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clownishness. Wurstl being the Austrian version of Punch, the prime minister seemed to place his government on the footing of a violent and insane puppet show. While keeping the liberals at bay, Taaffe set out to placate the Slavs and Czechs and other ethnic groups by letting them use their language in official capacities.57 German-speaking Austrians on the spectrum from left to right responded with outrage, which in turn helped to breed violently reactionary organizations—particularly the aristocratic, pan-Germanic, antisemitic movement of Georg von Schönerer that so inspired Hitler. It was Schönerer above all who changed Austrian politics from shouting in Parliament to fighting in the streets. When it came to a favored composer, the hero of the reactionaries was inevitably Wagner—social prophet of murky but suitable cast, German patriot, author of the antisemitic classic “Jewry in Music.” When Wagner’s disciple Bruckner emerged from obscurity, he became another tool the right wing used to belabor Brahms.

To Brahms as to most liberals, Taafe’s playing to the Hungarians and other minorities was anti-German and a road to revolution. On the other hand, the liberals were hardly united and had few ideas of their own about the direction of the country—mainly upholding capitalism and Parliament. (Unlike most liberals, Brahms had no objection to Czech-language schools.) The German-speaking right turned toward authoritarianism and demagoguery. The liberal Grossbürgertum collected their profits, wrung their hands, and retreated to the world of art and music as if to drink. Thus, to name one example from the later fin de siècle, Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s and Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, which hangs suspended like a marvelous unreal bubble in the imagination: Viennese operetta made sublime.

Just as the City of Dreams had kept drinking new wine and waltzing to Johann Strauss after the devastating loss to Prussia at Königgrätz, the spirits of the city continued to sing and dance through the onslaught of social and political chaos. “The situation,” runs an old Viennese joke, “is desperate but not serious.” Edward Crankshaw writes, “On the surface this beautiful city had never seemed more vital than when it was dying. It drew vitality from its past, which lived in the streets, and also from its incomparable setting between tall hills, with beeches, pines and gemlike meadows, and the great arterial river curving out across the plain to Hungary.”58 At the same time as the muddle of competing ethnic groups spread chaos in the city, so did the singular cultural goulasch of Slav, Magyar, Italian, Jew, and German create the singular vitality of modern Vienna.

Brahms witnessed the city singing through the dying of its empire and its soul, what Karl Kraus called the “Proving-Ground for World Destruction” that in the next century would be realized in Sarajevo and the Third Reich. Brahms feared for music and humanity alike. As he sang in Gesang der Parzen, neither for himself nor for humanity could he see any deus ex machina human or divine to step in, no salvation or consolation. That work of 1882 may be the first herald in music of the coming era, in which everything Brahms most feared came to pass except one: his music sang undiminished through the century of death.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Valedictions

BRAHMS WROTE THEODOR BILLROTH in spring 1883: “Hanslick and I, on Monday evening, want to have a little small sad festival together. Only you, Faber, and we two.” The sad festival was his fiftieth birthday, on May seventh. In approaching it he would have remembered that Beethoven died in his sixth decade, Bach had completed most of his greatest work by then, Mozart and Schubert and Mendelssohn were long dead by his age, and he had outlived Robert Schumann. Clara Schumann’s infirmity and the deaths of her children weighed on him. The previous autumn he had sat by the bed of his old friend Gustav Nottebohm, to see him out of the world.

Richard Wagner died in February 1883. Hans von Bülow responded to the news of his hero and betrayer