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By Root 1340 0

as usual keeping his cards close until he had something to show. For all the pleasures of the town, his temper there could be as variable as everywhere else. Russian composer Iwan Knorr learned that one night when Brahms was invited to the house of a music patroness who he knew was friendly with Cosima Wagner. And whenever Cosima turned up, this lady was careful to hide her copies of Brahms’s music. Brahms arrived at her house with Knorr and violinist Richard Barth, to find his works and his picture grandly displayed on the piano. Nudging Knorr, he said loudly, “See here, Brahms everywhere you look! But you mustn’t for an instant suppose that this is always the case! Here one modulates into various keys. Well, Frau X, how about singing a bit of Peter Cornelius?”

Earnestly the hostess swore she had no such Wagnerian trash in the house. At which point Brahms began to rummage through her cupboards, the lady becoming more and more distraught, until with a cry of triumph he produced a copy of Cornelius’s songs. Sitting down to the piano, he began to play and sing them in his raucous voice, with commentary—“Quite different from that Brahms guy, eh?”—until his victim collapsed in tears. Eventually he ceased the torture and agreed to play a sonata with Barth. “We really wanted to play Mozart,” he told his whimpering hostess, “but as you’re not worthy of it, we shall, for your punishment, play Brahms’s A Major.” Recalling the experience, Knorr said, “I have seldom lived through a more painful evening.”50

THE MAIN PRODUCTION from the summer of 1878 turned up toward the end of August, when in a note Brahms alerted Joachim that “a few violin passages” would be forthcoming. They turned out to be a gigantic first movement’s worth of solo part. With thrills of anticipation and anxiety, Joachim saw that Brahms had taken on a violin concerto and was talking about four movements like a symphony, rather than the usual three for a concerto. After their decades of friendship and collaboration, Brahms would write it for Joachim and expected his collaboration—in theory, if not always in practice.

The violinist, whose own Hungarian Concerto still made up a major item of his repertoire, was concerned from the beginning to make sure Johannes’s solo part was more playable and idiomatic than his old friend was likely to manage on his own. Joachim knew better than anyone that Brahms had always been impatient over string bowings and fingerings and other matters of the kitchen. In music of the nineteenth century and after, various notational conventions give string players instructions on how to wield the bow and where to change from an upbow to down, all of it having intimately to do with the musical effect. Players regularly tinker with the given bowings and some notations were (and remain) ambiguous, but still it is valuable to have them on the page as a foundation, especially in something as important as a concerto.

Brahms generally ignored the whole question of using slurs to indicate string bowing. Most of the slurs marked in his published scores show phrases rather than bowings, or else the bowings have been put in by a string player, who was usually Joachim. Joachim understood that the single instrument with which Johannes was entirely at home was his own. As Brahms exclaimed years later, working on the Double Concerto: “Oh, how much more agreeable and sensible it is to write for an instrument one knows thoroughly—as I presume to know the piano.”

Soon the two fell into steady correspondence over the gestating concerto, Brahms writing out swatches of solo part and dispatching them in the mail. A certain amount of the work they did in visits, Joachim with violin in hand to try out ideas on the spot. Joachim not only made suggestions for the solo part but rewrote passages, mainly ones involving the arcana of virtuoso figuration—complex figures that take ingenious and ear-dazzling advantage of the possibilities of strings and bow. These suggestions Brahms sometimes adopted, sometimes ignored, sometimes used as the basis of a third version. At