Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [341]
With relations in flux between Brahms and Billroth, the Herzogenbergs, Joachim, and Widmann—and another wrangle with Clara gathering steam—he felt drawn more toward friends with whom he remained on uncomplicated good terms. Those included the Fellingers and especially the bright, domestic, always-helpful Maria. In September 1888, Brahms notified Maria that he was on his way back to Vienna and would dearly enjoy a bowl of her Metzelsuppe on his first Sunday visit.32
THAT WINTER he busied himself with helping to arrange a celebration of Joachim’s fiftieth anniversary as a performer, contributing a hundred gulden for a bust to be placed in the Berlin Hochschule that Joachim headed.33 Clara had just celebrated her Diamond Jubilee as a performer. Though she would manage occasional appearances in the next years, at this point she could only play a few minutes at a time.
If his creativity appeared on the downhill, outwardly Brahms was in good spirits that winter, still the jokester and prankster as Richard Heuberger details. After a meeting of the Tonkünstlerverein they were talking about a well-known lady pianist and composer: “I praise Jaell!” Brahms said, grinning. “She’s an intelligent, gifted person and can write things herself that are just as bad as Liszt’s.” He told a story of a woman who had recently come asking him to suggest something of his to sing. Straight-faced, Brahms advised her to try some of his posthumous lieder.
“And which?” she inquired politely.
“Just ask Kalbeck, he knows everything.” So she did ask Kalbeck, who dissolved in laughter. When she returned irate to Brahms, he replied with a certain kindness, “Ja, dear lady, don’t ask me about such things. I’ll usually just make some kind of joke—and if a good one doesn’t occur to me, then a bad one.”34
The Vienna premiere of the Double Concerto in December, Joachim and Hausmann soloing, was cheered enthusiastically.35 For Brahms the gloomy conviction may have deepened that audiences were applauding him rather than the music. Critic Hans Gal describes the actual feeling about the piece as “indifferent” among friends, public, and performers.36 Recognizing the ambivalence behind the applause, Brahms was visibly depressed over its reception, no longer as sure as he had been in earlier times that the public would come around—and no longer as sure of himself.
In his review Eduard Hanslick noted the ovation, but as for his opinion: “I am unable to place the Double Concerto among the first rank of Brahms’s creations.” If in the Violin Concerto, “the solo violin is not accorded the sovereign place it deserves, this criticism applies all the more pointedly to the Double Concerto.… We feel that it is characterized by a lack of freshness and originality of feeling, of melodic and rhythmic magic.”37 By then both piano concertos had caught on, but critics and public still resisted the beauties of the Violin and Double Concertos. That situation would not change through the 1890s.
All the same, Brahms saw to practical matters, making sure the Zigeunerlieder were out before Christmas so Hanslick could praise them and boost holiday sales. The critic duly noted in the Neue Freie Presse: “His songs make excellent Christmas presents.” Brahms dined with the Hanslick family on Christmas Eve. Next day, after lighting the tree in his library with Frau Truxa’s family, he lunched with friends at the Igel, napped at the Café Heinrichshof, then oversaw Frau Truxa packing his things for a visit to the duke’s castle at Meiningen, where he was scheduled to celebrate the New Year and conduct the Double and D Minor Concertos.38 The latter would feature his new favorite pianist, Eugène d’Albert, who had done the most to secure the popularity of the Second Concerto.
After Hans von Bülow resigned from the Meiningen Hofkapelle Orchestra it had been briefly conducted