Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [348]
Thus the record of Brahms’s life as the new decade approached—laurels, scattered events without focus, without the excitement and anxiety of big premieres in autumn and winter: the life of a famous composer as opposed to the life of composing. Otherwise, everything ran on schedule. He spent Christmas Eve of 1889 lighting the tree and exchanging presents with Frau Truxa’s family. Then the next day’s holiday dinner with the Fellingers, where as always Frau Maria charmed and cajoled him into accepting gifts.72
In January 1890, Brahms skipped the ceremonies Hamburg put on for Hans von Bülow’s sixtieth birthday, but to mark the occasion he sent his old compatriot a rare gift—the manuscript of the Third Symphony. Bülow had been given 10,000 marks to dispose of as he wished; Brahms persuaded him to send it to Friedrich Chrysander for his Handel Edition. That month Joachim was in Vienna for concerts with his Quartet, and during a dinner served up an order to Johannes: “What shall we have next? A quintet! We have one, a very fine one; let’s have another.”
Brahms took his seventh Italian trip in April, this time with Widmann. Then he headed for Bad Ischl and wrote a quintet to Joachim’s order, commencing with a spacious cello theme that may have been intended for a symphony that had not taken wing.
The more telling new work of that summer is an unforgettable little piece for women’s voices, which Brahms added to ones he had written earlier to make up the Thirteen Canons of Opus 113. As theme for the new canon he quoted a melody of Schubert’s—the weird singsong of the last lied in Die Winterreise (Winter’s Journey). In it the narrator, wandering in the wilderness of the world, stands in a frigid waste as sole audience for the keening melody of an organ-grinder who in some way is Death. Schubert’s song is one of the most haunting moments in music, shaped by his own impending doom. Brahms, weaving that melody into a dense canonic fabric, somehow heightens the eeriness of the original. He made Schubert’s theme into a soft, twining wail of lamentation on a text of Rückert:
Changeless is love’s sorrow,
a song of monotonous tone,
and yet always
wherever I hear it
I quietly hum along.
When he reached Vienna that October, Brahms wrote Fritz Simrock, “I tossed a great deal of ripped-up manuscript paper in the Traun upon leaving Ischl.” As “The Organ-Grinder” had been one of Schubert’s last songs, Brahms when he committed those sheets to the river had decided that the gay new quintet and the deathly canon would be his own swan songs. At fifty-seven, worn by the years of discipline and struggle, fearful that he was drying up, feeling increasingly irrelevant and inimical to the spirit of the age, he had vowed to rest on his laurels and quit the game.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Secrets and Foreboding
DURING THE SUMMER OF 1890, Theodor Billroth visited Bad Ischl and found Brahms plunged in the thick volumes of Sybel’s Foundation of the German Empire and disavowing “the idea that he is composing or ever will compose anything.” That summer Brahms said to friend Eusebius Mandyczeswki in the tones of a retiring bureaucrat: “I’ve been tormenting myself for a long time with all kinds of things, a symphony, chamber music and other stuff, and nothing will come of it. Above all I was always used to everything being clear to me. It seems to me that it’s not going the way it used to. I’m just not going to do any more. My whole life I’ve been a hard worker; now for once I’m going to be good and lazy!”1 In fact, following Joachim’s suggestion, Brahms was working on the G Major String Quintet, and his vow to quit would hardly last out the year. But for the moment he was ready to let