Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [201]
Wishing to be a good sport, Johann Jakob found himself riding and hiking through the mountains alongside Hannes day after day, climaxing with an ascent of the 5,850-foot Schafberg. A horse carried Johann Jakob much of the way up, but he had to dismount for the scramble to the summit. There another climber heard their exchange: “Oh, father! Isn’t it magnificent here? The air! And the view!” Tentatively the old man agreed and added, “But Hannes, you’re not going to do this to me again, are you?” They descended on horseback to an inn where, Johann Jakob noted in his travel diary, they “saw the sunset and full moon, got quite merry on the punch.”
They ended with a stopover in Salzburg to have a look at Mozart’s birthplace. Then Johannes headed home and gleefully reported on the trip to Joachim: “Through my father’s visit and through the little trip we had together, I experienced the greatest happiness I have felt in a long time. Not the least of the happiness was the enjoyment my father derived from everything new that he saw. Until then he had never even seen a mountain, let alone looked down from one.… My soul is refreshed like a body after a bath. My good father hasn’t the slightest idea how much good he has done me.”56
In that frame of mind he made another tour with Joachim beginning in Vienna, then off to Budapest and nearby provinces. They found an enormous success, and the friends would play more concerts in Budapest at the end of the year. But Brahms continued to feel Joachim’s dissatisfaction with his accompanying, not to mention his own impatience with the touring business.57 It was clear that Joachim’s favorite accompanist was Clara Schumann. After this year the duo would take a long vacation. In 1868, Joachim moved his family to Berlin, where he took over direction of the new music school of the Royal Academy of Arts. Clara would resist his efforts to lure her there as a teacher.
Brahms returned to Vienna with much to occupy him. Before the premiere of the whole Requiem, the first three numbers were to be done in Vienna by the forces of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. The December 1, 1867, concert, under Johann Herbeck, was presented in the old Gesellschaft hall. Legend says that the excerpts were hissed at the end. So they were, vigorously, by a few people. But in fact approval overwhelmed the complaints, and in the several minutes it took Brahms to make his way onstage for a bow, the applause stayed strong.58 The main reason for the ambivalent reception is suggested in Hanslick’s review: “While the first two movements of the Requiem, in spite of their somber gravity, were received with unanimous applause, the fate of the third movement was very doubtful.… During the concluding fugue of the third movement, surging above a pedal-point on D, [one] experienced the sensations of a passenger rattling through a tunnel in an express train.”59
In other words, this trial run ended with the spot Clara had warned Johannes about, a thirty-six-measure fugue over a sustained D in the bass. It seemed a dubious idea on the face of it, to write an elaborate fugue tied down to a drone, so that harmonically it spins its wheels throughout. But Brahms felt wedded to this effect as an expression of the assurance in the text: “The souls of the righteous are in the hands of God and no torment shall touch them.” The already problematic fugue was not helped by conductor Herbeck’s underrehearsed performance and a timpanist who felt inspired to play his repeated D as loud as he could. Thus Hanslick’s train-in-a-tunnel effect, and thus the hisses. After long expanses of delicately lyrical, poetic music, the piece seemed to end by clubbing the audience about the head.
After the Vienna airing of the opening movements and its ambiguous success, Brahms went to work on the score again. He sent it for advice to his old teacher Eduard Marxsen, saying: “I enclose also something from my Requiem and on this I earnestly beg you to write to me. It looks rather curious in spots and perhaps … you would take some music paper