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By Root 1643 0

have sent me your Neue Liebeslieder and that I have seen them avant la lettre. You have given me innermost joyous hours.… One can say of a beautiful poem really nothing better than, “How beautifully poetic.” But when you say about a composition, “How beautifully musical,” that means much more. This is really music from the heart. It should only be sung and played together in late hours by good friends. You know, I suppose, that an impresario from Leipzig is traveling about with a quartette of a black and a brown piano player and a white fiddle player, playing your Liebeslieder.… I love the romantic, idealistic magic which is spread over all your songs.… I can, with you, feel Daumer’s verses very deeply. They are like the poetry of Goethe as an old man, more beautiful musically than beautiful in the way the words express the context. I have the feeling that here the outermost boundary in the expression of words is occasionally reached, and sometimes exceeded.… Wagner’s poetry is not so far removed from this boundary, but moves only toward the edges of this domain when music accompanies it. You lead poetry out of the hyper-romantic into the area of the most beautiful and clear musical feeling.

To all that—there was much more—Brahms made one of his laconic, grateful, hedging, perceptibly impatient replies:

Even a long letter from you does not read so badly, but that in this case it was not only the length that impressed me, I do not have to tell you. It is too bad that I have such a talent for finding good texts—the best, the most passionate, or those most like folk verses; but we will have to have a word with each other about Daumer. In that matter I am somewhat ticklish, in spite of the fact that I know myself a layman in the art of verse. I will bring a few poems with me next time so that you can see what I find beautiful. But what you have to criticize in Daumer, I really would like to hear more clearly!

The praise of me I will stick in my pocket. I can honestly and seriously say to that—it’s too bad about me!22

So artist and public fortified one another, when music was in its glory.

In fact, having set to music so many of G. F. Daumer’s love lyrics, Brahms had decided a few years before to pay a visit to the aging versifier, as an act of homage. Perhaps he imagined a touching moment, a heartfelt exchange between colleagues, a new insight into the poems, maybe the beginning of the sort of easy friendship he had found with another elder poet, Klaus Groth. So Brahms made his pilgrimage to Würzburg and there, he related to Klaus Groth, “in a quiet room I met my poet. Ah, he was a little dried-up old man!… I soon perceived that he knew nothing either of me or my compositions, or anything at all of music. And when I pointed to his ardent, passionate verses, he gestured, with a tender wave of the hand, to a little old mother almost more withered than himself, saying, ‘Ah, I have only loved the one, my wife!’ ”23

The Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde continued to occupy most of Brahms’s time in Vienna. Shortly after his December performance of the Beethoven Missa Solemnis came a letter from Hermann Levi that hardly suggests the looming breach in their friendship—or maybe marks an attempt to forestall it. Responding to Brahms’s duet “Wenn zu der Regenwand” Levi gushes, “If only I could tell you how this song has seized and moved me! I wish you were lying in my bed again, and I could sit beside you and stroke your brow—I have a terrible yearning to see you again.”24 Levi was getting carried away in those days, but the main thing carrying him away was Brahms’s rival. Shortly afterward came a letter from Levi rhapsodizing over Götterdämmerung. Brahms was willing to be generous toward Wagner up to a point, but Levi was passing that point. All that was lacking between them now was a match to light the fuse.

In February 1875, Brahms found enormous, city-wide acclaim with his Gesellschaft performance of Ein deutsches Requiem. Next month he mounted the complete Bach St. Matthew Passion, a monumental work still rarely heard in