Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [289]
DESPITE ALL THIS UPROAR, Brahms did not end 1880 without something to show; he began piano trios in C major and E major. Clara preferred the latter when Brahms played them for her, but he destroyed it.21 He also began a masterpiece that may have had a dual inspiration. His painter friend Anselm Feuerbach had died in January. In June Theodor Billroth asked Brahms to arrange something of his own, perhaps from the Requiem, for male chorus and brass, intended someday for the surgeon’s funeral. Billroth reminded Johannes that he was not religious, so nothing too pious, please.22 Johannes replied that he would keep it in mind. That summer, for those and maybe other reasons, he began Nänie.
He may also have worked on the Second Piano Concerto and a string quintet in F major. But the only completed works of the year, which he showed to Joachim and other friends in the fall, were a pair of overtures. The Academic Festival Overture amounts to Brahms’s thanks to Breslau University for the honorary doctorate; he would premiere it there in January 1881. Long-time friend Bernhard Scholz in Breslau had prompted him that the school expected something in return for the honor: “Compose a fine symphony for us! But well orchestrated, old boy, not too uniformly thick!”23 In lieu of that Brahms produced the lightly scored and lighthearted overture that he described to Max Kalbeck as “a very jolly potpourri of student songs à la Suppé.” The composer he cited was the à la mode Franz von Suppé, master of what a later time would call light classics, among them the Poet and Peasant and Light Cavalry overtures.
The most thoroughly unbuttoned of Brahms’s works, the Academic Festival concerns itself with the life of students rather than the dignity of the institution. Probably Brahms based it on memories of staying with Joachim at the University of Göttingen in 1853—the closest he ever came to student life in the streets and taverns. The overture ranges from bassoons comically puffing the freshman ditty “Was kommt dort in der Höh” to its closing, near-Wagnerian brassy blaze of “Gaudeamus igitur.” For all the droll tone and episodic form, Brahms gave it his usual treatment, drafting three versions and holding back the weaker two.24 At least one of those he kept for over a decade, just in case. As companion piece, with his inclination to pairs of works, he produced the somber Tragic Overture. That freestanding movement developed from sketches ten years old, going back to the period of the Alto Rhapsody.25 It also recalls Brahms’s “bardic” tone going further backward to the Harp Songs, and forward toward Gesang der Parzen. Soon after the overtures were finished, Joachim did trial readings with his student orchestra.
After the winter in Vienna, from where he wrote Clara “my music, particularly the chamber music, is having a terrific vogue,” and after tours of Holland and Hungary, Brahms took his second Italian vacation. This time he took with him Nottebohm, Billroth, and Viennese friend Dr. Adolf Exner; their main stops were Venice, Florence, Pisa, Siena, and Orvieto. Brahms had gone so far as to hire a language tutor before the trip. It did no good, the words wouldn’t come; he would stand stammering before a tradesman until Billroth stepped in with his fluent Italian.
The tone of the trip can be discerned in the surgeon’s report to Hanslick, from Taormina: “Five hundred feet above the murmuring sea! A full moon! The intoxicating fragrance of orange blossom! The red-flowered cactus on picturesque, colossal boulders!… Add to this the wide, long, snow-covered slopes of Etna, and her pillar of fire! Add to this a wine called ‘Monte Venere’! And to crown it all, Johannes in ecstasy! I, in drunken impudence, improvising fantasias to him on his quartets!”26 Billroth had to go home early, however, and Brahms lost Nottebohm when he refused