Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [306]
AMID THE SEASON’S PERFORMING in Germany and Holland, naturally featuring the new symphony, Brahms turned down a second offer from Cologne to succeed Ferdinand Hiller as music director. He wrote his old friend Hiller:
How I used formerly to long for such employment, which is not only desirable and even essential for the creative artist, but is necessary to enable him to lead a decent and fitting existence. I am thinking now of Hamburg, my native city, where, since the time when I consider I began to count for something, my name has repeatedly been—absolutely ignored.21
So Brahms remained unencumbered by a decent and fitting job, in his terms still a vagabond, when he took his fourth Italian trip in spring 1884, this time accompanied by his Krefeld friend Rudolf von der Leyen. It ended with a stay at the Villa Carlotta, the Duke of Meiningen’s summer house on Lake Como.
Just before he left for Italy, Brahms had written to Hanslick responding to two newly discovered cantatas the critic had sent him: “Even if there were no name on the title, one could guess no other author—it is all Beethoven through and through! There is the beautiful and noble pathos, the grandeur of the feelings and fantasy, the power, yes even violence of expression.” In one of these early works Brahms found a presentiment of the glorious end of Fidelio: “How deeply Beethoven must have felt the melody in the cantata … as deeply and beautifully as he did later when he sang the love of a woman—and of liberation—to its end.”
In that letter we find one of the few times on record that Brahms let himself go about music, speaking of his hero Beethoven’s work in terms more impassioned than he ever used in speaking of his own. Yet despite his enthusiasm Brahms was opposed to having the cantatas published. He said they should be left in a few copies in libraries, for the use of scholars. He repudiated, in fact, the whole idea of complete editions, which had been a major endeavor of nineteenth-century scholarship. “I cannot find it right and proper for amateurs and young artists to be seduced into filling their rooms and their brains with all the ‘complete works’ and thus confusing their judgment.”22
FOR THAT YEAR’S SUMMER working sojourn he tried out a new vacation spot that he hoped might be conducive to a new large work. This was the Austrian mountain village of Mürzzuschlag, some two hours by train from Vienna at the southern end of the Semmering Pass. Brahms’s Viennese friends the Fellingers had summer lodgings there. When word got around where he was headed, once again a voice from Bad Ischl complained of his infidelity, this time Ignaz Brüll: “Well, what a fellow he is! He means to take rooms in Ischl for the summer, and then one morning he wakes up in Mürzzuschlag! I had been looking forward to our walks, … to our pleasant coffee parties, and much besides—and most of all to playing new duets—and now all my hopes are turned to water (hence all this rain!).”23
When he arrived in Mürzzuschlag, Brahms registered with local police as “itinerant musician.” He took rooms in a big house with a courtyard on the town’s main street, the window in the square bay of his workroom facing not toward the surrounding hills but down Wienstrasse toward the Rathaus (City Hall). There was an expansive adjoining room with rococo plaster ceiling, supplied with a borrowed piano, handy for private performances. The wood-paneled rooms and stained glass of his favored restaurant Zur Post lay just down the street; as company at meals Brahms made friends with several local men, from a baron to a train engineer.24 For his daily hikes he had the relatively low ring of hills that surround the town—suitable for ascending at,