Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [240]
After the excitement of the festival, the friends returned to their cares and their sour grapes. Though Joachim had a wife and children, he was destined to remain a lonely and even tragic figure. When he and Johannes first met, they had been precocious geniuses on the threshold of glittering careers, at the same time clumsy and immature in their dealings with people. With the incomparable success that had attended their lives since then, many of those years in close friendship and collaboration, their emotional and social selves had hardly matured. Joachim’s need for love had always been insatiable. Among his other suspicions and jealousies, he had begun to imagine that his wife was unfaithful to him. Over that a disaster was in the making, one that took excruciatingly long to run its course, and which nearly consumed one of the most remarkable collaborations in the history of music.
IN THE SPRING OF 1873, Clara took a flat in Berlin and eventually sold her house in Baden-Baden, making the move partly to provide a better home for her consumptive son Felix.33 She spent the summer in the resort that year, but Brahms sought another vacation spot for himself. In April he took rooms at Gratwein, in Styria, only to come under siege by some “aesthetic ladies.” After suffering through two days of that he packed his bags and fled to the village of Tutzing on the Starnberger See, taking lodging at an inn called the Seerose (Water Lily). (Levi and Julius Allgeyer had recommended the town to him.34) Immediately he received an invitation from a group of young artists to join their meetings at the inn. Next morning the maid found the invitation ripped to shreds on the floor.
Still, Brahms rented the inn’s broken-down piano and settled in for the summer, with visits to Levi in Munich for purposes sociable and practical. Keeping him company in town were soprano Luise Dustmann from Vienna, quite married but still flirtatious in her relations with “Hansi,” and a young musician from the Dutch East Indies named Lucie Coster, who was more or less willing to put up with the relentless teasing to which Brahms subjected the women who appealed to him.
Brahms seemed to be rekindled by that landscape in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps. The weather in Tutzing was glorious, he wrote Levi, and the view “more beautiful the other day than we could imagine … the lake was almost black, splendidly green on the shore, but usually the lake is blue, a more beautiful, deeper blue than the sky. And besides there was the chain of snowcapped mountains—you never get tired of looking at it.”
With the inspiration of lake and mountains and feminine company, Brahms had a more productive summer than any in years. There were many new songs this summer and the next, and he was ready to finish a couple of string quartets long in the works. He made the acquaintance of the singers Heinrich and Therese Vogl, Wagner’s anointed Tristan and Isolde, who were enthusiastic to try out his new lieder.
The first item on his agenda, though, was another piece planned for some time. After a hiatus of ten years, Brahms returned to the genre of theme-and-variations. His theme would be a jaunty little tune attributed to Haydn, called “Chorale St. Antoni” on an old manuscript. Scored for pairs of oboes and horns, three bassoons, and the archaic serpent horn, it had been discovered by Gesellschaft librarian, Haydn biographer, and Brahms friend C. F. Pohl. In 1870, Pohl had showed the chorale to Brahms, who copied it down as something that might turn up ideas.
Later scholarly heads have decided that the attribution to Haydn was probably spurious.35 (In Haydn’s time there was something of a cottage industry devoted to faking his music.) The attribution probably would not have concerned Brahms. The tune, attractive and sinewy if slight, suited his purposes. Besides, a slight theme is not necessarily