Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [214]
Certainly in the three decades of his preeminence Brahms was to influence countless composers, not only with his music but by sitting on committees and placing people he approved of in positions of power. Still, with the exception of his help to Antonin Dvořák—a relatively mature artist when they met in 1875—it is arguable that Brahms’s influence on his time was a mixed blessing. When he examined the work of young composers he went at their voice leading and bass lines like the most dogmatic Herr Professor, and usually sent them off to study counterpoint with Nottebohm or some equally exacting pedagogue. Maybe one of Brahms’s secrets was that he had the instincts of a pedant and the gifts of a genius, or rather: he had the genius to withstand his own pedantry. Most of his followers did not. Even Dvořak, whose fertility of invention and freshness of voice enchanted Brahms, would be gently entreated to clean up his counterpoint. To the degree that lesser talents than Dvořák took Brahms’s advice or followed his example, it may have done them harm. After encountering the dogmatic Brahms, Hugo Wolf sensed the danger and fled to the opposition.
By the end of his life, Brahms’s efforts to erect barriers against the future had failed. Modernism overtook him, and Vienna would provide much of the model for the coming revolution, for good and for ill. Brahms would leave no school and mostly minor imitators, though his work enriched composers of the next century as diverse as Sibelius, Elgar, Ives, and Schoenberg. More than any of his contemporaries, Brahms had the kind of technique that can teach something to every composer, of every stripe: what musical logic amounts to.
IN MAY 1868, after the premier of Ein deutsches Requiem, Brahms returned to his father’s house, to Hamburg’s familiar streets and canals, the old gabled houses, and composed the new soprano solo as fifth movement for the piece. With that he gratefully laid the Requiem to rest after over ten years of gestation. Then he set off for the Lower Rhine Music Festival, where this year he formed a desultory but persistent friendship with Max Bruch. As with other composer friends, the admiration flowed more strongly toward him than in the other direction; Bruch would often feel the lash of Brahms’s sarcasm. All the same, that year Bruch proposed to dedicate his First Symphony to Brahms and the dedicatee accepted with pleasure.
For several weeks after the festival Brahms worked in Bonn. During hours away from his desk he spent much time with Hermann Deiters, philologist and music critic of the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, a steady champion and in 1880 author of a short Brahms biography, the first of many. That summer Brahms showed Deiters some of a piano quartet in C minor, a reworking of the old C# minor quartet from 1855. To introduce to the critic this music from the heart of his Clara-madness, his Werther years, Brahms said to Deiters, “Imagine a man who is just about to shoot himself, and to whom no other course is left.” He echoed the sentiment many times in the next years—often to writers, in fact.
By Brahmsian musical/emotional logic, he recalled a period of intense longing for a woman with music that stood for the longing. Picking up the quartet briefly again (it had years to go) he relived the agony of its inspiration. The woman he longed for this time, though, was the daughter of the first one—-Julie Schumann, twenty-three now, palely beautiful in her fragile health. Maybe that infatuation drove Brahms to take up the piece again. In any event, he was about to recapitulate an old pattern of his with women, in every way but one: now the woman he had fallen for had not fallen for him.
After a relatively fallow period in the wake of finishing the Requiem,