Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [343]
During his two earlier summers in Bad Ischl, Brahms had never quite settled into the emperor’s, and fashionable Austria’s, favorite resort, despite the presence of friends there including Ignaz Brüll and Johann Strauss, Billroth in nearby St. Gilgen, and Vienna friends Viktor von Miller zu Aichholz and his wife Olga, who kept a grand villa in nearby Gmunden (where Karl Goldmark also lived). This time Ischl, on the River Traun, its air brisk from mountains and lakes, suited Brahms despite the unpredictable weather and hoards of tourists. At least most of the faces in town were Viennese. He would vacation in the resort for the rest of his life.
He composed relatively little new that summer, mainly the Three Motets, Opus 110. He wrote Clara about another project, “With what childish amusement I while away the beautiful summer days you will never guess. I have rewritten my B Major [Piano] Trio.… It will not be so wild as it was before—but whether it will be better—? If Joachim and Hausmann happened to be knocking around Baden we might try it sometime.”44 They made sure they were knocking around. Brahms had reworked the piece because Simrock had bought the rights and planned a new edition. He hoped to redo the F Minor Piano Sonata too, but never got around to it.45
In his revision of the B Major Trio Brahms preserved most of the charm while tightening the structure. Once again, the seams hardly showed when he returned to an early work. Perhaps no composer in history would have still been close enough to his youth, and to the style of his youth, to tear apart and recompose a piece as he did the B Major—though he left intact long stretches of the outer movements and most of the scherzo. His friends generally resisted the new version, preferring the youthful fervor of the original. Lisl scolded him, “you have no right to impress your masterly touch on this lovable, if sometimes vague, product of your youth.” For his part, Brahms felt at first optimistic about the new version, informing Simrock that it would be “shorter, hopefully better, and in any case more expensive.”46 In the end, though, he never summoned any great conviction that he had improved it: “I must categorically state that the old one is bad,” he wrote Simrock, “but I do not maintain that the new one is good.”47 For better or worse, the early version fell into neglect.
If he was doing little new work, there were plenty of agreeable distractions that summer. Visitors to Viktor Miller’s villa in Gmunden included Brahms and most of his closest Vienna friends—Goldmark, Dvořák, Brüll, Heuberger, Epstein, Gänsbacher, Door, Hanslick, and Mandyczewski. Only the ailing Billroth did not turn up. Brahms also became a regular feature of the lavish parties Johann Strauss produced at his Biedermeier-style villa in Ischl. Strauss was happy to accept the friendship of the distinguished symphonist. Brahms got to know a young pianist named Ilona Eibenschütz, a pupil of Clara’s. If Ilona was more of a passing fantasy than Hermine Spies had been, the talented and beautiful teenager still may have helped inspire his late piano music.48 That winter Ilona played his Handel Variations in Vienna.
As Brahms liked to put it: life was only too gay. Now he let himself be diverted by the gaiety. All the same, in whatever society he still did quite as he pleased. If he went regularly to Strauss’s parties, he might spend the evening insulting the guests. Strauss’s fashionable friends had to wonder why the famous man was invited and why he showed up, if he found the company so offensive. At Viktor Miller’s in Gmunden that summer Joachim played through a Bach solo sonata, then had hardly begun Brahms’s G Major when its composer crashed his fists on the keys and leaped up to declare that with Bach in his ears, his own stuff was too banal to endure.49
Even his modesty had become a burden to his friends. Still,