Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [268]
His friends enjoyed Brahms’s teasing and practical jokes, at least when they were not his targets. One of his more ingenious pranks was visited on Gustav Nottebohm. On a piece of old manuscript paper Brahms expertly faked what looked like a sketch by Beethoven, but in fact was a current popular tune. He bribed a strolling food-seller in the Prater to give it to Nottebohm, wrapped around a hunk of cheese. Came the delicious moment when Brahms saw the old pedant step beneath a streetlight, put on his spectacles and peruse the paper with eyes popping, then slip it in his pocket with a sly air and begin munching his greasy cheese barehanded.6 Brahms dined out on that story for some time.
Besides his Beethoven studies and composing, Nottebohm did important work with the Schubert complete edition and with composers of the pre-Bach era who were still new territory in musicology. If Brahms admired Nottebohm’s contrapuntal authority and scholarly meticulousness, though, he did not appreciate the inflexibility that went with it. This friend was the sort who tried to get mailmen and waiters fired for minute infractions real or imagined. Sometimes Brahms trailed after Nottebohm patching things up.7
Several composer friends may have had distinguished reputations, but not as distinguished as Brahms’s, and he was apt to let them hear about it. Ignaz Brüll was admired for his light touch as both composer and pianist, and Brahms admitted that he wished he had a comparable fertility of melodic invention. But Brüll had not subjected himself to the sort of contrapuntal discipline Brahms had, and Brahms was unforgiving of shortcomings in technique. Besides, Brüll was surrounded by his adoring mother and sisters and wife, and to Brahms that household of women seemed a dismal setting for an artist. One of his wounding sarcasms ran, “One day ’Nazy really intended to write a modulation from F major to B minor, but the whole family objected so he gave it up.”
He subjected gentle Karl Goldmark, then Vienna’s second most celebrated composer, to relentless teasing, like a teenager whose notion of affection merges into cruelty. “Goldmark is such a terrific guy, both as a man and as a musician,” Brahms said by way of excuse. “The only trouble is that he’s so sensitive that I can’t go without teasing him. I’m often sorry afterwards; still, he … ought to know how to take a joke.” The prodding came to a head in the eighties when Brahms was awarded a high state prize, the Order of Leopold. Goldmark received the same award later on, but not before Brahms had spent years declaring himself the “superior” and watching his victim squirm. Biographer Richard Specht, who witnessed some of this, observed that in Brahms’s company Goldmark tended to be visibly on edge.
One evening when Brahms was in an evil humor he went beyond teasing. At a dinner at Brüll’s house the guests were complimenting Goldmark’s setting of a psalm in Luther’s translation, when Brahms broke in angrily, “Don’t you think it’s extraordinary that a Jew should set Martin Luther’s words!” Goldmark went pale and probably the rest of the company with him. Brahms would not let it go, pontificating on and on about the impropriety of setting things outside one’s own faith and experience, until the dinner came