Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [351]
Brahms would pull strings for Mahler after that, and he had a lot of strings to pull. His word in the right places helped bring the brilliant young conductor first to the Hamburg Opera and then, in 1897, to the podium of the Vienna Hofoper.13 Naturally in the intervening years Brahms followed the development of the young devil as a composer too, with interest if not exactly enthusiasm.
Mahler was appropriately grateful for it all and, in those years, despite his Wagnerian and Brucknerian sympathies, he admired Brahms’s music. At the same time he blamed Brahms in part for being condemned to “my whole cursed operatic career”—in 1881, Brahms had been part of a conservative panel of judges (the others were Goldmark, Richter, and Hanslick) that declined to award Mahler the Beethoven Prize for Das klagende Lied. Mahler believed that rejection had made a composer’s career impossible for him.14 Still, for several years the younger artist would make an annual pilgrimage to Bad Ischl from his summer composing quarters at Steinbach, to visit Brahms.
Christmas 1890 Brahms celebrated in Vienna. He wrote Clara, who was distraught at the prospect of physical debilities ending her performing, “Here next door in my library there also stands a beautiful large tree which will remain concealed until this evening from [Frau Truxa’s] two darling boys.… Frl. Barbi has told everybody here that you made her very happy through your kindness and friendliness.”15 After lighting the tree with the Truxa family, he had his usual Christmas Day dinner with the Fellingers.
Just after the holiday, Brahms came down with flu, which was going around the city. Two years before he had been struck mildly by the same illness, but was so unaccustomed to being sick that he hardly knew what to make of it. It was no different this time. Recently Max Kalbeck had showed up at Zum roten Igel still recovering from flu and Brahms observed with mock disdain, “Naturally, you have to go along with every fashionable foolishness.” Shortly afterward, Kalbeck came to Brahms’s apartment and found him in the library stripped to the waist, leaning over the washstand and pouring a jug of water over his head. With face flushed and beard dripping, Brahms groaned to Kalbeck in an odd efflorescence of Hamburg dialect: “I feel kind a’ out of it. I’m so frightful hot!” He seemed to have no idea what a fever was. To Kalbeck’s demand that he summon a doctor or at least go to bed, Brahms insisted that for a cure he would go over to the Igel and dose himself with Pilsner beer and roast beef. When Kalbeck, improvising, raised the specter of Mozart’s death as possibly a result of flu, Brahms saw reason in the light of historic precedent. He assured Kalbeck he would be good, “as a favor to you.”16 Then, for one of the few times in his life, he may actually have taken to his bed.
IN JANUARY 1891, Brahms sent Clara the new G Major String Quintet with a warning: “I have always told you that the first [F Major] Quintet is a really beautiful piece—for heaven’s sake don’t expect anything better or even equal to it!”17 In early March she ended an enthusiastic letter, “Finally the conclusion, which is just the sort of magnificent confusion that one hears in a dream after a Zigeuner evening in Pest.… Poor Frau Herzogenberg is not at all well. She has been in bed now for over six weeks.”18
That month Brahms went to Meiningen for a weeklong arts festival that included a performance before the playwright of Joseph Widmann’s tragedy Önone. Brahms was met at the train by a Hofmarschall and driven to the castle in the ducal carriage with full equipage. During the visit the court orchestra under Fritz