Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [235]
Bülow had once studied piano with Liszt, then as conductor had been among the best of Wagnerians until Wagner stole his wife. High-strung and obsessive at the best of times, Bülow had nearly been destroyed by the experience. After the divorce with Cosima was settled in 1870 he was still depressed, but available for a new hero. (His replacement as favored conductor in the Wagnerian ranks would be Hermann Levi, though Bülow continued to perform Wagner.) While Bülow had long resisted Brahms’s music, as pianist he had occasionally played it. Now, as sign of their new friendship, Bülow played the E Minor Scherzo, the Ballades, and the Handel Variations in Vienna, in November 1872.
Some observers, including Clara Schumann, called Bülow’s sinewy and analytical performances overintellectual, but Brahms appreciated them. (Another of Bülow’s teachers had been Clara’s father, Friedrich Wieck.) His orchestral conducting showed the same refined, meticulous, but still intense style. During the 1870s he joined Clara and Joachim as a leading Brahms champion. All that was necessary was to provide him with more orchestral music to champion, and Brahms was about to see to that.
In September Brahms returned to Karlsgasse No. 4, trying to subdue his ambivalence as he geared up for the Gesellschaft season. Each year as artistic director he earned 3000 florins for presenting four regular subscription concerts and two special, nonsubscription ones. The Gesellschaft board had agreed with his requirement of full control over programs, hiring, and all artistic decisions. Brahms immediately replaced nearly three dozen of the weaker amateur players in the orchestra with professionals from the Philharmonic/Opera orchestra, making up an ensemble of a hundred. Josef Hellmesberger, still the town’s leading concertmaster, headed the violins. The Gesellschaft choir numbered three hundred; Brahms for the first time required of them a second weekly rehearsal. Immediately the level of performance in Gesellschaft concerts shot up.
His own level went up and down, from shaky to inspired, as his performing generally tended to. As with his piano playing, Brahms could be nervous on the podium, especially when presenting new work of his own. Still, as artistic director he made an impact not only on the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde but on the musical life of Vienna—and from there, to a definable degree, on the musical world.
Brahms was determined to extend the concert repertoire backward to the Baroque and beyond. His programs featured more Bach than perhaps any previous group in history; during his tenure he mounted several cantatas and the complete St. Matthew Passion. After the performance of the cantata Christ lag in Todesbanden, Theodor Billroth probably voiced the feelings of many Viennese when in a letter he called it “damned dry music, though here and there lofty in effect.” He added that the audience took it well, out of respect for the conductor.17 Critic Eduard Hanslick, who gave still less of a damn for Bach, usually managed to be civil toward the old master in his reviews. But when Brahms put together on one program a Cherubini Requiem and Bach’s cantata Liebster Gott, wann werd’ ich sterben? (Dear Lord, When Shall I Die?), Hanslick could not resist grumbling in the Neue Freie Presse, “It is not the custom here … to go to concerts for the sole purpose of being successively buried according to Protestant and Catholic rites.”18
It was that sort of attitude Brahms had in mind when writing a sardonic pseudo-Biblical note to Amalie Joachim, by way of inviting her to solo in Handel’s Saul: “Therefore