Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [212]
Ein deutsches Requiem was the foundation of Brahms’s later career, his work, reputation, and fortune. After the Requiem he was not unassailable because no artist is (the more famous, the more assailed), but his pedestaled place at the center of the European musical world was assured as long as he could maintain that level of work. And he did maintain it, gloriously. His predecessor Mozart had lived and worked in almost a show-business atmosphere, with hits and misses and flops, without pretensions. Brahms would have liked to work like that, but history would not let him. Nor did he ever compose to order like Bach and Haydn, with the inevitably fickle results. The world depended on Brahms to make masterpieces, and he reliably did. The overall level of the work he published in his lifetime is perhaps higher than that of any other composer. Pieces of the sort Beethoven and Mozart put out as minor but workable, Brahms put in the stove. As far as he could assess what he had written, he wanted to issue nothing but masterpieces.
Yet however predictable Brahms’s achievement became in the last three decades of his life, it was never easy, never unearned. He worked from a solid body of technique built on a phenomenal inborn gift, but he followed no formulas and took nothing for granted—least of all his talent. With the courage, relentless discipline, and fierce determination that had brought him to accept the burden of Robert Schumann’s prophecy and to fulfill it—as historic genius, if not epochal Savior—after the premiere of Ein deutsches Requiem Brahms ascended his lonely pedestal and occupied it to the end of his days.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Ruthless Beauty
AFTER THE TRIUMPH of Ein deutsches Requiem in Bremen had been repeated in cities across Europe and England, Brahms assumed a commanding place among composers of his time, with Wagner his main rival and that rival on a different stage. Brahms cared little about the rewards of the position he had earned, the money and glory, so long as he had them. He took his genius for granted and the recognition of it for granted. (That is not to say his humility was false. It was not.) More important to his mind, musicians and critics across Europe, in England and the United States, were taking up his work. Even if few of Vienna’s leading performers were wholehearted advocates, Brahms had still woven himself into the fabric of musical life in the West’s capital of music. As it had been with his illustrious predecessors, the Viennese reserved the right to scorn him when they felt like it, but as one of their own. For that reason, his triumphs in the City of Dreams would be the sweetest of all. In his middle thirties, his burden now was no longer to live up to his promise but rather to maintain what he had achieved. After 1868 the Requiem would be heard around the Western world, and his chamber music and songs were making inroads everywhere. From this point on, Brahms seems to have felt no necessity to change the craftsmanship he had learned, but rather sensed that he had reached a level he could refine but not leap beyond. After the Requiem his music would most often be characterized by a magisterial perfection, with less of the Young Kreisler left on the surface—no Romantic excesses, fewer surprises, instead great beauty and resilient architecture. His feelings were still capable of giving rise to music, but he no longer relied on that inspiration as Young Kreisler had. Only sometimes now did his life trouble the surface of his work (certainly one occasion was the Alto Rhapsody). To an increasing degree, in the arrangement of his days Brahms approached his solitary goal: for the story of his music