Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [218]
Besides his daily routine of early rising, strong coffee, walking, working, and loafing, by age thirty-five Brahms had refined the seasonal routine to which he remained faithful. In four months or so of spring and summer in the country, he drafted most of his music. He returned to Vienna in autumn to polish new pieces, read engraver’s proofs, edit other composers’ work for publication (done for the instruction and pleasure more than money), study old masters’ scores and peruse the competition’s, and enjoy the company of Theodor Billroth, Ignaz Brüll, Julius Epstein, the Fabers, and a widening circle of friends from among the eminent artists and Grossbürgertum of the city. During the first two or three months of most years he toured as pianist and conductor, traveling around Austria, Germany, and as far afield as Holland and Switzerland; but he never crossed an ocean. Brahms remained deathly afraid of seasickness, or sailing out of sight of land.
From now on, as a pianist, he mainly performed his own music. Practicing bored him to distraction, and as he never tired of saying, concerts meant little to him anyway. The applause he enjoyed more than he was prepared to admit. While he generally remained competent at plowing through his own music, including the very difficult concertos, his old subtlety of touch at the keyboard gradually deteriorated to what Clara bewailed as “thump, bang, and scrabble.”10 Still, for all that, he toured. By the 1870s he was collecting handsome fees, and his concerts not only provided income but an important means of spreading his work. Even if Brahms was not the ideal performer of his own music, as either pianist or conductor, he came up with marvelous readings sometimes, and in any case audiences showed up in force to have a look at him. So he claimed to hate performing and performed all the time, just as he hated writing letters and wrote them constantly.
He started 1869 with a rush of things to attend to. After years of playing his Hungarian dances for friends, and occasionally giving Clara a manuscript to play from, he had decided to have them published. The pieces had accumulated since the early 50s, played for friends and at parties, rarely written down. Eduard Reményi initiated Brahms into the “Hungarian” style in his teens, and since then he had sought it out wherever he could find it. He could still sit for hours under the trees at the Café Czarda in the Prater, nursing mugs of beer and listening to gypsy bands, who seemed to play with particular fire when the Herr Professor showed up. And Brahms may have browsed published collections of authentic Hungarian folk songs, or what purported to be authentic, looking for tunes.
For Brahms this music had always been a recreation, a way to let go of his usual sobriety and escape into a music perfervid, exotically colored, elastic in rhythm, improvisational in style. Friends remembered his flashing eyes when Brahms played his dances, the rhythm darting and halting, his hands all over the keyboard at once. Part of the reason he resisted writing them down was that he felt unsure how to capture that protean freedom in the cold black-and-white of notation. Meanwhile the style lent a driving rhythm and exotic tone to allegros in his chamber works.
Finally, in hopes of good return, he did write down some dances, setting them for four hands to get the orchestral effect he wanted. In 1867 he offered seven to a publisher in Budapest, who to the man’s enduring remorse turned them down. A few years later Brahms sent them to Fritz Simrock, as “perhaps the most practical [pieces] so impractical a man as myself can supply.” Simrock understood their practicality to say the least, and in taking them ensured his own and his firm’s prosperity for the foreseeable future.