Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [266]
At Sassnitz one afternoon, Brahms took Henschel on a long walk across the moors to listen to what he called his bullfrog pond. “Can you imagine,” he said of the echoing amphibian chorus, “anything more sad and melancholy than this music …? Here we can understand the origin of fairy tales about enchanted princes and princesses.… Listen! There he is again, the poor King’s son with his yearning, mournful C!”
Henschel saw plenty of Brahms’s teasing side, now brash and provoking, now wounding. On one tour they shared a hotel room and Henschel had to flee in the middle of the night from his mentor’s symphonic snoring. Next morning Brahms found the fugitive and intoned with mock apprehension, “When I awoke and found your bed empty I said to myself, ‘There, he’s gone and hanged himself!’ But really, why didn’t you throw a boot at me?” Another evening they visited the house of a composer of popular but thin music who habitually worked all day long. (Henschel does not name him: it was Joachim Raff.) When their host left the room his wife told Brahms that she had prevailed on her husband to walk with their daughter, to give himself at least two hours a day away from composing. “Oh that’s good, that’s very good!” Brahms broke in earnestly, while Henschel tried to squelch his giggles.
As they walked home that night the younger man waxed sarcastic about a music-loving aristocrat who had published some pretentious attempts of his own. Brahms broke in, “My dear Henschel, let me warn you to be more circumspect when speaking of a nobleman’s compositions—because you can never tell who wrote ’em!”
Henschel may have been surprised to find Wagner a recurring theme between them. Brahms knew that Henschel had established his fame partly by singing Hans Sachs in Meistersinger; but that was not the reason the subject came up. Brahms seemed constantly to be turning over the matter of Wagner in his mind, sometimes critically, sometimes respectfully, sometimes in puzzlement, but never questioning the significance of his rival. As they walked home one afternoon after sharing a couple of hours of dolce far niente in a hammock (Brahms was amused by the problem of how both of them could climb in it at once), Henschel rhapsodized about sections of the Ring. Brahms replied mildly:
Certainly these are fine things, but I can’t help it, somehow or other they don’t interest me … when Siegmund in Die Walküre pulls the sword out of the tree, that’s fine, too; but it would … be really powerful and carry one away, if it all concerned—let’s say young Bonaparte, or some other hero who stands nearer to our feelings, has a closer claim to our affection. And then that stilted, bombastic language.… What really happens with the ring, anyway? Do you know?
Brahms the contrarian usually responded like that when he heard enthusiasm about the operas. He had an old habit of taking the opposite of whatever happened to be the going opinion: the eternal devil’s advocate. When he brought up the subject of Wagner himself, or when he heard criticism of his rival and suspected it was done to curry favor, Brahms was apt to put on his mask as best of Wagnerians. “I repeatedly heard Rheingold and Walküre at Munich,” he told Henschel, “and admit it would greatly interest me [to go to the full Ring premiere at Bayreuth], but—well, we’ll think about it.” He had an abiding distaste only for Tristan und Isolde, probably its harmonic vagaries that herald what a later age would name atonality. Brahms said he usually studied Wagner with enthusiasm, but “with the Tristan score it is different. If I look at that in the morning, I’m cross for