Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [284]
The always unpredictable Viennese had fallen under its spell. The first movement, though it recalls the pastoral D major three-beat of the Second Symphony and pretty Pörtschach, still makes us wait a long time for the lyrical flowering. When that breaks out with a ravishing melody at the end of the exposition, it is one of the most memorable of those moments where Brahms the mature craftsman and the poetic Kreisler sing together. That tender lyricism permeates the second movement. For a finale, with Joachim and his Hungarian Concerto in mind, Brahms produced another gypsy-tinted outing, not exactly a rondo but something like it, with dashing rhythms and delirious trills in the winds.
To a later age the work would seem almost irresistible, manifestly joining Beethoven’s and Mendelssohn’s as the third towering violin concerto of the nineteenth century. Yet most of the world outside Vienna resisted it for a long time. When Joachim took the concerto to Berlin and played it with his Hochschule orchestra, the papers demanded to know why students were required to participate in such “trash.”63 Some of the problem musicians and public had with the piece is suggested in two quotes from violinists. In Vienna, cynical old Josef Hellmesberger famously declared it “a concerto not for, but against the violin.” Pablo Sarasate spoke for many virtuosos: “I don’t deny that it’s fairly good music, but does anyone imagine … that I’m going to stand on the rostrum, violin in hand, and listen to the oboe playing the only tune in the adagio?” Once again Brahms had committed the cardinal sin of writing a symphonic concerto in which orchestra and soloist carry on the musical dialogue as equals.
Having mostly put off ambitious orchestral works until his forties, Brahms had now made up spectacularly for lost time, producing two symphonies and a concerto in three successive years, all of them historic masterpieces. From now on his orchestral excursions would appear regularly at two-year intervals, the periods between given largely to chamber and vocal music. Meanwhile, though Brahms perhaps never produced a more warmly melodious orchestral work than the Violin Concerto, he would still have to trust in posthumous acclaim for it. Certainly he had the philosophical patience for that—but not necessarily, anymore, quite the old courage of his convictions. Brahms had drafted a Second Violin Concerto, but after the reception of the first one held the second back. Finally he consigned it to flames.
There was another creative endeavor, of a sort, at the end of 1878: for the third and definitive time, Brahms grew a beard. To queries about why, his favored explanation ran, “With a shaved chin, people take you for either an actor or a priest.” To his satisfaction he discovered that whiskers made him almost unrecognizable. For as long as the joke lasted he enjoyed introducing himself solemnly as “Kapellmeister Müller from Braunschweig,” and seeing how long it took people to figure it out. Gustav Nottebohm spent an entire evening in polite conversation with “Kapellmeister Müller.”64
With the flowing blond beard between him and the world, the face of Johannes the Fair, the defiant underlip, the eternally boyish features of Young Kreisler sank once and for all behind the patriarchal mask. Brahms’s face became as magisterial and enigmatic as the outer face of his music.
The disguise was complete at last.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Song of the Fates
THE DAY AFTER the first Vienna performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto in January 1879, Felix Schumann died of tuberculosis in Frankfurt, at age twenty-four. Clara had moved there from Berlin the year before, to take the leading piano teacher’s position at the Hoch Conservatory. Felix was the last of her children, born when his father was in the asylum, everyone’s favorite of the boys as Julie had once been of the girls. He died in the arms of his sister Marie; she had not waked Clara when the crisis came because it would have upset their mother too much.1 Clara told her diary, “One grows old only to bury one’s