• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Brahms rushed to Clara’s side to help her through the latest tragedy, but she was suffering from more than her children’s sorrows. The previous October she had celebrated her fiftieth anniversary as a performer in her native Leipzig, and played Robert’s concerto in the Gewandhaus, once more amid flowers and fanfares and delirious applause.3 But her arms were aching miserably and her hearing was deteriorating. During the coming year she would try to relearn Johannes’s D Minor Concerto, but for the moment its thundering chords defeated her: “I had to give it up, and once more lay it aside with tears. I love the concerto so passionately, that I feel … as if it had grown out of my heart.”4 It must have been a sad meeting that February, Brahms still in his robust prime, their fourteen-year difference in age weighing on both of them. For distraction they worked on her edition of Robert’s music.

In March Brahms received word of another honor, one he particularly relished: an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau. Now to go with the distinguished career and distinguished beard, there would be the title Herr Doktor Brahms. Whereupon Richard Wagner, Ritter but not Doktor while his rival sported both titles, appeared once again lathered with righteous rage in print. These were the lines in his paper the Bayreuth Blätter about an unnamed composer who masquerades as a “cabaret singer,” poses in his “hallelujah periwig of Handel,” dresses as “a Jewish czardas fiddler,” and then appears as respectable symphonist and “Number Ten.” Wagner of course knew Brahms was not the least Jewish; that was thrown in for effect. Wagner’s Jewish disciple Hermann Levi, meanwhile, was now inhabiting the inner circle and following the Master in calling his former hero and Duzenbrüder Brahms an “epigone”—a second-rate imitator of his betters. This year the Bayreuth paper also belabored Robert Schumann in a series of articles, surely in part another strike at Brahms.5

One more honor of that period came when Brahms was offered the position of cantor at St. Thomas’s Cathedral in Leipzig, which would have made him a successor in the post of J. S. Bach. Some in the city resisted the appointment on musical grounds, while others took to mud-slinging and accused Brahms of a “dissolute life.” It is not clear whether that resulted from word of his taste for whorehouses getting around, or simply that being a bachelor of forty-six put him under suspicion in a proper German-bourgeois town. Clara and the Herzogenbergs united against the idea of his going to St. Thomas. With relief Brahms sent a quick refusal. By the end of May 1879 he was again on Lake Worth at Pörtschach.

The main creative effort of that summer, another characteristic product of the landscape where he said melodies flew thick, was the First Violin Sonata in G Major, Opus 78. It begins with Brahms at his most sweetly, piercingly wistful, and stays on that expressive tack for much of its course:

Brahms had, in typical fashion, written and suppressed at least three previous violin sonatas before the First. The initial thing his friends noticed about this one was that in both melody and accompaniment the third-movement rondo is based on his related settings of two Klaus Groth rain poems, “Regenlied” and “Nachklang,” of Opus 59. In sending the piece to Theodor Billroth, Brahms slyly hinted at the connection: “It’s not worth playing through more than once, and you would have to have a nice, soft, rainy evening to give the proper mood.” Billroth figured it out quickly enough and wrote back, “You rascal!… To me the whole sonata is like an echo of the song.”6 Clara responded: “How deeply excited I am over your sonata … you can imagine my rapture when in the third [movement] I once more found my passionately loved melody.… I say ‘my,’ because I do not believe that anyone feels the rapture and sadness of it as I do.… My pen is poor, but my heart beats warmly and gratefully, and in spirit I press your hand.”7 She always called it the “Regenlied Sonata.”

The dotted figure from the Groth