Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [193]
BY THE MIDDLE 1860s Brahms could expect to see everything he produced in print, but he still could not rely on a given publisher to accept a given piece. In early October 1865, Hermann Levi wrote Brahms indignantly that Leipzigers Selmar Bagge and Carl Reinecke, advisors to Breitkopf & Härtel, had quietly sunk the G Major Sextet with that house. They consider the piece, wrote Levi, “vile music, that one should suppress.” Clara also boiled about these machinations. In fact, Brahms had first offered the sextet to Simrock, who returned it. After Breitkopf did the same, and backhandedly in the bargain, he never submitted anything to them again. Finally in October 1865 Simrock relented and accepted the sextet along with the E Minor Cello Sonata, and so took a step closer to becoming Brahms’s primary publisher.23 At this point, though, Brahms also maintained a good relationship with the firm of Rieter-Biedermann, and with its eponymous proprietor.
At the end of October, Brahms joined Levi in Karlsruhe for a performance of the D Minor Piano Concerto. The piece was well received there, as it managed more and more to be in that decade. With people on the level of Levi, Clara, Joachim, and Kirchner promoting him, the public was coming around to the more difficult work. Surely over the decades of his playing the D Minor to growing applause, however, Brahms never sat down before an audience to begin it without remembering the hisses that baptized the concerto in Leipzig.
After the performance with Levi he went on to Basel, from where he wrote another champion, Albert Dietrich, “On my big tour I shall see Zürich, Mannheim, Cologne, and at Christmas or New Year, you at Oldenburg.… Could we not venture my D Minor Concerto at the orchestral concert?… For a quartet evening, I can with good conscience recommend my Horn Trio.”24 This concerned plans for a Brahms Week that Dietrich had arranged in Oldenburg.
Before that pleasant prospect Brahms made the trip he described to Dietrich, his first real grand tour as a pianist. (The one with Reményi in 1853 had been entirely small-time.) Outside his own music, the repertoire would include Beethoven, Schumann, Schubert, and Bach (the latter’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue was one of his showpieces). The coming months would see one of the periods of touring and living with friends that marked his life until he settled in Vienna. For all its satisfactions, Brahms considered the occupation of traveling virtuoso a vagabond existence, and if he enjoyed it now and then he never really approved of it.
All the same, Brahms could not deny that touring gained him a steady supply of new friends, patrons, and enthusiasts. This time in Zürich, musical amateurs including Theodor Billroth and Otto Wesendonck hired an orchestra and set up a special concert, Kirchner conducting, so they and anyone interested could hear the Piano Concerto and the A Major Serenade again. “They all spoilt me outrageously,” Brahms happily wrote Clara.25 Otto Wesendonck was a wealthy silk merchant, best known in the musical world as the accommodating husband of Mathilde, wretched poet and corporeal inspiration of Wagner’s hymn to crazy love, Tristan und Isolde. Wagner had since taken up with Cosima von Bülow, née Liszt, wife of conductor and leading Wagnerian Hans von Bülow.
For all Mathilde Wesendonck’s persevering if now platonic devotion to Wagner, she had no scruples about showering her (platonic) attention, and her unfortunate poetry, on Brahms. Besides, Wagner had given the Wesendoncks the original manuscript of Das Rheingold, which helped entice Brahms to their house. Some time later Mathilde invited him to visit her and sleep in the very garden cottage that had been the scene of the famous dalliance.26 No doubt that desecration of their sacred bower would have made Wagner apoplectic, and no doubt sleeping in the place would have tickled Brahms enormously, but he never took Mathilde up on the invitation.