• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Now antidemocratic and antisemitic forces that had simmered under the surface of Austrian culture found fertile soil. Jews would be blamed for the crash, and eventually for every ill of an increasingly precarious society. In 1879 the aristocratic Georg von Schönerer, pan-German and prototype of the Nazi, would make suppression of “the Semitic rule of money” and of the free press major planks of his election platform. (The Neue Freie Presse, after all, was the leading liberal paper.) These ideas inflamed Vienna’s university students, of the sort who had once cheered their parents’ liberalism.2 Vienna historian Carl E. Schorske writes:

Beginning with the economic crash of 1873, challenges to the liberal hegemony grew ever more powerful. At the same time, within liberal society itself cries for reform mingled with groans of despair or disgust at the impotence of liberal Austria. A widespread, collective oedipal revolt began in the seventies to spread through the Austrian middle class.3

The liberal bourgeoisie had not ultimately lost its money or its lifestyle or its love of music, but rather was losing, bit by bit, its power and direction. Among them, writes Schorske, “a sense of superiority and a sense of impotence became oddly commingled.”4 As symptom of that impotence, now began the epidemic of suicide among the Grossbürgertum in Vienna. And all over Austria, wracked by the conflicting claims of contentious groups, the wave of reaction rose. Schorske notes that in their politics the liberals had “succeeded in releasing the political energies of the masses, but against themselves rather than against their ancient foes [the aristocrats].” In the 1870s, Vienna entered a twilight that over the next decades would deepen into darkness.

AFTER THE CRASH there were dark forebodings in Brahms’s circle over what was gathering, but he had premieres to worry about—the A Minor String Quartet in Berlin by the Joachim Quartet in October, the Haydn Variations by the Vienna Philharmonic in November, the C Minor String Quartet by Hellmesberger’s group in December.5 Brahms was most fearful about the orchestral premiere, in which he would conduct the Philharmonic. His previous experience with them had been memorably unpleasant—when in 1869 they refused to play the scheduled D Major Serenade, relenting only when Dessoff threatened to resign.

For the last rehearsal of the Variations with the Philharmonic, Brahms gathered friends around him, as buttresses. To Theodor Billroth he wrote, “It would be extremely pleasant for me to have you there as an audience, and have a word with you.”6 Klaus Groth, who also appeared as moral support, found Brahms pacing back and forth backstage as the orchestra rehearsed a Beethoven symphony. “I know that piece well enough,” Brahms said to Groth. As he stepped on the podium to begin, the orchestra gave him a reasonably friendly greeting, he thanked them in his high gruff voice, and got efficiently to work. Afterward, when Groth reported that he and Billroth had enjoyed it, Brahms had unwound enough to respond with trademark irony: “Ah, so you are also unmusical!”7

On November 2 the premiere of the Variations on a Theme by Haydn made a sensation with the Viennese. It would repeat that success across Europe and the world. Brahms could relax a little; he had returned as an orchestral composer. The bad news was that he could not avoid the stack of symphony sketches much longer. Now he had the experience and the skill and the conceptions he needed to get on with them; but he managed to hold the symphony at bay for another year.

At the beginning of 1874 he received the first of a long row of honors: the Order of Maximilian for Science and Art. In other words, he had been knighted and could call himself (though he would not) Johannes Ritter von Brahms. The medal came from none other than King Ludwig of Bavaria, patron and fanatical devotee of Richard Wagner. Shortly afterward, Wagner received the Order as well. Livid when he discovered that