Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [224]
His steps recede into the bushes,
The thickets close
Behind him …
The barren waste swallows him up.
An aria follows the recitative—almost a true operatic aria and maybe the finest Brahms ever wrote. This time, his feelings outweighed his self-consciousness, the words ringing in his heart and on the page:
Ah, who can heal the pains
Of one for whom balm has become poison,
And who sucked hatred of mankind
From the abundance of love?
After the bleakness of those lines, set to music dark and wandering in both tonality and rhythm (much two-against-three, neither settled), there is a pause. Then a prayer breaks out in men’s voices, in C major, direct and heartfelt as a hymn, with the alto soaring above:
If in your psaltery,
Father of Love, there is a tone
Which his ear can discern,
Refresh his heart!
Open to his clouded gaze
The thousand springs
Alongside him as he thirsts
In the wilderness.30
The words are transparently chosen to capture Brahms’s heartbreak and his purpose in this work. The psaltery of the end, the harp of God’s succor that Goethe invoked, was for the poet simply a metaphor. For Brahms the composer, the harp stands for the healing power of music, and so stands for the Alto Rhapsody itself. (The accompaniment of the prayer he scored in harplike pizzicatos.)
Brahms’s connection to this text goes beyond that. Maybe he knew that for Goethe the journey to the Harz Mountains came at a turning point—away from his youth toward a more mature vision of his life and work.31 Certainly Brahms knew about the acquaintance of the poet’s who had inspired the poem, a misanthropic young man who had fallen dangerously under the spell of Goethe’s Young Werther. And the Harz rises beside Göttingen, where Brahms had courted Agathe. There lie the connections to Brahms, who identified both with Werther and with the solitary misanthrope of the poem.
As prayers go, Brahms’s marvelously fashioned one was answered. Even though it is a short piece—thirteen minutes—with it he returned with his soul refreshed not only to the top of his form as a composer, for the first time since the Requiem, but to joy in his creativity. He wrote Simrock that the piece was the best thing he’d ever offered.32 He told Albert Dietrich that he loved it so much that he slept with it (metaphorically) under his pillow.33 He took it to his bed, in other words, like a bride.
The Rhapsody also represents a turning point in Brahms’s life, as “Harzreise im Winter” had represented for Goethe. In Brahms’s case it was an acceptance that all he had, now, was his art. In that sense too it is his bridal song, his embrace of a solitary fate. Whatever succor and redemption from despair he might find in life, he would find henceforth in music. Like the G Major Sextet, the Rhapsody is another farewell to love, a darker and more final one. But he did not finish the Rhapsody on Goethe’s last word—Wüste, desolation, desert—but rather backed up in the poem, to end with the possibility of healing: Refresh his heart! set to the familiar IV-I cadence of a hymn’s Amen.
So the prayer of the Rhapsody was answered as much as prayer can be, for a man like Brahms. Which is to say: there would be no more troubles of the heart like he went through with Clara, with Agathe, with Bertha Faber and Ottilie Hauer and Elisabet Stockhausen, and most painfully with Julie Schumann. There would be other infatuations but decrescendo, the larks of an aging bachelor. The gods had inflicted on Brahms a cruel paradox: an ingrained misogyny, an equally ingrained instinct that without a mate his life was a wasteland. He began calling himself The Outsider, after the figure in the poem. Conspicuous in Brahms’s letters in the next years would be Goethe’s word Wüste.
Likewise conspicuous in Goethe’s poem is the question rendered in English by if: “If in your psaltery, Father of Love …” There is no final response to that if, and the last words of the Alto Rhapsody are gentle but still a plea, not an answer: Refresh his heart! In a choral work Brahms had sketched by then