Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [262]
Seldom, if ever, has the entire musical world awaited a composer’s first symphony with such tense anticipation.… But the greater the public expectation and the more importunate the demand for a new symphony, the more deliberate and scrupulous was Brahms.… The new symphony is so earnest and complex, so utterly unconcerned with common effects, that it hardly lends itself to quick understanding.… Even the layman will immediately recognize it as one of the most distinctive and magnificent works of the symphonic literature.… Brahms recalls Beethoven’s symphonic style not only in his individually spiritual and suprasensual expression, the beautiful breadth of his melodies … but also—and above all—in the manly and noble seriousness of the whole. Brahms seems to favor too one-sidedly the great and the serious, the difficult and the complex, at the expense of sensuous beauty.… Having relieved myself of these minor reservations, I can continue in the jubilant manner in which I began. The new symphony of Brahms is a possession of which the nation may be proud, an inexhaustible fountain of sincere pleasure and fruitful study.61
In other words, as Brahms of course realized, Hanslick was making something of a disingenuous case for a work he did not particularly like. Seven years later, reviewing the Third Symphony, Hanslick called the First “almost pathological … the expression of a suffering, abnormally agitated individual.”62 Brahms understood that like most Viennese, Hanslick preferred pleasant, pretty stuff. On his next symphonic outing he would provide them something closer to that.
If things were nonetheless going better than he had allowed himself to hope, his foreboding about every new performance is shown in a note of warning to his hosts Heinrich and Elisabet von Herzogenberg, as he prepared to leave Vienna for the Leipzig premiere: “Three days before the concert I begin to sweat and drink camomile tea; after the fiasco (at the Gewandhaus) attempts at suicide, and so on. You shall behold the lengths to which an exasperated composer will go!”63
Yet amazingly enough, Leipzig was generally receptive to the symphony on January 14, 1877. Clara, who heard it live for the first time there, called the effect
grand, overwhelming; the last movement, with its inspired introduction, made an extraordinary impression on me … then it gradually brightens in the most marvellous manner until it breaks into the sunny motif of the last movement, which makes one’s heart expand like a breath of spring air after the long, dreary days of winter.… The Leipzig audience behaved as it always does—respectfully; enthusiasm was shown only by a few.64
Brahms was content with respect; he could wait for the piece to settle in. And certainly it did, at least outside Vienna. The C Minor Symphony may in some ways be less seamless and sophisticated than Brahms’s later orchestral works, but it became his most popular and one of the most beloved of all symphonies—mainly due to the beauty of its themes, the lyrical charm of the inner movements, and the electric emotionalism of the outer ones. Meanwhile, the piece in one blow (Bruckner being still largely offstage) resurrected the genre of the symphony from years of failure, made it once again the king of musical forms, and so in some degree made possible the achievements of Dvořák, Mahler, Elgar, Sibelius, Nielsen, Ives, and generations of symphonists to come. Carl Dahlhaus wrote that with Brahms’s First begins “the second age of the symphony.”
For himself, Brahms knew what he had accomplished: he had wrestled with the giants. If he had not beaten them at their game and could never beat them, he had