an appointment: when in some embarrassment Brahms turned to leave, he was startled to hear emerging from a clothes trunk the famous opening of the vocal part to Beethoven’s Ninth: “O friends, no more these tones.…”70
There was a great deal more to Levi than wit and talent. He lived with contradictions as part of his triumph, his peculiar career, in a way finally his undoing. He was a rabbi’s son and unconverted—unusual in his time and in his circles, and something none of his friends let him forget. His features were exotic, inescapably Semitic in a society with fine-tuned antennae for that. Even Brahms, who was unusually free of the bigotry of his time and his culture, joined in the supposedly good-natured joking everyone visited on Levi’s Jewishness. Levi accepted it with an anxious smile. For all the man’s gifts, his ambition and precocious success, his enthusiasms shaded into something obsessive, neurotic, finally self-destructive. He was desperate for heroes, for messiahs. Brahms would be the first, Wagner the last. After a growing professional and personal closeness with Wagner during the 1870s, in 1882 Levi became the anointed conductor for the premiere of Parsifal—an opera that was, among its qualities for and ill, perhaps the highest expression in art of pseudo-spiritualized Germanic antisemitism. A century later, Levi became historian Peter Gay’s archetype of the German self-hating Jew.71
In 1864 he and Brahms became intimate friends, Duzenbrüder. The way it came about shows Brahms’s style of affection, and how much he felt for Levi. One night after a visit, when the conductor was hurrying from Baden-Baden for the late train to Karlsruhe, Brahms accompanied him with a mysterious package under his arm. As the train pulled out, Brahms suddenly tossed the package into the compartment and vanished. Levi unwrapped it to find the original manuscripts of the first three piano sonatas, inscribed on the front, “In heartfelt friendship, your Johannes.” There for the first time Brahms used the familiar du.72
Around then Levi wrote Clara Schumann: “This close contact with Johannes has had, I believe, a deep and lasting influence on my whole character.… In him I have seen the image of a pure artist and man.”73 Brahms would not have gushed like that, but he was deeply taken. Part of it was that he expected to benefit from the conductor’s orchestral expertise, but they had plenty of good times too, which resound in a Brahms letter to Levi that November: “Are you seeing to your health? Drinking good coffee? You and Fr