Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [326]
In conversation Brahms was ready to debate everything from politics to literature to philosophy. For a while he put off reading Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, which Widmann had reviewed enthusiastically in his paper before he lent it to Brahms. “I have placed an Italian novel on top of the Nietzsche,” he wrote Widmann, “while I think twice whether I’ll walk under a blue or a gray sky!”41
It was in 1888, after Nietzsche heard that Brahms had read and enjoyed the book, that the philosopher tried out his musical pretensions on the famous man, forwarding Brahms his own Hymn to Life. Brahms found Nietzsche’s hymn “much the same as any young student’s effort,” but out of respect he thought it over before making an uncharacteristically diplomatic response. Finally he announced to Max Kalbeck, “I’ve done it! I’ve extricated myself beautifully from this Nietzsche business. I simply sent him my visiting card and thanked him politely for the stimulus he had given me. The amusing thing is that I quietly avoided mentioning the music at all!”
Brahms had written: “He regards it as a signal honor, and he is grateful for the considerable stimulus he has derived from it.” Nietzsche chose to regard those words as a seal of approval on his achievement as a composer; he told a friend that his hymn had received signs of “piety and deep recognition from a number of artists, among them Dr. Brahms.” That did not impede Nietzsche’s disillusionment with the artist whom he had once attempted to make into a new hero. In “The Case of Wagner,” written in 1888, Nietzsche issued his famous dismissal:
What does Johannes Brahms matter now?—His good fortune was a German misunderstanding: he was taken for Wagner’s antagonist—an antagonist was needed.—That does not make for necessary music.… I discovered almost by accident, that he affects a certain type of man. His is the melancholy of impotence: he does not create out of abundance, he languishes for abundance. If we discount what he imitates, what he borrows from great old or exotic-modern styles … what remains as specifically his is yearning.—This is felt by all who are full of yearning and dissatisfaction of any kind.
Naturally “the melancholy of impotence” became a rallying cry for anti-Brahmsians in perpetuity. Nietzsche’s attack probably upset Widmann more than it did its target; nothing like that surprised Brahms anymore. But though the critic took some potshots at Nietzsche afterward—including his play named Beyond Good and Evil—Widmann never escaped a certain fascination with the philosopher. Meanwhile Nietzsche, shortly after condemning Bismarck, the Kaiser, and all antisemites to the same perdition, collapsed into syphilitic paralysis in January 1889.42 The final irony was that as music for his funeral in 1900, his sister chose Brahms’s “Wenn ein müder Leib begraben”: “When a weary body is entombed.”43
AMONG FRIENDS, Brahms in his fifties was jolly and joking as always, if still capable of galling insults inadvertent and otherwise. Strangers and hangers-on he held at bay, skillfully keeping the trials of fame from becoming a nuisance. Widmann noted the cunning with which he prevented lady pianists from gaining the bench to play for him. He was equally adept at evading autograph hounds, including the ones who asked him to sign for phony packages.44