Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [300]
Brahms did not know some of the other landmarks of that year, heralding ages passing and beginning: Anton Webern, Edgard Varèse, and Franz Kafka born; Karl Marx dead, John Maynard Keynes born; Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra written; the first skyscraper built in Chicago and the Brooklyn Bridge opened in New York; Paul Cézanne’s Rocky Landscape painted in the prophetic vein of his maturity; Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony completed.
Probably Brahms was convivial enough on his fiftieth birthday, dining and drinking with favorite companions. There is a drawing of Brahms and Billroth and Hanslick from this decade: three fat old men in evening dress, holding cigars and raising their glasses, glowing with champagne and self-satisfaction. In 1883, beyond the advance of time and the eternal demands of work, on the face of it Brahms had little to worry about and much to please him. However portly he had gotten from years of enthusiastic eating and imbibing, he remained in strapping good health. He had just produced another springtime flowering of choruses, vocal quartets, and lieder (for Opuses 92–5) and had a symphony growing in his mind. Meanwhile, yet again, he was in thrall to a singer.
He met her in Krefeld, where he had gone in January for a performance of the Second Piano Concerto and Gesang der Parzen. The German town had developed a Brahms cult centered around friends there including Rudolf von der Leyen, a music-loving businessman like many of Brahms’s circle. In the Krefeld concert the choir and orchestra did the Parzen so beautifully that the composer wept on the podium. The audience demanded an encore of the piece, which the performers did even more beautifully. Brahms was heard to cry out “Ah!” at the blazing entrance of the winds in the beginning. Afterward, in gratitude, he sent the manuscript of the piece to the Krefelder Konzertgesellschaft.
Among the performers that day was contralto Hermine Spies, who had studied with Brahms’s longtime colleague Julius Stockhausen. At a party after the concert she sang him “Vergebliches Ständchen” (“Futile Serenade”). The heady effects of the performance and the postconcert celebrations, and a slender and lively young woman singing him his sauciest song, acted predictably on Brahms. When she had finished the lied (the maiden leaves her suitor out in the cold with “Go home to bed!”) Brahms exclaimed, “I’m sure she’ll let him in!”
The flirtation would go on for years, with many songs for alto as symptoms. He called Spies “my songstress,” “the Rhine-maiden,” “Herma,” and “Herminche,” and with Shakespeare’s queen in mind: “Hermione-ohne-O” (Hermione without the O). Now he had another dark female voice to hear in his imagination, to compete with Agathe’s from years ago and with Amalie Joachim’s—though no one would replace Amalie, the finer and more enduring musician.
In the first glow of connection with Hermine Spies, that spring Brahms produced his surge of vocal music. Still, the texts he chose speak more of frustration and encroaching age than of new infatuation. Ruckert’s “Mit vierzig Jahren” (“At Forty”) from Opus 94 begins, “The mountain has been climbed; we stand still and look back.” (The first time Stockhausen tried it over with Brahms, the singer broke down in tears.3) “Stieg auf, Geliebter Schatten” is a plea: “Arise before me, beloved ghost, in the dead of night, and refresh me in my deathly weariness … and make me young again.” And ominously, “Das Mädchen” (“The Girl”): “If I were to know, thou white face of mine, that someday an old man will kiss you … I would pick