Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [226]
To cap it all off, Brahms still bitterly objected to sister Elise’s engagement to watchmaker Christian Grund. He was convinced that her debilitating headaches and lack of experience in the world made her incapable of seeing after a sixty-year-old widower and his six children. Despite Clara’s pleading for Elise’s right to make up her own mind, Brahms pressured his sister to enter a convent in Hamburg, pledging to donate funds for her upkeep.38 He kept pressing his campaign right up to the marriage, in October 1871, then grudgingly gave the newlyweds a hundred talers as a wedding gift.39 Before long, however, when he saw the marriage going entirely happily, he relented and bestowed a pension on them. Elise became pregnant, but the child lived only a few days. That sorrow aside, Brahms’s melancholy sister had finally found a little luck.
In March, Die Meistersinger had its Vienna premiere, and Brahms took it in for the first of many times. Maybe in deference to Clara’s Wagner-hatred he wrote her a hedging letter about it:
I am not enthusiastic either about this work, or about Wagner in general.… I confess that it provokes one to discussion.… But this I do know, that in everything else I attempt I step on the heels of predecessors who embarrass me. But Wagner would not hinder me at all from proceeding with the greatest pleasure to write an opera. Incidentally, in the order of precedence among my wishes, this opera would come before taking a job as a music director.40
In fact Brahms remained, by his interpretation, “the best of Wagnerians,” and Die Meistersinger became his favorite of the operas. At the same time he longed to challenge Wagner on his own turf. He entreated Julius Allgeyer and Hermann Levi and other knowledgeable friends to scout out librettos for him. That would turn out a frustrating endeavor for all concerned. In spring 1870, Brahms wrote Allgeyer after perusing some opera ideas, “The only thing I can arrive at after much hard thinking is always a ‘No.’ ”41 For the next fifteen years he kept asking, and after thinking it over kept coming up with the same answer.
Through it all he continued to study the subject of opera and mull it over incessantly, and continued to behave like a Wagnerian. In July, Brahms and Artur Faber joined Joachim in Munich to see the first performances of two operas from Der Ring des Nibelungen—Die Walküre and Das Rheingold, both under the baton of old friend Franz Wüllner. They took in both operas several times. Joachim reported home to Amalie, “Das Rheingold did not teach me anything new about Wagner; it’s really almost boring with its eternal mystery and elaboration. Even Brahms was forced to agree with me, though he likes to pose as an admirer of Wagner.”42
If a libretto could not seduce him, in summer of 1870 a chance turned up to secure exactly the kind of post Brahms yearned for, and it happened to be in Vienna: Johann von Herbeck resigned as music director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde concerts in order to take over the Court Opera.
After the Philharmonic and Opera, the Gesellschaft amounted to the second most important podium in town. The Musikverein, new headquarters of the Society of the Friends of Music, opened for business in 1870. The Philharmonic played the first concert in the Great Hall on January 6, and Clara Schumann inaugurated the chamber-music hall with a recital on the 19th. Brahms would know that building intimately; many great and small moments of his career were played out in it.
The classical facade of the Musikverein intimates a Temple of Art, the most placid and elegant exterior on the Ringstrasse. Inside, manic Viennese eclecticism takes over: from the elaborately domed ceiling of the lobby one moves into the Golden Hall, with its rows of glittering caryatids holding up the balcony, gods and goddesses swarming on the ceiling, a blaze of