Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [263]
With his patriarchal beard in a formal pose. The cravat he is wearing may be one of those Marie Fellinger made for him.
At the piano in Karlsgasse, with the Karlskirche across the street.
Joachim in his middle years.
Brahms playing the G Minor Rhapsody, painted from memory by his artist friend Willy von Beckerath, who called it “the artist at a moment when, completely oblivious of his surroundings, he is absorbed in his art.”
Reproductions often omit the cigar with drooping ashes.
Caricature of the time: “Eduard Hanslick Burns Incense Before the Image of Saint Johannes Brahms.” The adored image carries the Messiah’s palm-leaf, but his pedestal is worn and shabby.
Brahms walking with his vigorous stout man’s stride, by the celebrated Viennese silhouettist Dr. Otto Böhler. The hedgehog informs us that Brahms is headed for his favorite restaurant, the Rote Igel.
The study on Karlsgasse in Brahms’s later years. From left to right: his portrait of Cherubini with the Muse covered up; his trick rocking chair; the Sistine Madonna; his table with Kaffee machine; the electric light that the Fellingers installed as a surprise; the bas-relief of Bismarck with laurel wreath; his bust of Beethoven from Hamburg, and under it a Klinger etching; his Streicher piano, next to the window that looked out on the Karlskirche.
Brahms in his library—behind him, books from ancient to new and his collection of original editions and manuscripts.
Clara Schumann in old age. The cliché applies: battered but unbowed.
With Waltz King Johann Strauss, Jr., in Bad Ischl in 1894. Strauss was eight years older than Brahms.
The Brahms Monument, which faces the Musikverein in Vienna: nearly the last gasp of the Ringstrasse style.
The House of the Secession in Vienna, decorated for an exhibition honoring the city’s leading composer of the next generation.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Late Idyll
IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE 1870s that Brahms befriended baritone George Henschel, as he would do with several promising young musicians over the next decades. While he never accepted formal composition students and disdained disciples, Brahms enjoyed having a circle of men around him and liked to encourage talent. Few of his protégés had a career to compare with Henschel’s. A superb concert baritone, Henschel had been engaged by Brahms to sing in Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde performances. Also a composer and conductor, he would eventually be called to Boston as the new Symphony’s first music director. Henschel published a diary of his encounters with Brahms that provides a striking sketch of the composer in his prime—still beardless, but in the long high tide of his art that began with the First Symphony.1
Brahms was getting stout then, in his forties, the long blond hair turning sandy. While the truculent underlip was soon to disappear under foliage, the forget-me-not twinkle of his eyes—kindly or roguish in a good hour, steely in a bad—lasted to the end. Henschel seemed usually to find Brahms in jolly moods. One of their first encounters came when the two were soloing with the orchestra in Koblenz in 1876. At the public dress rehearsal Henschel was pained to hear the famous man losing notes by the handful in the Schumann Piano Concerto. Next day he found Brahms alone in the concert hall, red-faced with frustration as he belabored the piano. “Really, this is too bad,” Brahms groaned.
Those people tonight expect to hear something really good and here I’m likely to treat them to a swinish mess. I assure you, today I could play … far more difficult stuff, with wider stretches for the fingers