Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [260]
The year he completed the First Symphony is the same year Wagner brought the titanic Der Ring des Nibelungen to the stage, in his own theater at Bayreuth. Brahms’s achievement was no less stunning in his terms: to compose at the top of his skill and imagination despite the tramp of giants thundering around him, to epitomize his singular integration of Classical formalism and Romantic expression, to integrate Western musical technique stretching from Palestrina through Bach to Haydn and Mozart, and symphonic form from Haydn through Beethoven to Schubert, Mendelssohn, and Schumann. In sheer ambition, tenacity of purpose, and power of expression, what Brahms achieved in the forty-four minutes of the C Minor Symphony rivals Wagner’s achievement in the twelve hours of the Ring.
IN AUGUST 1876, as Brahms was finishing the symphony, Eduard Hanslick journeyed to Bayreuth to review the first performance of the Ring. He conceded it to be “a remarkable development in cultural history,” admired bits and pieces of the music and Wagner’s “astonishing mastery of his orchestral technique.” But in the end Hanslick deplored the drama and the “repugnant and absurd” device of the magic potion; he declared Siegfried “not a hero but a puppet,” called the pattern of leitmotivs “of meagre melodic and rhythmic substance,” complained of the “indigestible German … offered as poetry,” and on and on.52 While sharing some of Hanslick’s sentiments about the Ring, Brahms stayed apart from the fray, but meanwhile found himself increasingly fascinated with Wagner and what he had wrought.
Also as Brahms was completing the C Minor, he received an offer of the position of music director in Düsseldorf—Robert Schumann’s old post. After months of mulling it over and exchanging flocks of letters with most of his friends and with town authorities, he said no. The best explanation he could offer was in a letter to Billroth:
My chief objections to accepting are also of a childish nature. I must remain silent regarding some. Perhaps they include the good restaurants and winehouses in Vienna and the, to me, disagreeable and rough tone in general in Düsseldorf. In Vienna one can be a bachelor without any more discussion. In a little city, an old bachelor is a caricature. I do not plan to marry, and have some grounds left to be a little frightened by the fair sex.53
At this point Brahms was actually still considering the Düsseldorf offer, and told Billroth he was planning a second symphony as a farewell to Vienna. As it turned out, he did not need the farewell but wrote the symphony anyway, and wrote it to suit the Viennese.
Naturally Brahms took the First Symphony to Clara as parts of it were done. At the end of September, in Baden-Baden, he played her the outer movements on piano. She expressed tentative approval in her journal: “These two … are grand, full of life and of thought from end to end; only certain of the melodies seem to me rather thin.” On a drive one afternoon he provoked her ire by defending Wagner. (The previous year Clara had seen Tristan und Isolde and declared it “the most repulsive thing I ever saw or heard in my life.”54) During this visit she also observed, “I have often been amazed … that he can so delight in the old masters before Bach … for with the exception of certain isolated passages they are not interesting, musically. But always I love to watch Johannes when he is losing himself in a work of that sort, there is something touching about him.”55
Finally on October 10 Brahms played her the complete symphony. For herself after that first exposure she said, “I cannot deny that I was grieved and depressed, for it does not seem to