Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [256]
Awards of all sorts turned up steadily now. That April, Joachim wrote that England’s Royal Academy was offering an honorary Doctor of Music. Brahms was agreeable to the idea until he learned that he must receive the degree in person. Suspicious of the British as of most other foreigners, still childishly fearful at the prospect of the Channel crossing, Brahms let the idea slide. (Joachim conducted the First Symphony from manuscript at Cambridge the next year.)
After a frenetic winter of performing, in June 1876 Brahms sought out his seasonal idyll, this time choosing Sassnitz on the Isle of Rügen. He found a wild, heroic landscape with chalk cliffs plunging to a crashing sea—just the thing to inspire a symphony. To Clara and family he wrote:
Rügen is really very, very beautiful, apart from the dear old Low German, in which I am at last able to indulge again. There is the most beautiful forest coming right down to the sea.… My room is beautifully situated, my window looks out on to the sea, the village straggles up the hill to my left, and cornfields in front of me for the present stand in for the murmuring roll of the waves.41
To baritone and song composer George Henschel, who of late had become a good friend, Brahms dispatched an invitation: “I should find it charming if you could soon decide on coming. We shall not disturb each other in the least. For you the place swarms with ladies. In your free hours you can compose songs for them, the badness of which I in turn will expose in my free hours! It is quite beautiful here and the bathing enchanting.”
Around then Brahms received, simultaneously from Elisabet and from Heinrich von Herzogenberg, each unaware of the other’s efforts, copies of Heinrich’s new Variations on a Theme of Johannes Brahms. With that began a relationship beautiful and excruciating. For the first of many occasions in regard to Heinrich’s compositions, Brahms squirmed out of forced compliments in his reply. Instead, he turned to a sighing evocation of Elisabet: “Forgive me if my thanks begin, and my critical remarks end, sooner than you would like. How can I be disinterested, when, as I open the duet and play it in imagination, I have a distinct vision of a slender, golden-haired figure in blue velvet seated on my right? If I say any more I shall offend one or the other of you.” There followed a brief disquisition on variation form (“Beethoven treats it with extraordinary severity”) intended as a lesson to Heinrich.42
Soon George Henschel was in Sassnitz happily diving for pebbles in the surf with his host. Despite the high spirits, the task Brahms had set himself in those cheery surroundings was as terrifying as he ever faced. With the heroic landscape of Rügen as provocation, he was determined to finish the C Minor Symphony at last. The question of how to handle the finale had been the lingering dilemma, but now he knew what he wanted to do with it. He completed the symphony that August, while staying near Clara in Lichtental.
WHEN AFTER ITS PREMIERE Hans von Bülow, with his gift for historic quips, dubbed Brahms’s First Symphony “The Tenth,” he encapsulated what was on everyone’s mind. Brahms’s relation to Beethoven had long been manifest to the public (his debt to Schubertian lyricism less so). That spirit shone unmistakably in the First Symphony, from the monumental sound of the orchestra to the chorale theme of the last movement—the latter so inescapably reminiscent of the Ninth Symphony finale that Brahms could only snap in response: “Any jackass can see that!” Many saw too that this was the first truly historic symphony since Beethoven’s Ninth, which is to say that with it Brahms restored to full viability a genre that Wagner, among others, had pronounced dead.43
Yet with all that looming history as a given, the C Minor is one of the most innovative symphonies that the later nineteenth century produced. Once more, and never more powerfully, Brahms achieved a paradoxical resolution of conservative