Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [274]
Billroth responded to Brahms’s new songs with appropriate lustiness, writing Hanslick that “Salome” from Opus 69 should be sung by “a rather original sixteen-year-old, black-eyed little girl, full of fun, full of spirits.… When after that song that girl meets her John, she embraces him as if to crack his ribs!”28 Lisl, from Berlin, where she and Heinz were visiting Clara, responded, “How your ears should burn when we drink your health [on your birthday]! Let me tell you it is a red-letter day for us, the day when you graciously condescended to visit this planet.” She added a brief list of songs she liked and didn’t, but had to break off and fetch Joachim for an evening of music-making.29
If writing the mostly spirited lieder of spring 1877 and receiving mostly delighted responses from his friends cheered Brahms, it did not show in the cheerless congratulations he sent the Joachims upon the birth of another son, which happened to be on Brahms’s own forty-fourth birthday. He wrote: “One can hardly in the event wish for him the best of all wishes, not to be born at all.” Then he came to himself and appended ceremonial good wishes: “May the new world citizen never think such a thing, but for long years take joy in May 7 and in his life.” Soon afterward Brahms headed for Lake Worth, where he composed two works in which those felicitous and despairing spirits mingle.
BRAHMS WOULD SUMMER for three years at the village of Pörtschach on Lake Worth, near Bertha and Arthur Faber’s summer place. The first season he stayed in two plain rooms of the housekeeper’s quarters at Castle Leonstain, with its cool, linden-shaded courtyard. He shipped his piano from Vienna only to discover that it wouldn’t fit up the stairs, so he exchanged it for a local doctor’s smaller one. In the next two summers the numbers of visiting friends would send him to a more spacious place on the lake. Drawings of Pörtschach in those days show a gaslit path leading down to the water, where Brahms took his daily swim at dawn. As usual he had vistas of snowy mountains and water and good eating for inspiration—he reported to Billroth that there were “crabs to be enjoyed in quantity.”
The summer before, after over fifteen years of uncertain and interrupted labor, he had completed the First Symphony. This summer, like a sigh of relief and pleasure after clearing that hurdle, he turned out the Second Symphony in four months. During those same months came the anguished motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben den Mühseligen?—Wherefore is the light given to them that toil?
As he wrapped up that remarkable summer’s production in the autumn, he teased friends with reports of the new symphony. To Lisl von Herzogenberg: “I shall not need to play it to you beforehand. You have only to sit down to the piano, put your small feet on the two pedals in turn, and strike the chord of F minor several times in succession, first in the treble, then in the bass … and you will gradually gain a vivid impression of my ‘latest.’ ”30 Though the harmony he cites is oddly wrong (perhaps it was that way in the drafts), he seems to be talking about the end of the first movement’s development, the raw outbursts in thirds dominated by trombones. At the same time he wrote Simrock, “The new symphony is so melancholy that you can’t stand it. I have never written anything so sad, so minorish: the score must appear with a black border.”31
The joke is that on the surface, the D Major Symphony is the most buoyant orchestral work Brahms ever wrote, immediately identified by everyone as a pastoral outing in the spirit of Beethoven’s Sixth, if more monumental in tone. So came another association of the sort Brahms hated: as Hans von Bülow had dubbed the First Symphony “the Tenth,” others would declare the Second “Brahms’s Pastoral,” and eventually the Third “Brahms’s Eroica.” The composer himself suggested only that the charms of Pörtschach inspired the Second Symphony and the other warm,