Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [198]
An old friendship between Joachim and Hans von Bülow, interrupted when the violinist broke with the Weimar crowd, was renewed during the tour when Bülow turned up in Mühlhausen for one of the concerts. That did not mean the high-Wagnerian conductor was quite ready to defect to the enemy camp, even though he performed Brahms’s Horn Trio that year. Bülow wrote composer Joachim Raff just after the Mühlhausen concert, “I respect and admire [Brahms], but—at a distance.” Four years later he wrote Raff again, peevishly but with a prophetic ring for the man who was to invent “the three great B’s of music”: “What do the Br.’s matter to me? Brahms, Brahmüller, Bruch, etc. Don’t mention them again!… The only one who interests me is Braff!”44 Joachim surely bent the ear of his new-regained friend about Johannes, but as things turned out it was to be largely an unmusical matter that precipitated Bülow across the divide into the Brahmsians—his hero Wagner was fathering children with Cosima von Bülow.
AT THE END OF NOVEMBER 1866 Brahms gravitated back to Vienna, settling at Postgasse No. 6. Shortly after he arrived a letter came from Clara with more resounding between the lines than he could possibly have realized. Tweaking him, Clara writes that her Oldenburg performance of the A Major Piano Quartet went so well that “If I did not know how much the composer dislikes hearing his works played by anybody else, I should have wanted him to be there.”
She goes on to more somber matters. Brahms had reported to her that during his last Winterthur stay Theodor Kirchner had rambled on and on about killing himself. For all their friendship Kirchner could not tell Brahms the likely reason for his despair: Clara had jilted him. In this letter to Brahms she imperiously dismisses the sufferings of her ex-lover. Kirchner’s “suicidal ideas are not at all dangerous.… A man who talks so much about it is not really serious. But you are right in saying that one cannot think of him without real sorrow; his is a fine nature ruined by outward and inward circumstances.”45 Around those lines surges their carefully kept secret, and her ruthlessness in spurning anything or anybody that failed to meet her standards.
All that, of course, went right by Brahms. Now with what he thought to be the whole of Ein deutsches Requiem finished, he turned his attention to the practical side of finding a premiere. He made a piano reduction for the purpose of showing the work around. Clara was the first to see the arrangement, which he had promised her for a Christmas present. Before anyone else, she understood the value of the work. “It has given me unspeakable joy,” she wrote him.46 Soon, though, she had pinpointed a nagging problem in the piece—“The only really troublesome thing in it is the fugue with the pedal note.”47 That fugue at the end of the third movement was destined nearly to sink the first performance.
The music went the round of friends and performers. Besides soliciting advice, with this process Brahms saw to it that a number of important people knew he had a big choral piece in hand. Sending the score to Dietrich in Oldenburg, he dropped a clue: “Write to me seriously what you think of it. An offer from Bremen would indeed be extremely welcome.… Reinthaler would have to like the thing particularly, in order to do something for it.” Dietrich took his cue and showed the Requiem to Karl Reinthaler, town music director in Bremen and organist of the cathedral. Results proved substantial.