Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [332]
The immediate impetus for writing a double concerto for violin, cello, and orchestra is clear enough: a gesture toward Joachim, from whom he was still estranged. At the same time, it would provide another showpiece for Robert Hausmann, for whom Brahms had written the Second Cello Sonata. In September, after a meeting and rehearsal in Baden-Baden among Clara, Brahms, Joachim, and Hausmann, she told her journal: “This concerto is a work of reconciliation—Joachim and Brahms have spoken to each other again for the first time in years.” The piece was premiered in Cologne in October 1887, Brahms on the podium and Joachim and Hausmann soloing. Brahms told an acquaintance, “Now I know what it is that’s been missing in my life for the past few years.… It was the sound of Joachim’s violin.”66
But few of Brahms’s friends particularly liked the Double Concerto, even after they heard the full effect with orchestra. Joachim was dubious; Clara wrote in her journal: “I do not believe the concerto has any future … nowhere has it the warmth and freshness which are so often to be found in his works.”67 Billroth wrote Hanslick that he found it “tedious and wearisome, a really senile production. If the Zigeunerlieder [Gypsy Songs, a high-spirited product of the previous summer] had not been composed later, one might almost believe it was all up with our Johannes.”68 Billroth may have been reading some of his own infirmity into the Double Concerto. That summer he had been struck by an attack of pneumonia from which he never really recovered. The indefatigable prodigy of surgery was finally feeling his age.
Certainly Billroth did not use such harsh words about the Double Concerto with its creator. But Brahms knew how to interpret what his friends said, and did not say. The trouble was that his own fears about his and his work’s viability ran in the same direction. Few if any knew it at the time, but Brahms had drafted a second double concerto, just as he previously had another violin concerto. After gauging the equivocal private and public response to the concertos he did release, he smothered both sequels.
And through it all illness and death gathered around him. His musicologist friend C. F. Pohl had died in the spring, his old teacher Eduard Marxsen at the end of 1887. Besides Billroth’s ailments, Heinrich von Herzogenberg had fallen into a wretched siege of rheumatism and mysterious complications that were to cripple him for years, that in turn a burden to Lisl’s always-precarious health. (For the next decade Heinrich’s place at the Berlin Hochschule would be filled by Clara’s brother Woldemar Bargiel, whom Brahms respected more as a composer than he did Heinrich.69)
Brahms, Joachim, and Hausmann played the Double Concerto together several times in the 1887–8 concert season, and if the performances did not find the usual tumultuous ovations they still brought Brahms and Joachim in some degree back together—if not on the old intimate footing, at least in regular if wary collaboration. The Double Concerto has some of the expected nods to his friend. While Joachim’s motto F-A-E is not highlighted as such, those pitches in some arrangement or outline turn up often, notably in the rondo theme of the last movement. The second theme of the opening movement suggests Viotti’s Concerto No. 22, a favorite of both Brahms and Joachim going back to their early years together. The “Hungarian” character of the finale is another testimonial.
Eventually, Joachim came around to admiring the piece. It did not hurt that Brahms gave him the manuscript