Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [223]
To everyone he called it—whether wrathfully, sentimentally, or jokingly—a bridal song. It is an evocation of despair and a prayer for peace, addressed to a God who may not be capable of hearing it. When he sent the Rhapsody to publisher Simrock, Brahms snarled, “Here I’ve written a bridal song for the Schumann countess—but I wrote it with anger, with wrath! What do you expect!”24 To Clara, he named it not Julie’s bridal song but his own. At other times, with more bitter irony than anyone could have understood, he told friends that the Rhapsody was the epilogue to the Liebeslieder Waltzes25—maybe also, as he would have been ashamed to confess, epilogue to the amorous dreams of the Opus 57 songs.
In any case, Brahms portrayed the Rhapsody to friends and, perhaps deliberately, to history as the avatar of his struggle with grief and loneliness—victorious like all his struggles, but no less grueling. This wound, though, would be the last one like it, the last note of melodrama in his life. And he came out of the fiasco with joy: still free, and with the Rhapsody to show for it.
By autumn of 1869, as Julie’s wedding approached, and as Clara worried, Brahms had turned defiantly cheerful. Besides finding a measure of solace in the Rhapsody, he was flirting in Baden with a young Russian pianist and would-be composer, Mademoiselle Anna de Dobjansky. Brahms sent a nocturne of hers to Simrock to consider, submitting a whimsical bill for his own improvements:
Fresh modulation, per key 3 pfennigs.
(i.e., from C to E through F to B) 12 pfennigs.
A new bass for the melody 1½ silbergroschen.
Rapturous finish of four measures 5 sgr.
Repairs to a section 2½ sgr.
Whole new middle part 15 sgr.26
On September 21, the day before Julie’s wedding, there was a gathering at Clara’s for the couple and family friends. “We spent a very pleasant evening with the lovers,” she told her journal. There was music and laughter, they drank Ananasbowle, they cooed over the presents. Brahms’s personal gift to Julie was a daguerreotype of her mother. He, Levi and Allgeyer together gave the couple an embossed brass platter, and had a photo made of themselves contemplating the gift. In the picture the towering Allgeyer indulgently leans over so as not to dwarf Brahms, who seems barely to reach his friend’s shoulders. Levi is seated for the same reason, holding the platter on a table. Brahms stands hands on hips, also admiring the objet d’art. He is still clean-shaven but getting round-faced and thick about the waist now, moving toward the stubby figure of his later years. Still, he looks the brash, bright-eyed young man in the company of bearded grown-ups. Not long before this he had been turned away from the Baden casino because he looked underaged.27
A week after attending Julie’s wedding Brahms turned up at Clara’s house and played her the Alto Rhapsody. He did not have to say more than that it was his bridal song. She understood. The children heard the great solemn music coming from the study, and after he left their mother came to them shattered.28 From that first time Clara loved the piece unreservedly. In her journal she wrote, “It is long since I remember being so moved by a depth of pain in words and music.… This piece seems to me neither more nor less than the expression of his own heart’s anguish. If only he would for once speak as tenderly!”
THE TEXT OF THE RHAPSODY is a fragment from Goethe’s “Harzreise im Winter,” chosen with Brahms’s reliable gift, going back to “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein,” for finding others’ words to speak for him. For all the intimacy of the piece it is no less meticulously crafted, hardly less magisterial and impersonal in tone than Brahms usually was now. His anguish permeates the music all the same. It begins in tremolo strings with an extraordinarily agitated dissonance, the colors dark, the tonality drifting.29 The chill of winter invades the music, but a chill of spirit more than body. But who is that standing apart? the alto intones, like a woman addressing the solitary Brahms. She continues in a mournful