Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [283]
Done! What is done? The violin concerto! No. You or I! No.… One knows nothing definite; even the most credulous doesn’t.… And I am credulous. Indeed, I believe in immortality—; I believe that when an immortal dies, people will keep on for 50,000 years and more, talking idiotically and badly about him—thus I believe in immortality, without which beautiful and agreeable attribute I have the honor to be—Your J. Br.54
Eduard Hanslick got another eyeful of ink when he responded to an urgent request from Hamburg authorities to be a go-between. Brahms had been invited to the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Hamburg Philharmonic and had not responded. To Hanslick’s plea to attend he growled:
You have preached the doctrine of deportment to me in public once before; I do not wish that it should happen again … and therefore I am telling you that it is the fault of the Hamburgers if I do not appear at their festival. I have no occasion to display good breeding and gratitude; on the contrary, a certain amount of incivility would be appropriate, if I had the time and inclination to ruin my mood with it.55
Having delivered himself of that eruption, the product of his undying outrage at being snubbed by the Philharmonic, Brahms decided after all to attend the festival and enjoyed it considerably.
Clara Schumann was there to play a Mozart concerto, and among the guests and visitors were others from Brahms’s past and present: Theodor Kirchner, Ferdinand Hiller, Niels Gade, Karl Reinthaler, Klaus Groth, Hermann Grädener, Eduard Hanslick. Brahms was sitting beside Groth at the opening banquet where a flowery speaker cited the proverb of “a prophet without honor in his own country” as fortunately not applying to Brahms. The honored prophet leaned over to Groth and hissed, “Twice they filled the vacant position of director of the Philharmonic Society with a stranger, and passed me over. If I had been elected at the right time I might still have become a proper citizen. I could have gotten married and lived like other men. Now I’m a vagabond!”56 Years later Brahms told Max Kalbeck that there had been a girl at that banquet in Hamburg to whom he almost turned and proposed on the spot, but once more he resisted the urge.57
On the final evening he conducted the Second Symphony with the Philharmonic, Joachim sitting at the head of the violins. Naturally sister Elise, brother Fritz, stepmother Karoline, and stepbrother Fritz Schnack were proudly in attendance, and his teacher Eduard Marxsen and a number of women from the Frauenchor. His first teacher Otto Cossel had died thirteen years before, but his wife and daughter—Brahms’s goddaughter—had come.58 As Brahms stepped up to the podium to stormy applause, he was presented with a laurel wreath and the brass broke out in a flourish. At the end of the symphony the audience showered him with flowers. Hanslick remembered him then as “with roses bedecked,” like the baby in his Lullaby.
At the end of the trip there was a squabble when Elise wanted to claim the flowers. “So you want to boast with them?” Johannes snapped. Instead he dragged her with him to place them on their father’s grave.59
The New Year’s Day 1879 premiere of the Violin Concerto in Leipzig turned out a scrambling affair, with Joachim unnerved by all the last-minute revisions and Brahms even more tense on the podium than usual at premieres. The response from public and critics was no worse than cool, but it was enough to make Brahms hand over the baton for the Vienna premiere to Josef Hellmesberger, which in turn upset Joachim.60 Somehow at the Musikverein two weeks later—with Brahms and Joachim furiously revising solo and accompaniment in the interim—the work found a delirious response. Brahms reported it to Julius Stockhausen as “a success as good as I’ve ever experienced. Publikus would not cease its noise.”61 He was even pleased that the crowd had applauded Joachim’s first-movement cadenza right into the coda.62