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By Root 1493 0

the score has not gained by being remodelled; it has certainly lost in charm, ease, and clarity.” Distracted by grandchildren and miserable with rheumatism and neuritis, Clara replied nebulously, thereby setting up the worst fight of their old age. Brahms reported at the end of the same letter, “At Billroth’s we had a very pleasant evening with the Zigeunerlieder for quartet with piano, sung by myself. They are kind of Hungarian love songs, and beautifully sung as they were and in such jolly company, you would have found listening to them a delight.”18 Billroth had an expansive home in Vienna, laid out for entertaining. The surgeon slept in a narrow bed in a plain room; the lavishly decorated music room was the centerpiece of his house.

In the same month Brahms wrote anxiously to Fritz Simrock, who was about to buy his early piano sonatas and other music from Breitkopf & Härtel. Brahms felt ambivalent about these works being in the public eye at all, and certain they would not earn back the prices Härtel demanded for them. Oblivious to the kind of profits his publisher was piling up from his music, and speaking out of an abiding fear that his work was doomed to obscurity, Brahms wrote:

You expect me to congratulate you? … I can’t help your overestimating me immensely … but I think it exceedingly unwise of you to buy Härtel’s things at goodness knows what high prices, music that cost them approximately a hundred Louis d’or, and which in the near future won’t be worth powder and shot.… I suggest or propose truly and seriously that henceforth I receive no honorarium, but that you place a certain sum to my credit, which I can claim in case of need, but which is simply canceled by my death.… I can live very well without receiving any further fees. And live well I will, so far as a man of my stamp, which is very different from Wagner’s, cares to.… Well if I must send them, here are my congratulations, but I wash my hands with carbolic and so forth!19

One would like to know Simrock’s response to these proposals—measured? sly? ironic?—but Brahms destroyed his publisher’s letters. Simrock would continue to pay for new pieces. In fact, there were not many to come.

After three weeks basking in Italian towns and countryside with Widmann, Brahms arrived at his house in Thun at the end of May. The work of this third summer in Switzerland was more scattered than that of the last two: the setting of Max Kalbeck’s “Letztes Glück” (“Last Happiness”) and the remaining a capella choral settings of Opus 104, some of the Opus 106 and 107 solo songs, vocal quartets for Opus 112. Otherwise, he finished the Third Violin Sonata, arranged the quartet Zigeunerlieder for solo voice and piano, and began the choral Fest und Gedenksprüche that would prove quite serviceable the following year.

In the June 1888 there was another memorable soiree at Widmann’s with Hermine Spies and Brahms. He may have been distancing himself from his songstress, but their relations remained cordial and he wrote that summer’s lieder with her in mind. As with most of his friends Brahms was fond of the whole Widmann family, especially daughter Johanna, whom he playfully referred to as his main temptation to wedlock: for example, “Have I never told you of my good resolutions, father of my Johanna? Among these, to try neither an opera again nor marriage. Otherwise I think I should immediately undertake two (that is, operas), “King Stag” and “The Open Secret.”20 The joke about his bride, increasingly tattered, was one he had been indulging in since his flirtation with Laura Garbe in Hamburg.

The affection between Brahms and Widmann can also be read in an 1887 letter of thanks from Brahms in his pseudo-biblical mode: “And they brought unto them meat from his table. But unto B.[rahms] was given five times as much as unto the others. And they drank and were drunken with him. Thus it has been and will be in the palace of Joseph; wherefore the heart of B. rejoiceth.”21 At the end of that season the Widmanns had been saddened by losing their Scotch terrier during a trip to the