Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [196]
In Zürich, Brahms once again had the company of Theodor Billroth, the Wesendoncks, and conductor Friedrich Hegar, and on this visit he made the acquaintance of poet Gottfried Keller, who one day would supply him with song lyrics. He found Theodor Kirchner in a dismal frame of mind, and unwittingly wrote Clara about it. With everything else, it must have cost Kirchner agonies to spend so much time with Brahms in the last years, to be intimate with the connection to Clara lying unmentionable between them. Yet Kirchner was too much the admirer to avoid Brahms, who also sought out this friend and champion.
Music was always part of the socializing. One evening during this Zürich stay Billroth invited Brahms to a gathering to include a reading of the G Major String Sextet. An expert amateur pianist, the surgeon had learned violin and viola so he could play more of the chamber repertoire. Before this reading he had dutifully practiced the sextet’s second viola part. But on the sweltering summer evening, with the composer listening, Billroth’s mettle failed and his fingers turned to rubber. The G Major finally coasted to a halt and to Billroth’s mortification another violist present had to take over the part. He never had the nerve to play viola in Brahms’s presence again.
It is unlikely Brahms cared about a few missed notes. Their developing friendship was gratifying to both men. Among other things, both were hikers and liked to trade stories of mountain routes. They shared passions and hatreds. Around the time of the sextet reading Billroth wrote a medical and musical friend, “This morning [Brahms] and Kirchner played the Symphonic Poems of Liszt on two pianos … music of hell, and can’t even be called music—toilet paper music! I finally vetoed Liszt on medical grounds and we purged ourselves with Brahms’s G Major String Sextet [meaning the piano arrangement].” Billroth was no admirer of Wagner either, but like Brahms and even Hanslick he knew the man could not be dismissed with the high-handed satisfaction with which one damned Liszt. (It is a sign not only of Wagner’s genius but of his hold on the age that resisting Wagnerism demanded knowledge and discipline.) Naturally, when the surgeon moved to Vienna he and Hanslick became close.
Billroth’s feeling for music, an amalgam of the emotional, practical, poetic, and medical, is shown in a letter of his to Hanslick, attempting to turn around the critic’s ambivalence about Brahms’s G Major: “This Sextet demands a small hall, even better a moderately large room. It leaves an intense auditory after-image and has only a few places where a physiological emotional effect arises, as for instance the second theme in the first movement [the “Agathe” theme] and the close of the adagio, which resembles the heavens over Rome.”36
Working away on the Züricherberg, Brahms kept his mind on the Requiem as war erupted between Austria and Prussia. The Seven Weeks’ War, to settle who was the dominant power in Germanic territories, ended on July 3 with Austria’s defeat at the Battle of Königgrätz. With the ensuing Treaty of Vienna, the old balance of power shifted forever in Europe; never again would Austria have any sway over German lands. Here commenced the long unraveling of the Austrian Empire from within and without, hastened by the next year’s creation of the Dual Monarchy with one-time subject nation Hungary. Prussia, with Prime Minister Otto von Bismarck as its guiding energy, now annexed Schleswig-Holstein, Hanover, Hesse, Nassau, and Frankfurt. The Hohenzollern crown dissolved the German Confederation and created a new