Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [316]
[After approving of others,] I cannot reconcile myself to one song, and that is the “Mond, der sich leuchtend dränget.” Either I am quite irresponsible and capricious in my tastes, or it really is not on the same musical plane with the other. To put it brutally, I feel as if it had only the contours of a Brahms piece—what is called mannerism as distinct from style.… How can we Brahmsianer sanction a melody like this, with its intricacies and its restless harmonies, after all the treasures of inspiration showered on us!70
It did not escape Lisl that with his atmospheric, ominous setting of “Meerfahrt” Brahms had, for once, seized the Heine effect: an idyllic scene of two lovers rocking in a boat at night, that ends with a chill—“There the music sounded more and more lovely … but we floated past, desolate on the wide sea.” At the same time, Brahms accepted Lisl’s judgment that he had failed with another of the Heine settings. He suppressed the “Mond” and another song she objected to, recast a third based on her complaint, and followed her advice to extend the ending of “Entführung” (Opus 97). This may represent the one time in his maturity that he took someone’s advice almost point by point. And it went beyond the notes. He had been thinking of composing a number of Heine settings, returning to a poet of enormous subtlety and ambiguity whom he had loved and set (in discarded songs) in his youth, and who had been a favorite of Robert Schumann. After thinking over Lisl’s response, Brahms let go of his plans for the Heine series.
That he may now have trusted and relied on Elisabet von Herzogenberg more than any other friend only made his anxiety more perturbing when, in August, he sent her the first movement of the Fourth Symphony with these words: “Would you have time to look at it, and tell me what you think of it? The trouble is that, on the whole, my pieces are nicer than myself, and need less setting to rights! But cherries never get ripe for eating in these parts, so don’t be afraid to say if you don’t like the taste. I am not at all eager to write a bad No. 4.”71
The next two months turned into an agony, though he bore it with his usual stoicism. Nothing said by his friends would give him any real reassurance about this symphony. What happens to all artists sooner or later, most of them periodically, some of them relentlessly, had happened to Brahms for the first time since his twenties: the terror that he was dried up, that in chilly autumnal winds the cherries would never ripen again.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Taking Back
RETURNING TO VIENNA at the end of September 1885, Brahms steeled himself for a premiere that boded as ill as any since the First Piano Concerto. Responding to the opening movement of the Fourth Symphony, Elisabet von Herzogenberg wrote:
I can now trace the hills and valleys so clearly that I have lost the impression of its being a complicated movement.… At worst it seems to me as if a great master had made an almost extravagant display of his skill!… Your piece affects me curiously; the more penetration I bring to bear on it, the more impenetrable it becomes.… One never wearies of straining eyes and ears to grasp all the clever turns, all the strange illuminating effects of rhythm, harmony and color.… Indeed, the possibilities are so inexhaustible that one experiences the joys of a discoverer