Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [234]
If his creative juices were running low that summer, there was no lack of excitement. He played the Schumann Concerto and conducted the A Major Serenade in Baden-Baden in August, for which he was paid a thousand francs. Hermann Levi had scheduled the premiere of the complete Triumphlied for June 5, his farewell performance as Hofkapellmeister in Karlsruhe. Levi was about to take over the Court Theater in Munich, where through the next years he would be mesmerized by Wagner, the artist who dominated King Ludwig’s capital. Levi the rabbi’s son had already written Brahms in defense of Wagner’s antisemitic screed “Jewry in Music”: “I’ve never been able to join in with the general howling about Wagner’s foolishness and questionable character; you will remember that I myself defended the Jewish brochure insofar as I believe it to come from serious artistic conviction.”11 As of summer 1872, though, Wagner’s spell had not threatened the highly productive collaboration of Levi and Brahms, nor the affection between them.
Inviting friend Theodor Billroth to the Triumphlied premiere, Brahms wrote, “It is said that my song is very merry.” Indeed, the crowd found its patriotic raptures merry on June 5, at the Karlsruhe Hoftheater; it garnered stupendous acclaim. Clara and Joachim came for the concert. She had written in her journal, “Johannes’s Triumphlied is certainly the deepest and grandest piece of church music since Bach.”12 (That may have been the deepest and grandest misjudgment of Clara’s experience with Brahms’s music. Like him, she was carried away by patriotism.) Billroth could not attend but in his stead sent a beaker engraved “Master of German Music. Johannes Brahms, in remembrance of the fifth of June, 1872.” Moved, Johannes wrote Billroth after the concert:
I cannot in any way write and really thank you as I feel. It would have to be a description of my feelings as I held your letter in my hand or as Clara Schumann’s noble face beamed as we sat together with Levi and talked about men of your sort with awe and love. It is so natural for you to do the extraordinary that you can’t imagine how it impresses. The beaker was filled on that evening and afterwards, how many times!… I will never again hear my song, which after all was calculated for the great masses, with more joy. The artists really performed, as did our soldiers in France.13
In the same month, Brahms wrote in quite another mood to Reinthaler: “How often I have upbraided myself that I haven’t written you—but it is a desolate life [wüstes Leben] and so many letters must be written.” That summer Julie Schumann, having borne two children to Count Marmorito and carrying a third, had come to Baden-Baden to say farewell. Clara’s worst fears had been confirmed; childbearing had proven too much for Julie. “We saw her growing worse and worse day by day,” Clara wrote, “and could do nothing. No doctor could help her; she had worn out her delicate frame with all the cares of household and children.… I knew indeed that this loss must come, but I little guessed how soon the blow was to fall.”14 Julie died on November 10, the day of Brahms’s first concert with the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde.
BEFORE BRAHMS LEFT LICHTENTHAL to take up his duties as artistic director, he made another historic connection. That summer he and pianist/conductor Hans von Bülow, having spent years avoiding each other, formed a friendship based at first on a mutual affection for Johann Strauss’s waltzes.15 Conductor and composer took to spending evenings together sitting over beer in the summer air,