Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [346]
He had meant, in 1856, that he asked biography to be fearless and honest. In 1889, in his fame and encroaching old age, he told Widmann: “The chief consideration, in the selection of material for a biography of an artist or author, should be whether the facts in question were of a nature to make the artist, whom we love and honor in his art, also win our esteem as a man.” Brahms observed that after the recent publication of some new Beethoven letters, “our mental image of Beethoven has been disfigured by features so unwelcome that it would have been preferable to have been kept in ignorance of them.”64 When on that trip Widmann met Clara Schumann for the first time—he was enchanted by the youthful smile breaking out on her aged, careworn face—Brahms added, “When you have written something, ask yourself whether such a woman as Frau Schumann could read it with pleasure. If you doubt that, then cross out what you have written.”65
Eventually it occurred to Widmann that these remarks were not as offhanded as they appeared. Brahms was grooming a biographer, instructing him to defer to the feelings and reputation of his subject, leave the great man on his pedestal. The truth can disfigure a hero. In that spirit Brahms reminisced to Widmann about his life, revealing this and withholding that. To the same end, it was in the next years that he burned most of his papers and sketches and the pieces he had decided to keep back. He would do his best, in other words, to shape his own history, to deny biographers material or motivation for the kind of biography he valued in his youth. Widmann would produce only a thin book of memoirs about Brahms, but in it he followed the counsel his subject had given him. Like most memoirists and biographers after him, Widmann painted a bourgeois hero and kept the shadows out of the picture, just as his hero had advised.
AS HE RETURNED to Vienna in 1889, Brahms could not have been happy about the last two summers’ work. For the first time in his maturity he had not kept to his pattern of a major orchestral piece every other year. What made it more worrisome was that he had toyed with ideas for one or two symphonies, and they had failed to take flight. One of them had been far enough along to play through on the piano for Billroth, but he held it back.
If new pieces would not come, he was not going to occupy his time with performing. After some twenty-five years of exhaustive touring during the winter concert season—and more or less the same amount of time avoiding practicing—Brahms cut back considerably on appearances. Now he would concentrate mainly on presenting new works.
So with little proofreading and less performing than usual to occupy him in the winter of 1889–90, Brahms at fifty-six must have been at a loss as to what to do with himself. Maybe boredom was part of the reason he agreed to a surprising engagement. He had returned to daily dining at his “prickly pet,” Zum roten Igel. One afternoon in October, Brahms kept an appointment there for lunch with Anton Bruckner. Though the two composers had lived in the same city and passed each other in the halls of the Musikverein for years, this was their first (and last) formal meeting.
Both turned up with entourage. Everybody crowded around a table, waiting for one of the famous men to say something on this momentous occasion when Brahms had finally deigned to acknowledge Bruckner’s existence. There was a long, excruciating silence. Finally Brahms picked up a menu and declared, for history: “Oh, dumplings with smoked meat! That’s my favorite!” Immediately Bruckner’s peasant voice chimed in, “I say, Doktor Brahms, dumplings and smoked meat! That’s where we two agree!” A few seconds of bemused silence ensued, then much relieved laughter.66
The occasion was declared a success, though it hardly reconciled the camps. Still, maybe that moment of small agreement and laughter