Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [225]
BACK IN VIENNA as a new decade arrived, Brahms fell into one of his depressive phases, feeling wrung out and uncertain of his direction. The debacle over Julie still oppressed him. He still balked before the symphony movement in C minor he had been carrying around for so many years, the string quartet movements he had drafted. The profits from his Hausmusik had not begun to pile up yet, so his livelihood still appeared unpredictable. He performed often but with no great enthusiasm. Once again his bourgeois instincts drove him to yearn for a regular and respectable post. All the same, he turned down two music-directorships in 1869, in Cologne and Berlin (the latter came from Joachim, now head of the Royal College of Music).
For the moment Vienna was turning an indifferent if not hostile face to him. In March 1869 Brahms had gotten some manhandling from the Philharmonic when conductor Otto Dessoff programmed the D Major Serenade. During a rehearsal the “Orchestra of Poets” became so offended by the Serenade—for all its gentle atavism—that they mutinied. White with rage, Dessoff closed the score and left the podium without a word, went home, and wrote a letter of resignation. Unnerved by that, the orchestra agreed to play the piece later in the year.
So in December, Brahms conducted the Serenade himself, but was forced practically to beg the Philharmonic to rehearse it properly. “Gentlemen,” he declared to them, “you have rejected my work, and I can only say to you, if you want to compare me to Beethoven: such heights will never be reached again. But my work comes from my best artistic conviction. Perhaps you will find that it is not unworthy of your performance.”34 Spitefully, they did their job. Around the same time the first three Requiem movements, Rinaldo, and the G Major String Sextet had all faltered in some degree in the city.
To friends Brahms said he felt “useless as usual” as 1870 began. He wrote publisher Rieter-Biedermann in Switzerland, “Names like Winterthur and Zürich give me a great longing. It’s cheerless to have to loiter around a big city so entirely uselessly.” He dreamed of the perfect, irresistible Kapellmeister position or opera libretto falling into his lap. He told Artur Faber he just wanted to go to Budapest and listen to gypsies play.35
His bright new rooms in the hotel Zum Goldspinnerin, with a splendid view of the Old City and the new Stadtpark, did not cheer him, nor did the premiere in Vienna of the complete Liebeslieder Waltzes in January (Brahms and Clara at the piano, Luise Dustmann heading the vocalists). Clara wrote him in March, a few days after Pauline Viardot premiered the Alto Rhapsody in Jena, “So you have nice rooms, have you? I cannot tell you how glad I am of that … your old rooms seemed to me very gloomy.… Now you can take to yourself a nice young wife with a little money—and then it will really be homelike.”
The suggestion did neither of them any good. Brahms stayed in his funk, Clara was beset by arm and finger troubles and by son Ludwig, who had finally been decreed incurably insane and had to be put away in an institution, where he remained for the rest of his life. “I have not felt pain like this since Robert’s tragedy,” Clara wrote Johannes about the son whose mental illness could not help but dredge up memories of his father’s.36 It was, Clara told the other children, as if Ludwig had been buried alive.37 Felix Schumann’s consumption worsened steadily. Julie’s health hardly improved after her marriage and a quick pregnancy.
To deepen the gloom encircling Brahms and his loved ones, Joachim was threatening to leave his always-ailing Amalie—though they struggled on