Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [292]
In his personality the conductor was famously pinched and prickly, lean and hungry, at times downright weird. (In his later years, for example, he once descended from the podium during a concert and tried to force Gustav Mahler, who was sitting in front, to take the baton and conduct.) Bülow called himself “the little leopard,” his plump hero Brahms “the great lion.” The lion admired his leopard not without qualification, but immensely all the same. And so the favored conductors of Brahms and the New Germans, once respectively Levi and Bülow, had switched places.
Now his three B’s were Bülow’s gods. In 1881 he wrote his new wife: “You know what I think of Brahms: after Bach and Beethoven the greatest, the most sublime of all composers. After your love, I hold his friendship as the most important thing in my life. It represents an epoch in my life, a moral conquest.… Ah, his Adagios! Religion!” Another side of his devotion he expressed one day to Max Kalbeck, in a sudden paroxysm as they walked together: “I have him to thank for being restored to sanity … in fact, for still being alive! Three quarters of my existence has been squandered on my former father-in-law [Liszt], the old mountebank, and his tribe, but the remainder belongs to the true saints of art, and above all to him! to him!! to him!!!”39 With that he gestured wildly toward Brahms, strolling ahead of them.
After Bülow and Brahms played the Second Piano Concerto in Meiningen at the end of November 1881, the duke awarded its composer the Commander’s Cross of the Order of the House of Meiningen. Brahms the son of the Hamburg docks would become something on the order of friends with Herzog Georg II and Freifrau Helene von Heldburg, of the little Meiningen court where the arts loomed large. To add to Brahms’s pleasure in Meiningen, Princess Marie had studied piano with Kirchner and Bülow and played his music prettily. If his tastes remained unpretentious, democratic, and tieless, Brahms did not appear to mind staying in the castle, donning his good coat with his medals, and dining from golden plates with footmen at his elbow.40 Unlike Mozart and Beethoven, Brahms had the luxury of not particularly needing anything from the aristocracy, so he could enjoy what they offered him without ulterior motives. The following year’s Gesang der Parzen would be dedicated to Georg II.
In February 1882, Bülow gave a historic all-Brahms piano recital in Vienna that included what may have been the formal premiere of the F Minor Sonata, Opus 2, plus the old Opus 10 Ballades and new Opus 79 Rhapsodies, and the Handel Variations. After the last, the cheering went on so long that finally Bülow shouted jokingly, “If you don’t stop applauding I’m going to play the final fugue again!” Liszt came to the recital and complimented Brahms for that music and in a note afterward, mildly, for the Second Piano Concerto: “Frankly speaking, at the first reading this work seemed to me a little gray in tone; I have, however, gradually come to understand it. It possesses the pregnant character of a distinguished work of art, in which thought and feeling move in noble harmony.”41 Liszt was not so magnanimous, though, as to break his record of never playing Brahms in public.
The honor of premiering the Second Concerto went to the Budapest Philharmonic on November 9, 1881, with Alexander Erkel on the podium and Brahms at the piano. Bülow was soon playing both concertos as conductor and pianist,