Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [325]
IN MAY 1886, after celebrating another birthday in Vienna, Brahms headed for a new vacation spot, outside Austria. He may have considered himself something of a refugee from Count Taaffe’s generally anti-liberal regime.34 Brahms’s new resort was at Hofstetten, just outside the city of Thun in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland. He rented the sunny second floor, with a big porch, of a place owned by a merchant named Spring. The stately house sat at the foot of a hill stretching down to the glass-green water of the Aare River, near where it flows into Lake Thun. The landlord kept a haberdashery shop on the ground floor and maintained a handsome garden. Next door lay the Hotel Bellevue, which would hold many Brahms visitors during his three summers in the house. On the heights above the city loomed a Romantic sight, the twelfth-century Castle of Thun.
Brahms wrote his publisher Fritz Simrock, “The mountain is right in front of my window as if it was deliberately placed there. Then follow to the left the Stockhorn, the Niesen, the Blümlisalp, and a few steps from the house you can also see the Jungfrau and the Mönch.”35 To Max Kalbeck: “It is simply glorious here. I only say quite in passing that there are crowds of beer-gardens—actual beer-gardens—the English [tourists] are not at home in them!” He settled into the habit of whiling away the afternoons with beer and cigar in a nearby casino, where he tapped his foot to the house orchestra and slipped the musicians cash for card games.36
As it usually happened, Brahms had chosen his vacation spot not only for the beauty but for the company. This time he mainly counted on Josef Viktor Widmann, who lived to the north in Bern. Soon after he arrived at Thun in 1886 Brahms wrote Widmann, “I have induced the ‘songstress’ (Fräulein Spies, Hermione-ohne-O) to break in on you a week hence … and with my help to torture you with songs.” Taking his cue, Widmann invited a good deal of musical Bern to attend. They heard an unforgettable evening of Brahms songs from Hermine and the composer, with interludes of Bach from the keyboard.37 Brahms became a regular weekend guest at Widmann’s, talking for hours, critiquing his friend’s newspaper pieces, playing with the children and the dog, and putting away formidable slices of Frau Widmann’s plum cake.
In his memoirs Widmann recalled his friend in late middle age. Even when Brahms stayed up past the midnight chimes, he still rose at dawn for a walk and then work, his breakfast still a Havana cigar and strong coffee. His morning brew he made from a Viennese brass coffeepot with a little spigot, on a porcelain stand. An admirer in Marseilles kept him supplied with fine Mokka in quantity. Widmann recalled Brahms walking through Thun with the inevitable crowd of children around him, vying noisily for treats.
For weekends in Bern he usually turned up at Widmann’s in a striped flannel shirt without tie or collar. He would wear over his shoulder a shabby leather satchel, which he filled with books from Widmann’s library that he usually returned read the next week. His clothes still tended to black, the long topcoat graying with age. When it got cold Brahms would throw a brownish-gray shawl over his shoulders and secure it with a huge pin; the effect was grandmotherly enough to set the Swiss staring. He wanted his trousers short, out of the way of his walking boots, and if a pair was too long he was known to chop them off with scissors. Despite his age and girth Brahms continued to take on ambitious mountain treks, though in those days he complained all the way up. Usually on reaching the summit he turned cheerful, and he went downhill like a cannonball.38
In his literary tastes he remained old-fashioned, on the whole preferring to reread favorites from his youth like Jean Paul rather than new productions. Yet Brahms was au courant in his way, entranced