Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [245]
The sustained, wistful lyric melody that begins the A Minor has as its most conspicuous motivic element Joachim’s old motto F-A-E, frei aber einsam (free but lonely). That and the Hungarian echoes in the finale are clues that Brahms had originally intended to dedicate the A Minor to Joachim, until the ruckus over the Requiem came between them. Instead, Brahms dedicated both Opus 51 quartets to Theodor Billroth, and made him a present of the manuscripts. The letter announcing the dedication was the first in which Brahms used the familiar du with his medical friend.
If the Haydn Variations and two quartets were not achievement enough for the summer months of 1873, Brahms also wrote or completed the Eight Songs of Opus 59. Their subjects are a mixture of love found and lost, the most famous of them settings of two Klaus Groth lyrics: “Regenlied” with its imitations of raindrops (“Pour down, rain; reawaken in me the dreams I dreamed in childhood”) and the anguished “Mein wundes Herz” (“My Wounded Heart”).
Before going back to Vienna in mid-September, Brahms ended the summer with a private reading of the two quartets and the two-piano Haydn Variations at Hermann Levi’s in Munich. There, with Levi looking over his shoulder, he finished orchestrating the Variations. He had much to look forward to and much to worry about. All three works were slated to be heard before the end of the year, two of them in Vienna, and Vienna itself was in chaos.
At their premieres the string quartets would be received respectfully if without great enthusiasm, which on the whole is how they have been received by audiences ever since.49 Still, they entered the repertoire, they helped revitalize the medium, they helped inspire quartets from Schoenberg and Bartók and many of the next century’s composers. In other words, Brahms had revivified a great but moribund tradition. Having done that with the string quartet, he was finally ready to do the same with the symphony.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Tramp of Giants
IN SEPTEMBER 1873, after his grudging visit to the Schumann Festival in Bonn, Brahms returned home to a capital staggering through one of the turning points in its history—this and most turns to come, for the worse. Vienna had mounted a great International Exhibition to show off the achievements of the Gründerzeit, the years of boom and bourgeois prosperity, the time of spreading railroads and grand concert halls and the epic kitsch of the Ringstrasse. Brahms had his stepmother ship Robert Schumann’s old Graf piano, which Clara had given him years before, to be shown at the Exhibition. Among other sights drawing crowds to the fairgrounds was Hans Makart’s colossal, swarming canvas Venice Pays Homage to Caterina Cornaro.1 Then, a week after the Exhibition opened, the reckless speculation that had fueled an illusory prosperity came to its crisis. The stock market crashed and the country plummeted into depression.
The crash affected every class and institution, the box offices of concert halls as much as anything. Even when the depression eased, the long-term result was a serious deterioration in workers’ lives, a chronic housing shortage, and an assault on the parliamentary liberalism that had dominated Austria for years. Meanwhile the Austrian empire continued its inexorable decline, irrelevant to Europe and weakened at its foundations by the Dual Monarchy with Hungary. Yet the government continued to erect colossal structures around the Ringstrasse, their fake-historic grandeur