Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [249]
As always he looked for distraction in afternoons and evenings away from his desk. On July 11, at dinner in the house of composer Hermann Götz after a Zürich festival performance of the Triumphlied, Brahms made the acquaintance of the Swiss pastor, writer, playwright, and translator Josef Viktor Widmann. Among his other interests the polymathic Widmann produced opera librettos, including one for Götz’s new, much-celebrated, eventually forgotten Taming of the Shrew. Brahms felt kindly toward the chronically ill Götz, but once on a visit greeted the sight of the younger man’s chamber scores with a curt, “Ah, do you also sometimes amuse yourself with such things?” Götz spoke bitterly of that moment for the rest of his short life.15
Josef Widmann came from a family of fervent musical amateurs. His mother had improvised for Beethoven, his father had sung for Schubert, and among other treasures they owned the Graf piano that had belonged to Beethoven when he died. The night of the dinner at Götz’s, Widmann managed to enchant Brahms by the surprising method of getting into a red-faced argument with him. Widmann was expressing his support of the Theological Reform movement in Switzerland when to his astonishment he found Brahms not only cognizant of the issue but with forceful and contrary opinions about it—he declared it a half-measure that would satisfy neither the pious nor the freethinkers. During the next few days of the music festival Widmann found Brahms seeking out his company.
With his writer’s eye, Widmann surveyed his famous new friend, whom years before he had observed from a distance on the concert stage. He immediately noted Brahms’s delight in children. At restaurants Brahms would fill his pockets with sweets to hand out to urchins on the street. Widmann appreciated the wit, often at the expense of innocent admirers: say, the small-town musician who claimed to know everything Brahms had written, whereupon Brahms convinced the man that an inane tune played by a nearby band was his. Widmann observed that Brahms did not like having his nearsightedness noticed so walked the streets without his pince-nez, claiming the ladies looked prettier that way. When somebody pressed Brahms about needing glasses when he conducted, the reply was that he used them only during Schumann’s Faust, when the score directs “here women pass by.”16 Brahms and Widmann fell into a long-lasting friendship fueled by an ongoing dialogue on art, literature, politics, and philosophy.
Besides the Neue Liebeslieder, Brahms had apparently worked at something else that summer on Lake Zürich. Soon after leaving Switzerland for Vienna and taking up his third season with the Gesellschaft—he had scheduled himself to play the Beethoven Emperor Concerto in the first concert—Brahms surprised Theodor Billroth with the manuscript score of a piano quartet in C minor. In the accompanying note he cautioned disingenuously, “The quartet is only a matter of curiosity! Perhaps it can be considered an illustration to the last chapter of the man in the blue coat and yellow vest”17 (Young Werther).
Perhaps in person Brahms explained to Billroth the cryptic reference to Goethe, which he was repeating to any number of friends: this was none other than the piece begun in 1853 as a quartet in Kapellmeister Kreisler’s key of C# minor. He had returned to the quartet a couple of times since his own Werther period, and finally finished it. The first, dark murmurings of the strings outline (transposed) Robert Schumann’s Clara theme of C-B-A-G#-A, of which Brahms had also made use several times in his twenties. So now he completed his collection of three piano quartets with the C Minor, its material spanning, with few discernible seams, over twenty years.18 (If Clara recognized herself in the first theme, she still never much cared for the opening movement.)