Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [278]
This poem of Heine’s amounts to a bittersweet evocation of pastoral poetry, the title a repeated refrain with lilting, ironic dactyls: “O love is so lovely in springtime!” A shepherdess sits on the riverbank weaving “the daintiest wreaths,” and as she sighs “To whom may I give my wreaths?” a plumed horseman suddenly appears like a vision of knighthood and romance, and greets her impetuously. Then he rides on out of sight. As the tearful shepherdess hurls her wreaths into the river comes the final refrain, “O love is so lovely in springtime!” The poem inspired not only a song from Brahms but maybe also his late idyll into the form of a symphony, the same sorrowful undertones shadowing both pastorales.
On leaving Pörtschach in September 1877, Brahms visited Hans von Bülow in Baden-Baden and for the conductor played over the First Symphony on piano. Here may have come the moment of transformation like Saul’s, when Bülow turned away once and for all from Wagner the betrayer and threw his allegiance to Brahms. It was around then that Bülow dubbed Brahms’s C Minor “The Tenth.” In a letter about it to a friend, he added his other soon-famous formulation: “I believe it is not without the intelligence of chance that Bach, Beethoven and Brahms are in alliteration.”35 The conceit soon reached the public’s attention, and never left it. Brahms would be branded in history, to his infinite dismay (and probably covert pleasure) as one of “the three great B’s of music.”
Leaving Baden-Baden, Brahms joined Josef Viktor Widmann in Mannheim to take in the premiere of the late Hermann Götz’s unfinished opera Francesca da Rimini. Brahms could not summon much enthusiasm for this work of a highly popular composer whom he had liked personally but never treated with much respect. Brahms and Widmann stayed in a hotel together and passed the time turning over the idea of an operatic collaboration.36
With Widmann and others the correspondence about opera would straggle on through the next decade, but already in the 1870s Brahms had observed to an acquaintance about the idea, “Beside Wagner it is impossible.”37 Of course, he had said the same about Beethoven and symphonies—and so opera continued its feverish round in his mind. Recently he had discovered Carmen, going to see it twenty times in 1876 alone. Brahms loved Georges Bizet’s vibrant and exotic style; beyond that, it perhaps offered him clues toward a means of escaping Wagner. (Nietzsche was also ravished by Carmen, for more or less the same reasons.)
It would all come to nothing. Opera was a great genre and Brahms had taken on the great genres one after another—sonata, theme-and-variations, song cycle (Magelone), symphony, string quartet, cantata (Rinaldo), oratorio (of a sort, with Ein deutsches Requiem), and finally symphony. It had been genres close to opera, song cycle and cantata, that had turned out the most disappointing in his hands. Besides, opera is not ordinarily the medium for a composer who frets over every note, or for one who shies away from the direct expression of emotion in his vocal music. Even the years of labor on the Requiem and First Symphony might have paled before what an opera would have cost Brahms. All the signs, in other words, implied that opera did not come naturally to him. And Brahms could augur the signs as well as anyone else.
All that, and then when it was finished he would have to go up against the Wagnerian juggernaut. No, no. Brahms had tremendous courage, but he was also a sane and a practical man. Thus the meaning of his famous formula: as likely to write an opera as to marry. He was talking about resisting the two greatest temptations of his life, and being a little frustrated and more than a little pleased at having escaped them both.
AT THE END OF OCTOBER, Brahms was back in Vienna, gearing up for the premiere of the Second Symphony. In usual form he dropped hints to friends