Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [250]
So Brahms wrote variants of the Werther story to friends, among them Simrock: “You can put on the title page a picture, namely that of a man with a pistol to his head. Now you can get an idea of the music. For the purpose I will send you my photograph. You can also use a blue coat, yellow trousers, and boots with it.” To critic Hermann Deiters: “Now think of a man who is going to commit suicide and for whom nothing else is left.”19
Why did he explain the piece so much? It was not the only time Brahms hinted to friends about a personal resonance, but this was the most elaborate of his explanations—and more or less the last (and for a piece going back a long time). After the G Major Sextet he had largely moved away from that kind of personal symbolism. He did not want his art inspired by powerful personal experiences, because he did not want the experiences—he hoped to close that kind of unpleasant inspiration with the Alto Rhapsody. So why did he keep hinting about the story behind the C Minor Quartet? Certainly the piece had passionate associations, but there is no discernible indication that they were troubling him at that point—say, no infatuation to dredge up old memories (unless the recent reacquaintance with Elisabet von Herzogenberg had roused a new sense of loss).
One surmise for Brahms’s insisting on the Werther connection is that he wanted history to note it. The charge of manipulating the record is one he would never have confessed to—he professed indifference to such matters. Yet history was always on his mind. The first time he heard of someone buying a letter of his for the autograph, he vowed from then on to suppress intimate details in his correspondence. As he observed to friend George Henschel, “A person has to be careful about writing letters. One fine day they get printed!”20 He took to signing letters “J. Br.” to foil autograph collectors.
During the years of his fame Brahms parceled out his life to future generations in all sorts of ways, sometimes by withholding information, sometimes by priming potential biographers with a few discreet facts and caveats. At times, knowing it would be noised around, he went out of his way to provide a personal anecdote about a piece to several people, most notably the story about the C Minor Piano Quartet. Likely the referentes were authentic, but he may have made a point of them with the public and history in mind. After all, in his covert and desultory way Brahms had always promoted himself shrewdly, finding champions in the highest ranks of musicians and critics. Now to some ambiguous but detectable degree he had begun to do the same with his own history. He was trying to manipulate the future as he manipulated the notes on the page. That the C Minor would come to be called the Werther Quartet was his own, perhaps deliberate, doing.
THIS PERIOD began the heart of the relationship between Brahms and surgeon Theodor Billroth. After one of his crowded days, his grueling rounds at the hospital often followed by a play or a concert and late-night dinner with friends, the insomniac surgeon would sit at his desk and pen long ruminative letters to people like Brahms, Hanslick, and his medical compatriots.21
In October 1874, responding to the Neue Liebeslieder, he issued the kind of thoughtful response that Brahms treasured, even if at the same time he tended to receive it with a certain patronizing impatience. This surgeon was another exemplar of the ideal amateur for whom Brahms mainly composed, Billroth’s responses a model of how Brahms expected to be perceived. In other words, this letter, one of many like it, may stand for the terms—intuitive and analytical, poetic and technical—in which the age and the Austro-German Grossbürgertum thought about music.
The day’s work and sorrow is past, and midnight is approaching. I wish that you were here and that we could chat with each other or be silent, just as we pleased. But since you can’t be here, you will have to put up with an answer to your good notes in one of my almost unreadable letters. I am very proud that you