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revision for “Therese” from Opus 86, making a more elaborate melody for the beginning of a song she had already seen, and he asked what she thought. “I should feel quite sad if you insisted on it,” Lisl replied. “I do beg that you won’t meddle with the dear little song any more, but rest satisfied with the simpler version.”47 He did as told. In April he took up and revised the old “Wiegenlied” (“Cradle Song”) he had written for alto and viola on the birth of the Joachims’ first child, quoting “Josef, lieber Josef mein.” He hoped it might help resolve the estrangement of two beloved friends and musicians. Of course it did not. As “Geistliches Wiegenlied” it would join “Gestillte Sehnsucht” to make the lovely Opus 91 for contralto, viola, and piano. For a long time, the alto voice in Brahms’s imagination had been Amalie, just as violin and viola were always Joachim.

From Ischl that summer Brahms responded to an invitation of Bülow’s, confessing he was tempted to accompany his friend to the premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal in July: “The fact that I can’t come to a decision about Bayreuth probably means that I am unable to produce that ‘yes.’ I need hardly say that I go in dread of the Wagnerians, who would spoil my pleasure in the best of Wagners.… I may take advantage of my beard, which still allows me to trot about so nice and anonymously.”48 It is charming if he really imagined he could sneak into Bayreuth undetected behind his beard, like a spy in disguise.

Shortly after that, Wagner issued a barely coherent harangue in the Bayreuth Blätter, perhaps partly by way of revenge on Bülow for his defection from the fold: “But as the Gospel has faded since the cross of the Redeemer has been hawked like merchandise on every street corner, so has the genius of German music grown silent ever since it has been hauled around the world-mart by the métier, and pseudo-professional gutter-witlessness celebrated its progress.” He snarled that the success Bülow had found recently with Brahms’s symphonies only proved that public taste had become so debased that maybe now Brahms’s eventual ten symphonies would survive compared to two by Beethoven. After perusing those thoughts, Brahms wrote Bülow again, turning down the invitation to Bayreuth with his sarcasm running strong: “What a pity, for I was planning nothing for the entire month apart from a pilgrimage to the Prophet who has divined my future in so friendly a way.”49

A letter of that summer to Simrock, asking the publisher when he was going to Bayreuth, shows that Brahms had heard of the kind of abuse Hermann Levi was getting in the Wagner circle: not only were many of Wagner’s disciples, and Cosima, disgusted with the Master’s choice of a Jew for a conductor, but the Master himself could not stop taunting his disciple with antisemitic gibes. Brahms wrote Simrock, “The official scribes treat [Levi] with suspicion and praise the assistant Kapellmeister!” Like many in the cult Levi was in a kind of sinister rapture now, making excuses for Wagner to his rabbi father. And to Joachim, to whom he wrote: “I bless the day on which my eyes were opened.… But one cannot argue about Wagner any more than one can about religion.… I should be glad if you also were granted such a—change one day. (I said ‘granted’ deliberately, because it comes quite of itself, and you need only to keep quiet and not to fight against it.)”50

Yet out of respect for his bygone friendship Levi had still programmed the first two Brahms symphonies in Munich. In part because the conductor did not entirely like either piece, in part because Munich was Wagner’s town, both symphonies were a fiasco. A group of citizens informed Levi that in the future he must announce the entire season’s schedule ahead of time, and if Brahms were on it they would cancel their subscriptions. Even with the best of intentions, Levi could hardly fight that kind of resistance and keep his job. Whether it secretly pleased him is another question.

Without the distraction of going to Bayreuth, in 1882 Brahms had a remarkable summer in Bad Ischl. He