Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [270]
Which is all to say: the operative concept in Brahms’s financial philosophy was “plenty”—less for himself than for friends and family, and for what he perceived to be investments in the future of music. In an age when many artists spent their last years in garret or gutter, and the body of Johann Strauss, Senior was famously found naked on a bare bed in an empty apartment, Brahms never lacked for plenty.
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IN FEBRUARY 1873, Heinrich von Herzogenberg wrote Brahms from Leipzig, “My little wife plays [the First Symphony] accurately now, and is not a little proud of her feat in reading the score. But how shall I express our great admiration for the composer, and our thanks?”12 It is not clear whether in her teens Elisabet von Herzogenberg learned from Brahms to play orchestral scores at the piano, during the short time she studied with him. She was safely married now to Heinrich, diligent composer and Herr Musikprofessor. For Brahms to reestablish relations with a married woman for whom he had once fallen, and befriend the husband too, was a pattern of his going back to Bertha and Artur Faber.
Elisabet von Herzogenberg, amateur musician of genius and an artist in living and friendship, reentered Brahms’s life at exactly the time he needed her. In some ways, for some years, she came to occupy the place in his affections and his creative life that Clara Schumann had once held.
Another admirer of Elisabet was British composer Ethel Smyth, who during her studies in Leipzig lived with the Herzogenbergs for most of the 1870s. Smyth first heard of Elisabet, then around thirty, as a legendary figure, “said to be the most gifted musician and fascinating being ever met or heard of”13 and a close friend of Brahms. Smyth wrote of her as “not really beautiful but better than beautiful, at once dazzling and bewitching; the fairest of skins, fine-spun, wavy golden hair, curious arresting greenish-brown eyes.… With her sunshine came in at the door.”14 Her circle called Elisabet Lisl. To Brahms, in deference to Heinz, she was Frau Lisl. The Herzogenberg marriage Smyth reported as “notoriously happy,” but it had its afflictions. Lisl was unable to bear children and never stopped mourning it. She struggled with chronic asthma and a weak heart. Smyth remembered her idol painfully ascending stairs with her trademark stoop (that was somehow lovable too), stopping every fourth step to catch her breath.
In the next decades Ethel Smyth became a prominent composer and suffragist in England, and a marvelous memoirist. (Her connection to Lisl had an element of frustrated passion, since the Englishwoman was a noted “Sapphist.” Eventually—and fatally for the friendship—Smyth’s only male lover of record was Lisl’s still-married brother-in-law.) During her student years, Smyth was an incisive observer of the musical life she found in Germany. George Henschel first mentioned her to Brahms, sending an introduction for this “jolly and amusing” young Englishwoman who “wrote some quite charming little songs, even before she had any lessons.… Besides all this she can jump over chairs, back and all, she rides, hunts, fishes, swims etc.”15
When he first met Smyth Brahms greeted her: “So this is the young lady who writes sonatas and doesn’t know counterpoint!” Her initial challenge with the famous man was to convince him she had actually composed the songs—Brahms half-seriously accused Henschel of writing them. Given his experience with Clara, the concept of female composers was not new to Brahms or necessarily anathema, but there remained his