Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [280]
You write somewhat hurriedly. When you’re filling in the numerous missing sharps, flats, and naturals, it would also be good to look a little more closely at the notes themselves and at the voice leading, etc.
Forgive me, but it is very desirable to point out such things to a man like you. I also accept the works just as they are very gratefully and consider myself honored by the dedication of the quartet.44
In the spring of 1878, Dvořák wrote Brahms saying that Simrock, clearly with Brahms’s biggest sellers in mind, had commissioned him to write some Slavonic dances. “As I did not know how to set about these, I have tried to obtain your famous Hungarian Dances, and I shall take the liberty of using these as my model.”45 Brahms responded encouragingly.
The Slavonic Dances would do for Dvořák’s fortune and fame what the Hungarian Dances had done for Brahms’s. Like Brahms, this composer would capitalize on that success with a string of superlative works from the popular to the symphonic. Unlike Brahms, he produced operas as well. In 1879, Brahms and Hanslick arranged a meeting between Dvořák and the head of the Hofoper, which some years later led to a production of The Cunning Peasant. But anti-Czech sentiment was raging in the city and that situation turned the production into a fiasco. Due in large part to Brahms’s encouragement and steady promotion, however, by then Dvořák could afford a fiasco: he had become a musical citizen of the world.
AFTER THE VIENNA PREMIERE of the Second Symphony, Brahms took it on the road as part of his regular winter concertizing. Mostly the symphony repeated the success it had found in Vienna; only Leipzig was notably chilly. Ethel Smyth observed the occasion. Brahms, she wrote, “had the knack of rubbing orchestras up the wrong way.… Moreover … the Gewandhaus musicians were inclined to be antagonistic to his music, and indeed considered the performance of any new work whatsoever an act of condescension.”46 After much bitter experience there Brahms was probably more brusque and nervous on the Gewandhaus podium than on any other. One reviewer’s opinion amounted to a dig at both the composer and his city for countenancing such frivolous stuff as the Second: “The Viennese are much more easily satisfied than we are. We make quite different demands on Brahms, and require from him music which is something more than ‘pretty’ and ‘very pretty’ when he comes before us as a symphonist.”47
When he had finished the season’s touring in Holland, Brahms realized an old fantasy. After diligent study of travel guides and attempts to learn some Italian, he headed out on a vacation to Italy in April 1878, Billroth and Goldmark in tow. For four weeks they dashed through cities including Florence, Naples, and Rome (without Goldmark after Naples, where Brahms had a sad visit with the critically ill Felix Schumann). During the trip he wrote Clara, “How often do I not think of you, and wish that your eyes and heart might know the delight which the eye and heart experiences here! If you stood for only one hour in front of the facade of the Cathedral of Siena, you would be overjoyed.” He meant she would be given solace in the face of her family’s tragedies, of which Felix was now the chief. Brahms reported to Simrock that he found church music in Italy “atrocious … unbelievably brassy and crude,”48 but that only gave him more time to enjoy the scenery and art and architecture.49 Somewhere in this vacation Brahms made sketches for a piano concerto, but he would not take them up again for several years. For all his delight in Italy, this first excursion was mainly a prelude to later trips—nine in all, Italy the only country outside Germanic ones in which Brahms ever traveled for pleasure.
By the second week of May 1878 he was back at work in Pörtschach,