Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [298]
AT THE SAME TIME, to a degree, from its composer’s standpoint Gesang der Parzen is a work of what a later age would call “midlife crisis”: I’m getting old, music is going to the dogs, I have no children, nobody will remember me when I’m gone. If it had only been his personal anguish that the piece reflected, however, Brahms might not have allowed such self-indulgence. The breakup of the Joachims had shaken him. Surely he was thinking of Clara too: aging, much in pain, a son and daughter dead in ten years, another son mad and another broken by drugs. Beyond these concerns he thought about the state of music, with a few streaks of hope like Antonin Dvořák, but no one in sight who seemed to him to possess the kind of mastery and depth he did, poor as those were in relation to the gods. And he looked with a shudder at the state of his homeland and his adopted country.
The year after he finished Gesang der Parzen, 1883, Brahms wrote Simrock, “In a city and a land where everything not rolls, but tumbles downhill, you can’t expect music to fare better. Really it’s a pity and a crying shame, not only for music but for the whole beautiful land and the beautiful, marvelous people. I still think catastrophe is coming.”55 Later that year anti-Brahmsians in Vienna spread a rumor that he no longer believed a German could live in Austria.56
Now Austria’s long slide, not only of empire but of spirit, was accelerating toward the era expressed in the term fin de siècle. Brahms understood with agonizing clarity that the siècle about to end in social and artistic revolution was his age, the age in which his music had flowered and found its public: the long, relatively placid interregnum after the Napoleonic Wars, the era that saw the triumph of the rationalistic, liberal Austro-German bourgeoisie that also happened, more than any other class in history, to appreciate music.
The political part of Austria’s decline was relatively easy to understand, impossible to resolve. The polyglot Austrian empire was unraveling at its eternally weak seams. The Dual Monarchy with Hungary continued to sap the Crown, and the Hungarians exploited their new power relentlessly for their own purposes. The other ethnic groups, especially the Czechs, followed the Hungarian example with increasing vehemence, all the subject peoples exploiting the turmoil of a government that socialist Viktor Adler famously declared “a system of despotism tempered by Schlamperei.” The word mingles inefficiency, sloppiness, and incompetence.
If Emperor Franz Josef grew into an astute politician, he did not become enough of one to find a way out of the maze. His court had become an operetta fantasy world useless if not dangerous to the country. Most of the real power was wielded behind closed doors of palaces and ministries, in secret actions of nameless bureaucrats answerable only to the Emperor. Parliament approached paralysis, leaving the liberals, long the most dynamic and effective part of the leadership, nearly impotent. There was no possibility of nationalistic sentiment uniting the country, because, as Franz Josef well knew, there was no such thing as an Austrian nationality, only a patchwork that had lasted hundreds of years for no particular reason. The name “Austria” did not even officially exist anymore. In other words, Austria ruled its empire by a kind of epic fakery: empire as theater, with nothing behind the stage set. (The Ringstrasse the biggest stage set of all.) Yet this peculiar congeries had long been one of the greatest powers on the continent, and even in its decline wielded a formidable military machine. And as of 1881 Vienna had a population of one million, making it the fifth-largest city in the world.
From 1879 the government had been led by the witty and cunning Count Taaffe. He proclaimed a “no-party” government, with a policy he actually articulated as fortwürstln, which means “muddle along,” with overtones of bumbling and