Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [287]
There has to be a concert every day, and all one can do is to arrive an hour before the concert and be off again an hour after it. I can think of nothing more detestable or more contemptible than this kind of occupation. And yet people like us are so well treated. We are received by the mayor and the Directors at the station, introduced immediately into the best circles, and they all vie with each other in being as kind and as friendly to us as possible.11
In fact it would be a long time before Brahms’s winter performing schedule slackened; early the next year he and Joachim toured in Poland. If Brahms claimed to hate performing and did not particularly need the (very good) money, he continued to need the exposure. Anyone proposing to perform with him, however, had to be prepared to follow their accompanist’s vagaries. Brahms still tended to play chamber music as if he were the only one present. Besides, he had acquired the habit of groaning and growling along as he played. The effect was alarming, if you were close enough to hear it.
Just before his summer’s working sojourn of 1880, Brahms traveled to Bonn for the unveiling of the monument at Robert Schumann’s grave. The ceremonies included several concerts. Among the old Schumann circle attending—including Dietrich, Hiller, Grimm, Bargiel, and Stockhausen—was Joachim, who contributed an especially memorable performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto with the composer on the podium. Brahms also conducted Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony and Requiem for Mignon.
The performers did not include Clara, whose arm troubles were not allowing her to play long pieces. Her misery at that was compounded by having to listen to Johannes grope and growl his way through Robert’s E Major Piano Quartet with Joachim’s group. “I felt as if I were sitting on thorns,” she told her journal, “and so did Joachim, who kept casting despairing glances at me.”12 Hermann Levi, once intimate with all of them, neither attended the festivities nor sent greetings. At a party following the ceremonies Clara and Johannes played the second and final set of his Hungarian Dances, which would be published that year. Like the previous set they would be issued first for piano four hands, then in all sorts of profitable arrangements; Dvořák orchestrated nos. 17–21, and Joachim supplied a violin-piano version as he had for the first set.
In Bonn, Clara invited young Max Kalbeck, who had come on Brahms’s recommendation to consult with her about editing Robert’s letters, to return to Frankfurt with them and stay over to celebrate Johannes’s forty-seventh birthday. At home on May 7 she played the new Opus 79 Rhapsodies for the assembled guests. Brahms had been in a foul mood throughout the visit, and Clara asked Kalbeck if he knew why. The young man had no idea. Suddenly Clara’s eyes filled with tears. “Would you believe,” she said to Brahms’s future biographer, “that in spite of our long and intimate friendship Johannes has never told me anything about what excites or upsets him? He is just as much of a riddle, I could almost say as much of a stranger, as he was to me twenty-five years ago.”13
LOOKING FOR NEW SCENERY and new ideas in the summer of 1880, Brahms chose Bad Ischl, a resort east of Salzburg called “the Baden-Baden of Austria.” The place was famed for being the summer home of Emperor Franz Josef and much of fashionable Vienna. To the Herzogenbergs Brahms wrote, “If half of Berlin or Leipzig were here, I’d probably run away, but half of Vienna is very pretty and very easy to look at.”14 (He appears weary of his fellow Germans.) Around his forty-seventh birthday he reported to Billroth, “I live most comfortably in Salzburger Street 51. Some of my rivals are here, meanwhile, in the persons of [Eugen] Franck and Brüll. But now we only rival each other in seeing how long we can walk and gad around; there I outdo all my colleagues.”15
Ischl turned