Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [347]
Being the kind of personage he had become, Brahms had to cope with people who wanted to juxtapose him with other personages, as in a sculpture gallery. Sometimes he submitted to it. He shared a table with another nominal rival at the beginning of 1888, while he visited Leipzig to conduct the Double Concerto and play the C Minor Trio. Invited to dinner at the house of Gewandhaus concertmaster Adolph Brodsky, Brahms joined guests Edvard Grieg and Peter Tchaikovsky. Brahms had met the affable Norwegian before and they had always had cordial relations. On this first acquaintance Tchaikovsky and Brahms dutifully attended each other’s rehearsals, but neither could stand the other’s music and took no trouble to hide it. To Tchaikovsky the German master’s work was pretentious and derivative; to Brahms the Russian’s was shallow and self-indulgent.
At Brodsky’s dinner Frau Grieg was seated as a buffer between them, but she soon leaped up saying, “I can’t sit between these two any more, it makes me so nervous!” Slipping around the table to take her place, Edvard Grieg declared, “I have the nerve!” Tchaikovsky wrote a report home: “I have been much with Brahms yesterday and today.… We are ill at ease together because we do not really like each other, but he takes pains to be pleasant with me.”68 One gets the feeling that while Brahms was passionately competitive with Bruckner, he did not take the Russian seriously enough to conceive a rivalry. In a diary entry, Tchaikovsky called Brahms “that scoundrel … this self-inflated mediocrity.”69
Besides his involvement in the musical scene, there were novelties and amusements to keep Brahms occupied, if composing and performing did not. A few years before, the Herzogenbergs had introduced him to Thomas Edison’s phonograph, and now the Fellingers had a machine at their house. “I have had the opportunity of hearing it often and quite pleasantly,” Brahms wrote Clara. “You must have read about this new miracle.… It’s like being in fairyland again.” That December he met an American named Theo Wangemann at the Fellingers. Edison had dispatched this associate to record famous Europeans on his cylinder machine. Naturally Wangemann asked Brahms to contribute.
Brahms returned to the Fellingers’ a few days later to try out this Yankee marvel. At first he sat paralyzed by nerves when confronted by the apparatus, then suddenly he went to the piano and, as Wangemann scrambled to get the machine going, played off a section of the First Hungarian Dance and a Strauss polka. The recording survives in mangled condition, revealing a rhythmically free, bass-heavy kind of playing. As intriguing is the voice at the beginning of the recording, so garbled that no one can tell who is speaking or quite what is said. At least one haunting possibility is a mixture of German and English from the high tenor of Brahms himself, shouting at the future: “Grüsse an Herrn Doktor Edison! I am Doktor Brahms … Johannes Brahms!”70
It was at a party in those years that he heard a young American woman playing a ragtime tune on a banjo. To a friend Brahms recalled the evening wistfully, humming a few bars of what may have been “Hello, Ma Baby.” He was fascinated by the effect of the instrument, and by the dancing syncopations of this new American style. Instinctively he saw its rhythm as a fresh resource, as gypsy music had been for his generation. But now he was too old to do anything about it.
His main loyalty remained, of course, to popular music close to home. He reveled in his friendship with the Waltz King, writing Simrock in December 1889: “The evenings with Strauss! And his wife! and the champagne! and the waltzes! and the …”71 Near the end of the year