Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [228]
There is no doubting that Brahms’s joy at the unification of Germany was authentic. His patriotism was deep-lying, straightforward, conventional. He trusted the Prussians and idolized Bismarck, whose brazen bas-relief, decked with laurel, would someday preside in his living room beneath his bust of Beethoven. Still, for the moment the Triumphlied did not get beyond its rapturous first movement, so at the end of 1870 Brahms could not have been cheered to look back on the first year of his musical life in which he finished not one piece (except for 1867, when he was hard at work on the Requiem). The best he could say was that he had two promising shorter works in the oven, the patriotic item and the Schicksalslied. They are perhaps the most startlingly divergent of Brahms’s many contrasting pairs of works: the Song of Triumph rattling the sword, the Song of Destiny a sublime hymn to despair.
A LANDMARK for Brahms in early 1871 was the first complete Vienna performance of the complete Ein deutsches Requiem, which he conducted on March 5 with the forces of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. He must have been waiting to see if people would hiss the end of the third movement again, not to mention snub the whole piece. In fact, it was received calmly and respectfully. With this performance the Requiem began to find a place in the hearts of the Viennese.
By then Brahms had secured a premiere for the opening chorus of the Triumphlied. He had sent it to his old reliable Karl Reinthaler, co-director of the historic Bremen premiere of the Requiem. Once again Reinthaler lived up to his name, which essentially means “good money.” They decided to mount the Requiem again in the cathedral, this time adding the new patriotic chorus. Needing reinforcements for the proper grandiose effect, Brahms wrote Albert Dietrich that Reinthaler “complains of the weakness of his choir. Couldn’t you find some volunteers at Oldenburg who could sing in the eight-voiced forte? It’s not difficult, only forte.”49 At Bremen Cathedral on April 7, the first number of the Triumphlied raised a furor with two thousand listeners. Said the Bremen Courier: “One again recognises the titanic capacity of the composer. The work is a vocal joy-symphony, of imposing power and exalted feeling.”50
Encouraged by the response, Brahms spent that summer’s vacation in Lichtental writing the last two movements of the Triumphlied. In final form it found thunderous acclaim not only in Germany but across Europe (except France, naturally), accomplishing as much as the Requiem—though less than the small popular pieces—to spread Brahms’s fame and fill his coffers. He viewed the Triumphlied as his version of a grand festival piece on the order of Handel’s Dettingen Te Deum, which also commemorates a thrashing of the French.51 While Brahms decided against the militant initial subtitle, “On the Victory of German Arms,” he dedicated it to the Kaiser in flowery language: “Most Illustrious, Most Powerful, Most Gracious Kaiser and Master!” his dedication begins.
The opening chorus’s text from Revelation proclaims, “Hallelujah, salvation, and glory, and honor, and power, unto the Lord our God; for true and righteous are His judgments.” Brahms omitted the Scripture’s indecorous following lines—“For He hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication.” Privately, though, he copied the beginning of that verse into his own score, under an instrumental phrase that exactly represents it. He took great glee in pointing out the spot to friends.52
Certainly Brahms knew you can’t go wrong with grandiloquent, forte patriotic rhapsodies, especially when combined with the kind of Handelian hallelujahs that struck familiar resonances with concertgoers. Besides the popularity of Handel’s oratorios generally and the Messiah