Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [290]
At Gause’s too drank Nottebohm,
Who started out to go to Rome
But got to Venice merely,
Old wine of Cyprus made the man
Scorn wandering sincerely.
This may have been the Venetian occasion when an acquaintance of Brahms spotted her composer sailing along in exalted spirits, perhaps from Cyprian wine, and grabbed him as he was strolling into a canal.27 Brahms not only loved Italy, he loved to travel it with a few men whose mode of joie de vivre counterpointed his own.
MAY 1881 found Brahms in Pressbaum, an hour from Vienna on the Linz rail line. To Billroth he said he chose the place “desiring to avoid a bad summer in Ischl, which I would not like to expose myself to again.” His visitors included Henschel, Widmann, Simrock, and Joachim, the last still pressing Johannes to second his accusations against Amalie and Simrock.
That summer Brahms completed Nänie for chorus and orchestra, his commemoration of the death of Anselm Feuerbach. He sent it to Billroth with the reminder that he had not forgotten the “garden”—i.e., funeral—music for which the surgeon had asked him (which he never got around to). Brahms noted in the letter, “Incidentally, if the piece does not please you, reflect upon the fact that hexameter makes a rhythm which is quite difficult for a musician.”
The hexameters in Nänie are Schiller’s, a re-creation of the ancient Roman funeral dirge called noenia sung by parents on the death of a child. In keeping with that Brahms dedicated it to the painter’s stepmother, who indeed embraced it as her funeral song. In search of a text that would suit the neoclassicist Feuerbach, Brahms had happened on the verses after begging Lisl von Herzogenberg, “Won’t you try to find me some words?… The ones in the Bible are not heathen enough for me. I’ve bought the Koran but can’t find anything there either.”28 The text he finally found is an evocation of the pagan and Classical world, a dirge at once tragic and serene:
Even the beautiful must die! That which conquers men and gods
Does not touch the brazen heart of Stygian Zeus …
See! Then the gods weep, all the goddesses weep
Because the beautiful perishes, because perfection dies.29
Though like most of his texts it spoke deeply to his life, Brahms’s setting of it is far from the resignation of Ein deutsches Requiem, the anguish of the Alto Rhapsody, the threatening despair of the Schicksalslied. He set Schiller’s verses to exquisite melodies in richly weaving counterpoint: a ceremonial dance before the grave, a tonal analogy to the quiet gravity of Feuerbach’s art, and one of the highest examples of what has been called Brahms’s “sublime style.” Perhaps no one but Brahms, with his constitutional reserve masking a feeling soul, could have set “Even the beautiful must die!” to a gently lilting, D major soprano melody that captures the sorrow of death and transcends it in the singing. The beginning already embodies the closing words: “Even to be a song of lament on loved ones’ lips is glorious.”30 Brahms would conduct the premiere in Zürich in December 1881.
Immediately, mundane matters intruded upon that sublime canvas. Even though Brahms had now been happily with Fritz Simrock’s publishing house for years, he gave Nänie to Dr. Max Abraham at Peters, to fulfill an old promise of a work. He was thinking of doing the same with the next piece. That news brought an alarmed Simrock flying to Pressbaum in person, with the result that Brahms wrote Dr. Abraham with mock gravity, “Herr Simrock … is a much too easygoing and well-disposed colleague of yours. He will take the heavy cross from you and carry it for you!”31 The “heavy cross” he hints about, a.k.a. “the long terror,” turned up in equally ironic form in a letter of July 1881 to Elisabet von Herzogenberg: “I don’t mind telling you that I have written a tiny, tiny piano concerto with a tiny, tiny wisp