Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [315]
Helmholtz’s discoveries and their extensions influenced everything from the design of pianos to the international standardization of musical pitch.66 For composers of coming generations, by challenging the myth of “eternal laws” in music, he not only provided a scientist’s sanction to embrace music of the distant past and of other cultures, but also to explore new territories of harmony and tonality and timbre. The message was unmistakable: if science says that many things are a matter of taste and culture, and taste and culture inevitably evolve, then unheard-of things are possible.
Eager to sound out the views of creative artists, Helmholtz managed to get an interview with Brahms. Their meeting turned out badly. The scientist talked of sine waves and spectra, the composer of counterpoint and form. Helmholtz complained that Brahms and Joachim “always give me artistic musical answers to my questions regarding scientific acoustical problems!” Brahms responded: “In musical things, he is an enormous dilettante.”67 Billroth’s passion for Helmholtz Brahms wrote off as more dilettantism.
The Scales, Modes, and Harmonic Tissues the scientist and the physician saw as conditional, time-bound cultural constructs, Brahms saw simply as what music was about. To his mind, the dissolution of the assumptions and procedures of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven was not a matter of the “progressive development” of art and humanity, but rather a sign of the decline of art and humanity. In the profoundest sense, Brahms and Helmholtz spoke different languages: one a language of the past, the other of a future that stretched all the way to the advent of electronic music nearly a century later.
BACK IN MÜRZZUSCHLAG in summer 1885, Brahms completed the six lieder of Opus 97 (two of them on lyrics by Maria Fellinger’s father), and the last two movements of the Fourth Symphony. Soon after he arrived in town there was a rush of inspiration when, for a fifty-second birthday present, Klaus Groth sent him the poem “Komm bald” (Come Soon), noting that he had also sent a copy to Hermine Spies. Brahms and the aged Groth had been keeping up a nominally joking competition between them for the delightful Hermine’s affections. In one sitting Brahms put the little lyric to music: “Why should we wait from day to day? In the garden everything that feels like blossoming is doing it.… I wish you were here!” If the text is flirtatious and frivolous, he made of it a warm and tender love song to send Hermine. He told Max Kalbeck, “I’ve never done anything so fast, so a tempo.”68
His new scores figured in a more dramatic event of his two summers in Mürzzuschlag. One day a carpenter’s shop in his house erupted in flames. Brahms ran from his workroom in shirtsleeves to join the bucket brigade to fight the fire, shouting at well-dressed passersby to lend a hand. In the confusion someone pulled him aside and told him his papers were threatened by the blaze. Brahms thought it over for a second, then returned to the buckets. Richard Fellinger finally extracted from him the key to his room and ran to save the score of the Fourth Symphony. When the fire was out—his rooms were not touched—Brahms shrugged off the threat to his manuscript with “Oh, the poor people needed help more than I did.” He followed that up by slipping the carpenter money for rebuilding.69 (He could, after all, have rewritten the symphony from memory.)
In May, Brahms had dispatched the new songs for Opus 96 to the Herzogenbergs for comment. Lisl replied with one of her characteristically long, detailed letters, writing out small passages for approval or complaint, exulting and cautioning and dissenting:
[“Wir wandelten