Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [230]
There remains the question of what he finally meant by the wordless ending of the Schicksalslied, however it took shape. The more apparent answer is the kind of stoic, agnostic reassurance that pervades Ein deutsches Requiem. But ending in a new tonality—in the terms of the time, the “wrong” key—is a disconcerting gesture for all the quietness of the end. Donald Francis Tovey wrote of the “ruthless beauty” of the conclusion, with the drums still whispering fate as in the “All flesh is grass” movement of the Requiem. Fate always an ominous thought for Brahms. “Because this vision rouses our longing,” Tovey continues, does not mean “it is an answer to our doubts and fears.”57 With the ending in a new key, Brahms denies us a true resolution, a return home.
If he would not exactly end the Schicksalslied on a note of despair, neither could he bring himself to finish it with hope and consolation like the Requiem or the Alto Rhapsody. So he finished with music alone, its ruthless beauty the only solace he knew now. In October, acknowledging his fee for the piece from publisher Fritz Simrock, Brahms wrote with moll-Dur irony, “Here’s the receipt for my heart’s blood, also my thanks for the purchase of the poor little piece of soul.”58
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Herr Musikdirektor
IN 1871, Brahms was thirty-eight and had been famous since he was twenty. During most of his adulthood spent in the public gaze he had outspokenly yearned for a settled life and position, a wife and family and happiness. Meanwhile he fled every opportunity to secure them. The one position for which he ever seriously made a play, the podium of the Hamburg Philharmonic, was the only serious position that ever turned him down. Though like all artists he had a steady familiarity with rejection, he treated the Hamburg rebuff, of a post he would surely have soon given up, as the great tragedy of his life—the blow that prevented him from gaining wife and family and happiness.
As of late 1871 a job had been stalking Brahms for nearly two years while he took evasive maneuvers—Artistic Director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. That autumn he learned that the Gesellschaft board intended to offer him the post again. Once more he commenced his ritual of advancing and retreating. By that point, after all, he had settled into a way of life that allowed him to get his creative work done with remarkable efficiency. When a schedule and lifestyle function that well, one is loath to change them. Adding to his ambivalence was his instinctive resistance to being tied down to anything or anybody.
Still, still, the Gesellschaft position was perfect: a large orchestra and the finest chorus in the city at his disposal, and the promise of a free hand in developing them. As had not been the case with the Singverein, Brahms was being offered a podium with the understanding that he would give the Viennese a stronger dose of Bach and other “difficult” old music than they were accustomed to. At length he concluded, despite himself, that the Gesellschaft was too good to pass up. In December 1871, he wrote Hermann Levi, “I’ve as good as taken the director position—I don’t see any hole to escape through.”1
Just after Christmas, he did something that implied he might be settling down in life. He took his first apartment in Vienna: two rooms on the fourth floor (called third in Austria) of Karlsgasse No. 4. While that represented a step up from the hotels he had inhabited for years in the city, it hardly seemed a suitable place for someone like himself. It was a plain stone building like any number of others in Vienna, next to the looming Baroque dome of the Karlskirche. The big windows of the living room looked past the church to the plaza and little Resselpark, and the River Wien. Just beyond the river lay the Musikverein, home of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. A short stroll over the Elizabeth Bridge brought him to the horse-drawn streetcars of the Ringstrasse; a ten-minute walk at the brisk Brahms pace took him past the Hofoper to Kärntnerstrasse