Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [197]
In Vienna on July 3, the day of the worst defeat in Austrian history, thousands of partiers jammed the Venetian Summer Festival in the Prater.37 Through defeat and its aftermath the city kept waltzing and singing and drinking new wine, and the cafés and theaters and concert halls stayed as full as ever while the empire began to evaporate. In 1867, Johann Strauss, Jr., supplied the Viennese with his most celebrated waltz, The Beautiful Blue Danube, to help salve the regrets over a lost war. Preoccupied with work in the summer of 1866, Brahms seems to have paid little attention to the conflict, but unification when it came would arouse his dormant German patriotism with a vengeance.
Despite his labors Brahms was not too busy to remember family and friends elsewhere. In August he sent his father and stepmother money to buy furniture.38 That month he wrote Eduard Hanslick to notify him of another sort of gift:
Just now, writing the title of the four-hand Waltzes, which are to appear shortly, your name occurred to me quite of its own volition. I don’t know, I was thinking of Vienna, of the pretty girls with whom you play four-hands, of you yourself, the lover of all that, the good friend and whatnot. In short, I feel the necessity of dedicating it to you.… It consists of two volumes of innocent little waltzes in Schubertian form. If you don’t want them and would rather see your name on a proper piece with four movements, “your wish is my command.”39
Hanslick was happy to accept the dedication and did not ask for more than these lovely trifles. He probably hoped for something bigger with his name on it in the future. If so, he never got it.
THAT AUGUST Brahms came once again to his gemütlich rooms in Lichtental next to Baden-Baden, with Clara and family nearby. In the same month he wrote at the end of the Requiem score, “Baden-Baden in summer 1866.” He had finished it except for the fifth movement, an afterthought following the premiere. On a memorable September afternoon at Clara’s he played and sang through the whole piece for guests including Levi and Allgeyer. She noted in her journal, “Johannes has played me some magnificent numbers from a German Requiem, and also a string quartet in C minor. But I am most moved by the Requiem; it is full of thoughts at once tender and bold.”40 (The C Minor String Quartet had been in the works at least since 1865, and it would be years more before Brahms felt ready to let it go.)
Because of work or the weather or his inner barometer, Brahms stayed in good spirits during this Baden summer, distributing presents to Clara’s children and amusing them in all sorts of ways—especially Julie. “I often saw his eyes shining when he looked at her,” Eugenie remembered. Clara wrote with relief of his mood on that visit, but noted that she did not at all like the beard he had grown that summer: “It quite spoils the refinement of his face.”41 Maybe because of Clara’s disapproval, Brahms abandoned this second attempt at whiskers (the first had been when he left Hamburg in 1853), but the aspiration remained. On both sides of the Atlantic men of the later nineteenth century sprouted beards, bespeaking maturity and patriarchal dignity. Most who could manage it raised some sort of shrubbery, from the full flowing style of Stockhausen, Allgeyer, Billroth, and eventually Brahms, to the tighter trim of Joachim and Levi, the under-chin chaff of Wagner, the cloudy sideburns of Julius Epstein, the Van Dykes of Hans von Bülow and Hugo Wolf, the military cut of the young Gustav Mahler. Among Viennese concert crowds, cleanshaven Anton Bruckner stood out like a baby in a sea of bristles.
After the Prussian victory in the war, Joachim had been relieved of his job at the court of Hanover when King George was relieved of his throne by the Prussians. (Being a music lover, the king moved to Vienna.) Brahms was scheduled for