Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [291]
As soon as he heard about it, Hans von Bülow offered Brahms a trial reading of the new work with his Meiningen Hofkapelle Orchestra. Bülow had just taken over the court orchestra and was in the process of building it into one of the most finely honed ensembles in Europe. Brahms made some polite demurrals to the offer but allowed himself to be persuaded. He turned up in Meiningen in October 1881 and occupied the piano at the reading as Bülow proudly showed off his men. There began an extraordinary collaboration between Brahms and Bülow, and also the long and surprising relationship of Brahms with the music-loving court of Georg II.
From that point, for as long as Bülow headed the Meiningen Orchestra he placed it at Brahms’s disposal as a laboratory for new pieces, and at the same time made the group—despite its having only forty-eight players—the prime model of Brahms performance. In that Bülow outshone the Vienna Philharmonic under the brilliant but mercurial Hans Richter. Like Bülow, the current Philharmonic conductor had been a protégé of Wagner; unlike Bülow he had remained one—Richter conducted the first performance of the complete Ring of the Nibelungs at Bayreuth in 1876. Eventually he would champion Anton Bruckner as well. Brahms and Richter were by no means inimical to each other, but understandably wary. Richter was noted for skimpy rehearsing that he made up for, sometimes, by inspired performances. His philosophy was to give “the orchestra of poets” room to poeticize. It worked beautifully sometimes, but such an approach was not Brahms’s style in the least. When the Philharmonic gave a characteristically underprepared repeat performance of the First Symphony in 1878, Brahms told friend Richard Heuberger, “Finally I didn’t say anything else, but only laughed when things got really sloppy. If you don’t want to study it, you should leave it alone.”33 He wrote Clara at the same time about the Philharmonic, “They mean well, but when something has once failed, they don’t rehearse it.”34
In contrast, Bülow was both celebrated and in some circles deplored for his fanatically meticulous performances. As Hanslick put it, he played the Meiningen Orchestra “like a little bell in his hand.”35 Bülow handled not only concerts but rehearsals without a score, which amazed Brahms as much as anyone.36 The conductor also lectured and sometimes harangued audiences; at one concert, when he felt the appreciation for Beethoven’s Ninth had been insufficient, he played the enormous symphony all over again.37 “He baptizes the infidels,” Hanslick wrote, “with a firehose.” As sign of their commitment and concentration, Bülow made his musicians memorize the music and play standing; some ridiculed them as the “strolling orchestra.” And he took them on extensive railway tours, one of the first conductors to do that.
Both Clara Schumann and, for a while, Elisabet von Herzogenberg considered Bülow’s conducting and piano playing cold and intellectual. After hearing the Meiningen Orchestra Lisl sent Brahms a report reflecting what many of the day thought of Bülow’s hard-edged style.
Everybody lay prostrate before this anointed one, who bore himself like a priest elevating the Host in the glittering monstrance for the first time. At times he seemed to be giving a repulsive anatomy lecture. It was as if he were making the experiment of stripping an antique statue of its lovely flesh, and forcing one to worship the workings of bone and muscle.… Bülow’s affected little pauses before every new phrase, every notable change in harmony, are quite unpardonable.
Quirks aside, Bülow’s philosophy of precision and fidelity to the score was prophetic, heralding a new age of conducting virtuosos. Clearly that approach suited Brahms. At the same time some of this friend’s affectations, mainly the habit of marking phrases with pauses and generally letting tempos wander,