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When the immense appeal of the first four-hand books of Hungarian Dances became manifest, Brahms readily made two-hand versions. Many would eventually be arranged for orchestra too, numbers 1, 3, and 10 by Brahms and more by artists including Dvořák. Joachim supplied violin-piano arrangements At Brahms’s request the dances appeared without opus number. Likewise he wanted his name on the title page under “arranged by.” The idea, he wrote Simrock in a torturous metaphor, was that these were “genuine gypsy children, which I did not beget, but merely brought up with bread and milk.” In fact, among the twenty-one dances eventually published in four sets (the first two volumes in 1869, the second two in 1880) Brahms slipped in a couple of faux-gypsy children of his own creation. To enhance their appeal, Simrock put out the second batch “as set by” Brahms, who on finding out concluded an irate letter to his publisher with: “yours set beside himself, J. Br.”11

Brahms received a one-time fee for each edition of the Hungarian Dances and let Simrock get fat on them. As long as he had money for his own generally spartan lifestyle (often spartan in expensive resorts), and plenty to hand out to family and friends (by the later 1870s he did have plenty), Brahms was happy for his publisher to claim most of the manna.12 At the same time, this kept Simrock extremely grateful, attentive, and generous to his star composer and good friend.

So during the 1860s and ’70s, with a fervently proclaimed indifference to money and to commercialism, in composing the Requiem for amateur choruses everywhere, and Hausmusik including the Waltzes, Liebeslieder, Hungarian Dances, and “Cradle Song” for concerts, parlors, nurseries, beer gardens, restaurants, and parks all over the world, plus a steady flow of more serious but still practical vocal duets, quartets, small choruses, and the like, Brahms marshaled his craft to secure himself the wherewithal for an independent creative life few composers have ever enjoyed. For comparison among other Austro-German composers: Bach was employed by courts and churches, who worked him like a slave. Handel was a freelancer who went bankrupt several times before his comfortable old age. Haydn spent most of his career composing for one aristocratic family, with whom he had the status of a servant. Mozart lived independently but had to perform and teach for much of his income. Beethoven received support from the aristocracy and early in his career was a keyboard virtuoso. Schubert mostly lived off friends. For much of his life Wagner existed largely by extracting funds and services from admirers, tradespeople, and King Ludwig of Bavaria, and slipped out of town when creditors caught up with him. Robert Schumann had a small inheritance supplemented by paid positions, journalism, and Clara’s performing.

None of those composers earned so extravagantly from publishing their work as Brahms did, and none except Wagner, in his fifties, reached the position Brahms reached in his thirties—composing what he wanted, when he wanted, prospering without ever accepting a commission to write a piece. By Brahms’s time, a living like that had been made at least conceivable by the enormous growth of the audience for classical music, and the tens of thousands of pianos in bourgeois parlors, all of them requiring material from light to heavy. At the same time the later nineteenth century saw a proliferation of music schools, which enormously improved the overall level of professionalism and knowledge.

All of that amounted to Brahms’s milieu, the setting in which he saw his music. And for his audience the flood of light works he provided for them paved the way for his substantial pieces. Music lovers of every stripe began growing up between Brahms’s “Lullaby” and his Requiem, from the cradle to the grave.

IN EARLY 1868, amid the labor of negotiating the Hungarian Dances and getting them out, Brahms went before the public steadily. In the space of two weeks at the end of February