Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [220]
Among the performances was the premiere of Rinaldo in Vienna under his baton. Maybe Brahms had sat on the cantata for so long out of uncertainty whether to air it at all, and the premiere hardly persuaded him. He let his publisher decide whether or not to hold it back: “Rinaldo was not as soundly hissed as my Requiem was last year,” he wrote Simrock, inflating the negative in both cases, “but I don’t think I can call it a success. And this time the critical bigwigs listened and really wrote quite a lot.… Thus this time everybody expected a crescendo of the Requiem, and certainly beautiful exciting voluptuous goings-on à la [Wagner’s] Venusberg.… Therefore I ask you to think matters over more.”14
Simrock accepted the cantata without question. Even if it might not turn a profit—and probably it did not—he owed the composer any number of favors. One critic who did enjoy Rinaldo, at least as a gesture contra Wagner, was surgeon Theodor Billroth. His review of the premiere for the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung concluded, “That which must astonish the modern public in Rinaldo is that the hero, far otherwise than in Tannhäuser, Tristan … etc. is not constantly in an emotional orgasm but really sings melodies of the deepest and truest feeling.”15 Privately, Billroth was unenthusiastic about the piece.
As spring arrived and Brahms geared up for another summer sojourn on his “pretty hill” in Lichtental, once again near Clara and family in Baden-Baden, he made an epochal decision: the city to which he intended to return after this and future vacations would be Vienna. He wrote his father in April not to reserve a room for him in Hamburg anymore. “Apart from you there is no one I want to see. You know well enough how little, in any respect, I get out of the place.… I think I shall try to make myself more comfortable in Vienna next autumn.”16 He curtly declined entreaties from family and friends to attend a gala Hamburg performance of Ein deutsches Requiem.17
Declaring himself rejected by Hamburg—an embellishment, but with reason—Brahms called himself a vagabond for the rest of his life. Much as he loved Vienna, for all the good music and companionship and food and drink he found there, for all the affection the City of Dreams gave him along with the snubs, in his heart it always appeared a place of exile.
BEFORE SETTLING into Lichtental in summer 1869, he stopped off in Karlsruhe, where Hermann Levi was training his choir for a performance of Ein deutsches Requiem set for mid-May. A letter from Levi during the rehearsals shows the kind of affection the work already claimed among amateur choristers:
Yesterday evening after the rehearsal, when most of them had already gone away, I was still sitting lost in my thoughts at the piano, and without any real intention I began to play the first bars of the Requiem. Immediately the girls who were already at the door turned round, their cloaks flew off, they arranged themselves round the piano and began to sing, with beaming faces, until we eventually got stuck in the third movement.18
After conducting the Karlsruhe performance Brahms went on to Lichtental and got to work. The first items of business were to finish the Liebeslieder and the Romances from L. Tieck’s Magelone, the cycle of fifteen songs he had been hammering at desultorily since starting it in Hamm in 1861.
The Magelone Lieder, Opus 33, stand as his testament, on one hand, to the admired baritone of Julius Stockhausen, on the other to the Winsen idylls of his teens, reading old romances like The Beautiful Magelone in the fields and woods with Lieschen Giesemann. Tieck had reworked the story from the version Johannes knew in childhood; in both cases the tale was interspersed with song lyrics, which he set without trying to convey the actual story.