Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [312]
Monday evenings at the Tonkünstlerverein became a staple of his life in Vienna, along with his regular meals with friends, Sunday dinner with the Fellingers, day-long Sunday walks all over the forests and vineyards of the Vienna Woods. Every weekend those friends proposing to keep up with the brisk Brahms pace would meet at the Café Bauer, opposite the Opera, and take the tram with him out to the suburbs. For walks in the woods he sported one of his few examples of sartorial pride, a dashing green hunting jacket which he topped with a feathered cap. The day generally ended in a favorite Heuriger, one of the village inns where new wine flows and little bands dispense bittersweet Viennese tunes.
In and out of the Tonkünstlerverein, Brahms took any number of young composers under his wing to some degree or other, with great concern and generosity, if not necessarily gently or to great effect. He was often able to establish his favorites as teachers and administrators in schools, where they tended to champion his music and his aesthetics. He was not, however, able to make any of his protégés into a first-rate composer. This may not have been news to him. “What I do envy,” he once wrote Elisabet von Herzogenberg about Heinrich, “is his power of teaching.”
As they had been with George Henschel, Brahms’s dealings with aspiring composers were straightforward, brutally frank, and dogmatic on matters of craft. Still, he perhaps felt guilty enough to soften his approach after a tragedy of 1880: Hans Rott, a school friend of Mahler’s, asked Brahms for a critique of his Symphony in E, and received such a rebuff that it may have precipitated a breakdown. The next month Rott lost his senses during a trip, raving, “Brahms has filled the train with dynamite!” He ended up in an asylum and died at twenty-six. As far as we know, Brahms never expressed regret. Over a century later, the premiere of Rott’s symphony revealed a remarkable if immature talent that manifestly influenced Mahler in his formative years.47
In 1879, the composer Hugo Wolf brought Brahms some of his songs. Two years before that he had been thrown out of the Conservatory for general intransigence, climaxed by a (perhaps) joking threat, in a signed letter, to assassinate Director Josef Hellmesberger.48 One of the most brilliant of the young men who came to Brahms for advice over the years, Wolf was then scraping by on a few students and food mailed from his parents. The diminutive composer looked the classic bohemian: lean and shabby, with burning eyes and endless cigarettes and little beard scraggly from his constant nervous tugging.49
From Brahms Wolf got the usual treatment: he took things too lightly, he must study counterpoint with Nottebohm. Wolf returned from the interview spitting with rage to a friend who had been waiting at the Café Imperial. He reported that Brahms had told him, “First you must learn something, then we’ll see if you have talent.”50 To his father Wolf wrote, “It’s only Brahms’s North German pedantry that makes him thrust Nottebohm on me.” In any case, he could not afford the lessons.
On the other hand, there seems little doubt that Hugo Wolf had instinctively fled a genuine threat to his creative temperament. From that point he moved decisively from an admirer of Brahms to the opposite camp, and in that camp he found his voice. He was destined, during a short career that ended with insanity, to join the line of great German lieder composers that began with Schubert and ran through Schumann and Brahms to Wolf and Mahler.
However, Wolf came to public attention in Vienna during the mid-1880s not as composer but as music critic of the Wiener Salonblatt, a society paper whose columns he graced with fanatical defenses of Wagner and Bruckner and vitriol toward Brahms. Among Wolf’s more notorious blasts:
Through this composition [the D Minor Concerto] blows an air so icy, so dank and misty, that one’s heart freezes.… Unhealthy stuff!
Whoever can swallow this pianoforte concerto [the