• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1641 0

about it, whipping up anticipation. Shortly after his return he summoned a group of interested parties including conductor Hans Richter, Billroth, and Hanslick, to Ehrbar’s piano salon to listen to the new piece on piano four hands, Brahms and Ignaz Brüll at the keyboard. The listeners were enchanted. After the reading Billroth wrote Brahms, “That symphony is like blue heavens, the murmur of springs, sunshine, and cool green shadows! It must be beautiful on Lake Worth.”38 Hanslick’s review of the premiere by Richter and the Vienna Philharmonic on December 30, 1877, declared it an “unqualified success … with nothing of the contemporary tendency to emphasize novelty.… This time Brahms has managed to suppress his imposing, but dangerous, art of hiding his ideas in a polyphonic web or exposing them to contrapuntal frustration.”39 The Second was perhaps more to the tastes of the Viennese and their favorite critic than any other symphony of Brahms: gay and lilting and brilliant, if you don’t listen too hard.

Around that time Hanslick wrote an encouraging note to an impoverished and obscure Bohemian composer, notifying him that for the third year in a row the Austrian Commission for the Conferring of Artists’ Scholarships had awarded him a prize of 600 florins. This time, Hanslick advises, the younger man should do more than express thanks to the committee.

Johannes Brahms, who together with me has proposed this grant, takes a great interest in your fine talent, and likes especially your Czech vocal duets.… The sympathy of an artist as important and famous as Brahms should not only be pleasant but also useful to you, and I think you should write to him … and perhaps send him some of your music.… After all, it would be advantageous for your things to become known beyond your narrow Czech fatherland, which in any case does not do much for you.40

The letter was addressed to Herr Anton Dvořák, composer, Prague.

Brahms had been on the three-member Austrian Commission since 1875. At that point Karl Goldmark and Hanslick were the other members, but Goldmark was largely living in Gmunden, so the other two did most of the selecting. Hanslick would screen the pile of scores and forward the ones he considered respectable to Brahms, who always returned them fully studied, with marginal comments from enthusiastic to acid.41

Dvořák had been at it for a long time, with only middling and local success. The freshness and fertility of his gift amazed Brahms. At the same time, the Czech coloration of his style Brahms perhaps saw as a welcome touch of the exotic, like gypsy music. And as with “Hungarian” music in general, there is no indication Brahms took the ardent nationalistic sentiments behind Dvořák’s work particularly seriously. (For another example, as a patriotic gesture Dvořák pointedly avoided using German in company, even though he could speak the language perfectly well.42) Like most liberals Brahms tended to look at the nationalism of Austria’s subject peoples with suspicion, as a threat to the stability and prosperity of the empire.

None of that came between Brahms and Dvořák, because still for Brahms, music that he admired excused everything. The two men met in December 1877, and visited periodically from then on. For years Brahms’s letters to his publisher Simrock regularly drummed for Dvořák. It was one of a number of times Brahms generously promoted a younger artist—but the only time the world would much remember it. Other composers about whom he was nearly as enthusiastic included the names Knorr, Röntgen, Fuchs, and Novak,43 all men Brahms hoped would lead music into the future. The list did not include Anton Bruckner, Hugo Wolf, or Gustav Mahler, whom history has called after Brahms the three greatest Viennese composers of the late nineteenth century. For none of their work did he have the respect he did for that of Fuchs, Röntgen, et al.

So at the end of 1877 Brahms began to pull strings, writing Simrock that Dvořák’s Moravian Duets were “suitable and practical for publication,” and the composer should be paid well: