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by his young assistant Richard Strauss. Now Fritz Steinbach had taken it over, and this conductor was happy to lend the podium to Brahms. From the duke’s castle he wrote Clara, “Oh, how I wish you could have spent the last few days here with us! You would have loved it. At the concert d’Albert played my D Minor and Joachim and Hausmann my Double Concerto. Both went excellently. Yesterday at a rehearsal Joachim played Beethoven’s Concerto and mine quite magnificently.… In short it was a mixed but sumptuous menu.” From Meiningen he stopped by Frankfurt to visit Clara and play in a performance of the Third Violin Sonata. She wrote in her journal, “I once more thanked heaven for sending so strong and healthy a genius into the world in the midst of the Wagner mania, one who counteracts it for the moment and who must soon conquer it entirely.”39

There were any number of manias about in those days. At the end of that month the Austrian emperor’s heir Prince Rudolf, another frustrated liberal, who had despaired of ever gaining the throne and effecting anything, shot his teenaged mistress and himself in his bedroom in the royal hunting lodge at Mayerling. The Crown attempted to call it a stroke and secretly buried the mistress in an unmarked grave, but everyone suspected the truth. In the wake of the royal suicide confusion rattled all over Austria. Anton Bruckner demanded to be driven out to Mayerling to peer at it from the outside, then returned to the city and fell into one of his odd manias, standing outside in the cold and counting the hundreds of windows in the Imperial Palace over and over again.

Like most liberals, Brahms saw the tragedy as yet another sign of despair and dissolution. In that atmosphere the Wagner- and Bruckner-loving reactionaries thrived by preying on the fears of aristocrats and working people alike, blaming the Jews for Austria’s ills. Brahms, his monarchical and democratic instincts clashing, wrote Simrock, “The saying that ‘everything has happened before’ has been dashed to pieces. It is new how emperors and kings kill themselves. They explode, they drown [Bavaria’s King Ludwig, Wagner’s patron, had plunged into a lake], they kill themselves. And now, in addition to all this, our Imperial tragedy.” He asked Simrock for uncensored newspaper reports from Berlin.40

Whatever the ominous symptoms of Crown and empire, musical life played on unimpeded. In February, Brahms accompanied Joachim in three concerts that added up to a triumph, the programs featuring the Third Violin Sonata and Joachim’s arrangement of the Hungarian Dances. Then the two went to Berlin for the Hochschule celebrations of Joachim’s fiftieth anniversary, which Brahms had helped plan and finance. Among the orchestral performances there, Brahms conducted the D Minor Concerto with Hans von Bülow at the piano. Brahms’s collaboration with Joachim was the first major undertaking the two had tried in person since their reconciliation, and both had felt apprehensive about it. Brahms reported to Clara that his old companion “was more affable and friendly than usual and … we had a very pleasant time together.”

From Berlin, Brahms went to Hamburg to visit sister Elise, now widowed but in relatively good spirits, and his stepmother and brother.41 All were prospering from his generosity. In April he stayed at Duke Georg’s “Villa Carlotta” on Lake Como. Billroth was traveling in Italy that summer, this time without his friend. Brahms wrote the surgeon in Palermo, “I never see the beautiful sickle moon without thinking of you.”42 Even as quarrels periodically darkened his relations with Billroth and Clara and Joachim and others, still Brahms’s dealings with friends and family alike were taking on a valedictory cast.

BRAHMS WROTE JOSEF VIKTOR WIDMANN at the end of April 1889, “It’s a bit of a minor chord that I’m sending you.”43 He had decided to try Bad Ischl once more for his vacation, forsaking Thun after three years there. Widmann knew that their political differences had something to do with it, but received the news as diplomatically as he