Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [203]
He had already said a good deal. The verse he tells Reinthaler he would “dispense with” is none other than “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” Brahms means that he could do without that verse and that dogma, in Ein deutsches Requiem and in his life. If he was North German Protestant by tradition and temperament, he was not that in his faith, which like all his convictions Brahms held close to his chest. For himself he would not call Christ a particular son of God. Meanwhile, to Reinthaler he downplays the theology of some verses he does use, saying “I can’t delete or dispute anything” from Scripture. With that he obliquely confesses that even the hints of resurrection lingering in his texts are not his own sentiments. At the end of his Requiem the dead are not reborn but released: “they rest from their labors.” It is that rest from his own lonely labors that Brahms yearned for someday, as his mother rested from her life of poverty and toil.
The central message of Ein deutsches Requiem is in its first lines: “Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Brahms wrote his Requiem to bless those left living in the world, not the dead. The work aspires to comfort those who mourn. And it has done that through the generations since it was first sung in Bremen.
After their friendly theological debate Brahms and Reinthaler actually came to a compromise. In the performance Amalie Joachim would sing “I know that my Redeemer liveth” from Handel’s Messiah, to placate the pious. Hearing the effect of that may have helped Brahms conclude that the piece could use a nice solo for a female voice. But when he added that solo after the premiere, it still pointedly made no allusion to the eponymous founder of the Christian religion.64
Just before the premiere, Brahms set out from Hamburg with Julius Stockhausen for a tour beginning in Germany and ending in Copenhagen. The Danish part of the tour was cut short by an archetypal demonstration of Brahms’s thickheadedness and incapacity to make good on his own insensitivity. The concerts in Copenhagen had been set up by Robert Schumann’s old friend, composer Niels Gade. The first ones created a sensation and the city buzzed with admiration for both artists. Then at a Gade party in his honor, full of dignitaries and admiring music lovers, Brahms lavishly extolled Bismarck to the open-mouthed guests and added (playfully, maybe) that it really was a shame the main museum of Thorwaldsen’s sculpture was in Denmark rather than in, say, Berlin. Since Denmark had recently lost Schleswig-Holstein to Prussia and the sculptor was a beloved national figure, Brahms had managed with a few offhanded remarks to trample on an extraordinary collection of sensitivities. Stunned, Stockhausen reported to his wife, “Do you know what Brahms has done in my absence?” (implying that the singer usually kept an ear on his partner’s tongue).
There was an uproar all over the country, complete with satirical poems and indignant newspaper articles, the remaining concerts were canceled, Brahms took the first boat out of town.65 His music would not be welcome in Denmark for years afterward. Stopping to visit Klaus Groth in Kiel after the debacle, Brahms gaily called the Ditmarsh poet to the window and slapped his pocket, shouting, “Come out quick, I’ve made a pile of money!” Brahms related the story to Groth and shrugged it off with, “I’ve got so much money I won’t need any more for a long time, so I couldn’t care less.”66
Besides, by then Brahms may have come to the realization that he had put his foot in it much worse with Clara Schumann.
HE DROPPED THE BOMB in a long letter of February 2, 1868, in which he sounded an old theme. He began by pressing her to come to