Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [236]
Brahms never relented in his own smiting of Philistines, especially the Viennese variety, and did much to establish the monumental works of Bach in the repertoire (Joachim was doing the same for Bach’s solo violin music). If Brahms’s performances of Handel, including the oratorios Saul and Solomon, perhaps went down easier with the Viennese, he also gave them therapeutic doses of Renaissance composers Palestrina, Isaac, Gallus, and Lassus.20
As Virginia Hancock has detailed, Brahms’s way of performing older music in general and Bach and Handel in particular represents a middle ground between the “modernized” Baroque of his time and the “historically informed” approach of the next century. When Felix Mendelssohn made his epochal revival of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in 1829, he decked out the music with the full Romantic forces of giant orchestra and chorus, and the contemporary expressive palette of sighing swells, sweeping crescendos, varied articulations, and arching legatos. Brahms had the time’s love of huge choruses doing Bach and Handel (Bach himself premiered the St. Matthew with less than fifty), and did not use harpsichord and other “obsolete” instruments. Still, he was more discreet than most conductors of the day in adding dynamic effects and such to the music (though he added some). He also avoided reworking the instrumentation to the degree Mendelssohn and others had.
Of mainstream composers Brahms naturally concentrated on Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Gluck, Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Schumann. The surprising thing, for that age and for a composer, is how little contemporary music he played, and how few premieres. Most of the living composers he presented were friends of his, the pieces including a violin concerto by Albert Dietrich, Joachim’s Hungarian Concerto, and works by Goldmark, Hiller, Rheinberger, and Rubinstein. Brahms’s farewell Gesellschaft concert was entirely taken up by Max Bruch’s Odysseus. (There is a legend that after Bruch first plowed through the long oratorio for him at the piano, Brahms’s sole comment was: “Say, where do you get your music paper? First rate!”21) If Brahms felt dubious about Berlioz, most admiring his pastoral oratorio L’enfance du Christ, he still programmed the hyperbolic Frenchman’s Harold in Italy. Of his own music, over three years Brahms played the Schicksalslied, the Alto Rhapsody, and the Triumphlied, and in 1875 conducted a performance of Ein deutsches Requiem that turned out to be one of the great triumphs of his life.
On the podium Brahms was graceless but decisive, the baton sweeping vigorously around the stubby figure, the pince-nez on its cord flying in loud passages. In adagios he might conduct dreamily, left hand shoved in his pocket. He always memorized the scores. Sometimes he allowed his troops to get careless. In his third concert the harpist brought Schumann’s Sängers Fluch to a halt by turning over two pages at once, and on the same program an early entry by a timpanist led to a breakdown as Ferdinand Hiller conducted his Concert Overture. That night only Mendelssohn’s Walpurgisnacht had an uninterrupted journey. These do seem to have been the last sweat-drenched episodes of the kind in Brahms’s tenure, but there were a number of conspicuously subpar performances, including Harold in Italy.
Brahms managed rehearsals with incomparable musicianship and ready wit. He knew how to be self-deprecating, as when he echoed the town’s (and probably his own) favorite joke about himself: “I’m in a really good mood today, so let’s do Dear Lord, When Shall I Die?” Behind the scenes, managing the thousand details that Levi had warned him about—programs, budgets, scheduling, hiring soloists, and on and on—Brahms did his job scrupulously and with only