Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [269]
BRAHMS REMAINED A LONE WOLF in the midst of friends and fame, as happy alone in his Karlsgasse rooms as out in company. In Vienna he did little fresh composing; instead he polished work done in the summer, saw pieces through the publishing process, attended to his correspondence. And he did regular editorial work. In the 1860s it was collections of pieces by Bach’s sons, Schumann, Schubert, and Handel; in the 1870s he worked on more Schubert, Couperin, Schumann’s Études Symphoniques, Mozart’s Requiem, and a good deal of Chopin; in the 80s and 90s Handel, the Schubert symphonies for the complete edition, and much Schumann—the latter supplementing Clara’s edition of her husband’s work (Brahms advised her in that as well). He kept up a friendship and correspondence with the leading musicologists of the time—not only with Nottebohm the Beethoven scholar and Pohl the Haydn, but with Karl Franz Friedrich Chrysander whose Handel edition Brahms worked on, Philipp Spitta the biographer of Bach and editor of Schütz, and Otto Jahn the biographer of Mozart.
For company at home he had his reading and his little projects, including the notebook habit going back to “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein.” Besides collections of song lyrics, opera ideas, and so on, they included a collection of parallel octaves and fifths—a cardinal sin in counterpoint—that he had gleaned from the works of the masters. Each infraction he copied down with an annotation as to whether he deemed it forgivable.
Sometimes Brahms accepted the usual pay for his editorial work, sometimes not. He no longer particularly needed anybody’s money. By the 1870s he was living mostly on performing fees and interest, the accounts managed by friends. For a while Clara made investments for him; later the banking brothers of both Hermann Levi and Felix Mendelssohn saw to some of it; finally he put everything into the hands of publisher Fritz Simrock. Brahms usually asked Simrock to deposit fees for his works into the bank in Berlin, no questions asked. Once when Levi pressed him to look for investments with higher interest, Brahms replied testily, “I earn what I need. I don’t want to pursue any kind of business with what’s sitting there; I may never need it for myself but rather can bequeath it to my family. I understand absolutely nothing about money matters and they don’t interest me in the least.”9 At home he stuffed bundles of uncounted bills in his closet and rarely had any idea how much he had in his bank account.10 All the same, he commanded top fees for his conducting and playing. With Simrock and concert producers he named his prices and they were not skimpy, and he got what he asked for.
Except perhaps for a few people writing opera, Brahms was the first composer in history to prosper like that from creativity and personal appearances. He did not accumulate an enormous fortune as fortunes go, but by his forties he was exceedingly comfortably set up, and that with minimal attention to his finances. When in the 1890s Simrock lost 20,000 marks of his most famous client’s money in some disastrous speculation, Brahms simply wrote back, “I haven’t given it a moment’s thought,” and that was that.
Likely Brahms could have paid for Wagner’s notorious wardrobe and furnishings with his spare cash. His own lifestyle was famously frugal and unadorned. Any luxury in his accommodations he was apt to describe as “Wagnerian.” Even if he summered in fashionable resorts, he ferreted out bargain rentals and cheap cellars to dine in. On