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By Root 1573 0

organ pipes towering over the orchestra’s low platform.43 The space is intimate compared to later orchestral halls. It was designed not only to show off music but its patrons, a place to see and be seen. However, all the Age of Makart flamboyance, the rows of golden nudes and teeming bricabrac, help shape one of the warmest, most lucid acoustic spaces in the world. In that hall even the tumult of an ovation is tamed and civilized. The adjoining chamber-music hall has flocks of golden cherubs, whose chubby cuteness exemplifies much of the Viennese spirit in churches and buildings all over the city. Brahms never liked the sound of the small hall—today, ironically, called the Brahmssaal. He preferred the Bösendorfer or Ehrenbar hall for chamber music.

Knowing that he was on the short list of Herbeck’s possible successors as music director of the Gesellschaft, Brahms did his ritual writhing over the matter, which included sounding out friends. Clara responded incredulously, “You’re thinking of refusing? Surely you have nothing to fear?”44 Hermann Levi, on the other hand, articulated what must have been Brahms’s own qualms: “I saw in Karlsruhe [with the Requiem] … that you have a gift for conducting such as no other man possesses. Nevertheless, you are not the man to contend successfully with the thousand-and-one petty vexations which are inevitably connected with any official position. I am afraid they would soon get the better of you.”45 Some years before, the board of the Hamburg Philharmonic had likely concluded the same about Brahms—a passable leader on a good day, but impatient with the quotidian duties of a music director. In any case, for the moment the cup passed: the Gesellschaft committee gave a one-year appointment to violinist Josef Hellmesberger pending the choice of a permanent director, and the following year Anton Rubinstein took over on the same terms. Brahms understood that someday the job would be his for the taking. As usual he was happy to put off the decision.

Meanwhile a more dramatic development arose to occupy his attention. As he finished his Wagnerian pilgrimage to Munich in July, the Franco-Prussian War broke out—declared by Napoleon III but engineered by Prussian Prime Minister Bismarck, who provoked war with the French as a means of drawing together the scattered German states under Prussian leadership. During the six months of fighting the ordinary concerns of life went up in smoke. Brahms wrote Clara that he would come to her in Baden, where she could hear the cannons roaring at Strasbourg and lived in terror of Turkish soldiers, rumored to be barbaric, in the French army. Her son Ferdinand eagerly enlisted to fight with the Prussian forces. “I stayed,” Clara wrote him, “but in a state of continual nervousness as we have no man to protect us. Your promise to come seemed to me most kind.”46

Brahms’s gallant offer to save Clara and family from the Turks proved impossible to realize; every train in Germany had been commandeered for the military.47 Suddenly the exploits of the Vaterland infected Brahms with a fever of patriotism that had only been latent before. The Austro-Prussian War of 1866 had not roused him to sign up for the army, but that is what he resolved to do in this war when, briefly, things were going badly for the Prussians. Later, amused at himself, Brahms told George Henschel that in his martial seizure he felt “fully convinced that I should meet my old father [on the battlefield] to fight side by side with me. Thank God it turned out differently!”48

Instead, he returned to Vienna and, by way of doing his bit, wrote the opening chorus of the Triumphlied (Song of Triumph). Scored for two four-part choruses and orchestra, it is a neo-Handelian paean for the victory of Prussia, Bismarck, and Kaiser Wilhelm I. Above all, his hallelujahs celebrated the results of the war: at Versailles in January 1871, Wilhelm was proclaimed Kaiser of a united Reich. After centuries of dreams in the face of the apparently impossible, Bismarck had plotted, negotiated, bullied, bamboozled, compromised,