Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [318]
All that beauty, all that rich tenderness [in the scherzo], and then the … almost brutally rapid return to C major! Believe me, it is as if you had played us some glorious thing on the piano, and then, to ward off all emotion and show your natural coarseness, snort into your beard: “All rot, all rot, you know!” … It’s no modulation, but an operation.4
To publisher Fritz Simrock Brahms wrote: “Taking it all in all I haven’t the ghost of an idea whether I’ll let the thing be printed.… You’d be insane to invest a groschen in it!”5 In mid-October, holding down his dread, he took the train for Meiningen and Hans von Bülow’s Hofkapelle Orchestra. His plan was to see the piece through the premiere, then decide whether he and Bülow would take it on tour as planned.
As always with Duke Georg, he was treated royally in the Meiningen castle. “I came here a few days ago and am rehearsing the new symphony,” Brahms wrote Clara Schumann. “I have worked long and hard at it, thinking of you all the time, and wondering whether it might prove a very doubtful pleasure to you. The fact is I’m living in the lap of luxury here.” By then, having heard the effect of the symphony with full orchestra, he felt a little optimistic: “As the piece pleases musicians (and does not entirely displease me) I can’t exactly refuse to let Bülow travel around a bit with it.”6
The premiere on October 25, 1885, was almost an anticlimax. The Meiningen audience unreservedly applauded every movement and there was a delirious ovation at the end. A great weight must have fallen from Brahms’s shoulders, but an unfamiliar apprehension remained. Somehow the triumph at the premiere and in city after city afterward was ambiguous, if there is such a thing as ambiguous triumph. At its first performance Brahms was fifty-two, still vigorous but aging visibly, and had been famous for a very long time. Perhaps he could not shake the suspicion that the applause the symphony found across Europe was not so much for the piece as for him and his achievement. Could these be valedictory ovations? To have the courage to start the next big work, he needed to be reassured not about a body of work already on the books, but about this piece, which is to say: reassured that he could still do it.
When they heard the effect with orchestra, expressions of relief and pleasure came from the people he most cared about. Lisl von Herzogenberg called Joachim’s performance in Berlin “overpowering, beyond all we had imagined.”7 (The Herzogenbergs had moved to Berlin, where Heinrich was teaching at Joachim’s Hochschule für Musik.) Clara wrote, “My heart is full to overflowing about your symphony. It has given me some wonderful moments and its beauty and richness of color have held me spellbound.”8 Her response was based on the piano arrangement. By then Clara’s hearing had gotten so bad that she could not listen to orchestral music without maddening distortions of pitch. In early 1886 she spent a month in bed with rheumatism.9 Joachim and Brahms were still not speaking to each other except in letters, but the violinist seized on the forbidding, cloudy Fourth as his favorite of the symphonies. When he wrote a letter expressing his enthusiasm, Brahms responded a little stiffly, “Praise and sympathy such as yours are not only highly gratifying, but necessary. It is as though one had to wait for them for permission to enjoy one’s own work!”10
After Bülow conducted the Fourth at a repeat concert in Meiningen, he and the orchestra set off with it on a railroad tour of fourteen cities in Germany and Holland. Just at the end of the tour, Brahms managed to derail what should have been a jubilant experience for himself and Bülow, who was now his most eloquent champion.
It was another episode of his bearish insensitivity. Brahms had already directed the new symphony in Frankfurt, where Bülow was due to play it with the Hofkapelle