Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [252]
For an immediate reason he blamed his predecessor, who wanted the job back. Brahms wrote Levi, “It is certainly said in a word: Herbeck! I will neither wrangle with him nor wait until he eases me out.” Johann von Herbeck had left the Gesellschaft directorship for the Hofoper and Philharmonic, but in four years there had become disgusted with the intrigues and politics involved in the position. So he was determined to reclaim the Gesellschaft.
Brahms had the power to put up a fight, but he lacked the will. Why should he use his time and energy to resist Herbeck, who was a master intriguer and politician himself? Instead, Brahms took the excuse to bow out. (Herbeck regained the directorship only to die two years later.) Brahms had plenty of unspoken reasons for quitting: the unfinished symphony, his almost embarrassing performance of the Emperor that revealed how much his playing had deteriorated (from now on he rarely attempted any concertos but his own), friction with the board over his spending summers incommunicado, a feeling that in his three years and eighteen concerts with the Gesellschaft he had sufficiently made his mark on the city. Meanwhile his experience on the podium had solidified his own understanding of the orchestra and his confidence in composing for it. Mainly, though, he quit because he wanted his freedom back.
His last concert as director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde came on April 18, 1875, with a matinee performance of Max Bruch’s Odysseus. History would hardly embrace Bruch’s oratorio, but it went over handsomely in the Musikverein. After the concert, baritone George Henschel, who soloed in the performance, observed Brahms’s boredom and irritation during a farewell ceremony that included a long poetic eulogy. Brahms responded to it all with a gruff “Thank you very much,” picked up his grandly inscribed certificate, and headed for the door. A celebratory dinner that night was more his style. Still, he parted on good terms, remaining an honorary member of the Gesellschaft committee, a position that gave him great weight in local musical affairs. Thereafter, whenever Brahms attended concerts at the Musikverein, he sat in the director’s box. His tenure with the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde marked the high point of its history as a performing organization.
On his way to summer quarters, Brahms stopped off in Munich for a baneful rendezvous with Hermann Levi. At one point during the visit Levi was making a comparison between the operas of Wagner and his predecessor Gluck, to the advantage of Wagner, when Brahms interrupted: “One doesn’t pronounce those two names like that, one after the other!”25 After perhaps adding some more personal and insulting things Brahms stalked out of the house, and next day left town without saying good-bye. Levi wrote a dignified letter about it, reminding Brahms that he had always deplored Liszt and his crowd: “The fact that I shun even the most distant intercourse with the Futurists’ band, and that I am thoroughly hated by them, ought to make you consider whether I really deserve your truly harsh words.”26 Brahms did not reply.
They made a few gestures at restoring the friendship, and visited later that summer, but each man knew a boundary had been passed. For Brahms, acceptance of Wagner was one thing for a friend of his; Hans von Bülow, Franz Wüllner, and Joachim all conducted Wagner, and singers George Henschel and Luise Dustmann were famed for Wagnerian performances. But Levi’s intoxication was another matter. Besides, neither man needed the other as much as before, and probably both of them knew it. Now Brahms had Bülow on his side, and the brilliant and self-destructive Levi was turning into the figure Peter Gay calls “Richard Wagner’s favorite conductor and Jewish whipping-boy.”27
BRAHMS SETTLED for the summer of 1875 at Ziegelhausen near Heidelberg, in the house of painter Anton Hanno. The usual train of