Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [199]
Another important premiere had been settled more directly. Despite Josef Hellmesberger’s set-to with Clara over playing Brahms, the violinist was agreeable to premiering the G Major Sextet, which he did with his group on February 3, 1867. Somehow Vienna took this work of enormous warmth and charm, intimately involved with his feelings about a lost love, for another of Brahms’s passionless exhibitions of intellect. The reviewer of the Wiener Zeitung stormed with Biblical wrath, “We are always seized with a kind of oppression when the new John in the Wilderness, Herr Johannes Brahms, announces himself. This prophet, proclaimed by Robert Schumann in his darkening hours … makes us quite disconsolate with his impalpable, vertiginous tone-vexations that have neither body nor soul and can only be products of the most desperate effort.”48
Just after the sextet premiere Brahms began an Austrian tour with a concert in nearby Graz. Maybe that helped distract him from a development that could not have improved his frame of mind. After less than five years on the podium, Julius Stockhausen resigned as conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic (though he stayed on for two years more). With a sigh almost audible between the lines, Joachim in London once again wrote to Theodor Avé-Lallemant, prime mover of the orchestra board in Hamburg: “I suppose … it’s no good hoping that you will rouse yourselves now and offer a fitting appointment to the greatest musician of our day (I know what I am talking about), to Johannes Brahms of Hamburg.” As Brahms understood, that hope was no good at all, which does not necessarily mean he stopped hoping. Sure enough, for the second time the orchestra committee presented him the back of its hand, to his great disgust and his great good fortune. This time he said little about it. Soon he wrote Clara that he had decided to settle in Vienna, though with his habitual inertia concerning large matters he took a long time to act on it. He had several years of wandering ahead of him.
Joachim returned from London in spring 1867 for a concert in Vienna with Johannes, after which they toured Austria. Then Brahms headed out alone on a Hungarian tour. Much of the considerable proceeds of all this performing flowed to his father and sister in Hamburg. Clara wrote him that month that she had bought a thousand talers’ worth of securities in his name and he could pay her back later. She cautioned the fiscally nonchalant Johannes, “You are sure to earn some more in Pest. But don’t forget to change your guldens into Prussian money in Vienna, otherwise you’ll lose too much on them.”49
Brahms followed the huge creative outpouring of the Requiem with some songs that ended up in Opuses 48, 49, and 58. He had last released instrumental pieces in 1865, and from then until 1873 he completed only vocal music. Meanwhile, that spring an evil humor built up in him.
He visited Baden for a while in the summer, where Clara found him so insufferable that for the first time she disinvited him to meals. There was a break with Hermann Levi too. When the conductor—who had been giving useful advice on the Requiem and other pieces—showed Johannes some of his own compositions, the response was sufficiently disdainful to interrupt their friendship for months. Levi wrote Clara: “I am afraid that Brahms, the man as well as the musician, is now at a crossroads.… If he should not succeed in snatching his better self from the demon of abruptness, of coldness, and of heartlessness, then he is lost to us and to his music, for only all-engendering love can create works of art.”50
Likely there were several reasons for Brahms’s biliousness this year. Being spurned again by the Hamburg Philharmonic may have accounted for part of it. Besides, after delivering a big project a certain postpartum depression is common with artists. Inevitably, Brahms felt great anxiety about the prospects of Ein deutsches Requiem. He knew that its manifest beauties aside, the work was perfectly suited for the dozens of amateur choirs that dotted Europe. He also knew there are