Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [345]
As he tried to get back to work in July, Brahms wrote Clara, “The Herzogenbergs were here for a day.… One’s pleasure in the man himself is considerably reduced if not entirely obliterated by the composer. I would like to get the better of the latter some time if I could only get him alone, but his wife is always there and one really doesn’t know what to talk about.”55 Quite a callous letter, given that the couple he was dismissing, both of them miserably ill, had honored and served him as much as anyone alive. Certainly Brahms was generally unhappy with Heinz’s music, and never papered over his opinions despite the couple’s insatiable craving for approval. Out of Heinz’s voluminous production Brahms had complimented little but a few string trios and quartets, the latter dedicated to him.56
The saddest fact is that probably the Herzogenbergs’ physical infirmities were what most alienated Brahms in those days—Lisl sapped by asthma and heart disease, Heinz mobile but still racked by rheumatism. Clara, who had met them in Italy, described Heinz to Brahms as “a broken man.”57 As Brahms was increasingly intolerant of friction or contradiction from anyone, he also could hardly bear to be around sick people, as so many of his aging friends were. He had recently written Clara, “Since his illness the sight of Billroth disturbs me, upon my soul I don’t like the look of him, and when he makes an effort to appear bright and in good spirits it makes one’s heart sink!”58 Somehow, with the exception of Clara, he instinctively felt the sick to be a distraction, a bother, a threat to his own robust health.
It may have been that period when Elisabet von Herzogenberg’s photograph, the golden-haired muse that had presided over his writing desk for many years, suddenly disappeared from view. Brahms gruffly gave Frau Truxa the frame Lisl’s picture had resided in.59
In Hamburg that September, as a gesture of thanks for the Freedom, Brahms premiered with the Cäcilienverein the three a capella choruses he called Fest- und Gedenksprüche (Festal and Commemorative Mottoes), as part of the festivities at a Trade and Industry Exhibition. With their biblical texts on civic virtues and aloof, elevated style, these double-choir pieces seemed the ideal occasional piece, and they were dedicated to Bürgermeister Petersen. Actually, Brahms had largely completed them before the honor was announced. His performance with the Cäcilienverein, as it turned out, was his last appearance on a concert platform in Hamburg.60
For all their grandeur, recalling the antiphonal choruses of the late-Renaissance Venetian master Giovanni Gabrieli and his German pupil Schütz, Brahms did not value the Gedenksprüche as much as the equally atavistic motets of summer 1889.61 He took a sneaking pride, though, in his juggling of the biblical text in one of the new choruses. In his setting he makes a sentence from St. Luke, “When a strong man armed keeps his palace, his goods are in peace,” evoke the German nation under the firm hand of Prussia and the Kaiser. Meanwhile he knew perfectly well that in the Bible the “strong man” of those verses is actually Satan. This chicanery he described playfully in a letter to Josef Widmann as “theological, even jesuitical subtlety.”62
AS A GESTURE OF RECONCILIATION with Widmann after their political quarrels, Brahms invited his republican friend to join him on a visit to Baden-Baden and Clara in September. There he stayed at his old favorite hotel, Zum Bären, but when he discovered that three favorite pine trees near the Bear had been cut down, he informed them he would never come back. Though the two friends skirted politics now and Widmann had given up trying to tempt Brahms to write an opera, they still had long talks about all sorts of things.
For example, there was a conversation that drifted to the subject of biography. In his youth, immersed in Robert Schumann’s library, Brahms had written Clara: “What would become of all historical research and biographies if undertaken with an eye to the susceptibilities of