Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [355]
ON NOVEMBER 21, 1891, Brahms arrived in Meiningen to rehearse the Clarinet Trio and Quintet, the first with Richard Mühlfeld and cellist Robert Hausmann joining him, the second with the Joachim Quartet plus clarinet. They gave a private performance of the pieces for Duke Georg, then got ready for the public premiere in Berlin. Before that, Brahms spent a few days in Hamburg visiting stepmother Karoline, stepbrother Fritz Schnack, and his seriously ailing sister Elise. In Berlin on December 1 the reception of the clarinet pieces was tremendous, certainly more because of the Quintet than the Trio. From the beginning the quintet was understood to be a masterpiece written from the heart and addressed to the heart.
Then he returned to Vienna and sank back into his life there, the round of concerts, plays, politics, meals, and gossip. On January 5 the Clarinet Quintet, played by the Rosé, had what Richard Heuberger declared an “unparalleled success” in the city, the cheers roaring on endlessly. With Heuberger, Brahms scoffed at the news that Bruckner was getting an honorary doctorate from the University of Vienna, which sullied his own cherished title of Herr Doktor: “If somebody overrates somebody as an artist, that’s his business. But that a totally uncultured man is made a doctor, that’s really pretty hard.… I was the guinea pig for music doctorates, and now it’s gotten so common!”29
The turn of 1892 brought many beginnings and endings for Brahms and his world. That year Bruckner finished his gargantuan Eighth Symphony and Tchaikovsky The Nutcracker. To the north the Dane Carl Nielsen produced his First Symphony, carrying on Brahms’s legacy, and Jan Sibelius joined that legacy to Finnish accent and mythology with Kullervo and En Saga. In France, Maurice Maeterlinck wrote the precious, short-lived drama Pelléas et Mélisande, which Debussy would spend the rest of the decade making into an ageless opera. Monet began his Rouen Cathedral series, Toulouse-Lautrec painted The Moulin Rouge. Across the waters, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Walt Whitman died.
On January 2, Brahms received a telegram that Elisabet von Herzogenberg had passed away in San Remo, of her old heart condition. Many people grieved, in and out of her circle. In Florence the sculptor Hildebrand created a monument to her in Renaissance style, with Elisabet as St. Cecilia seated at the organ. Brahms wrote Heinrich:
It is vain to attempt any expression of the feelings that absorb me so completely. And you will be sitting alone in your dumb misery, speechless yourself and not desiring speech from others.… You know how unutterably I myself suffer by the loss of your beloved wife, and can gauge accordingly my emotions in thinking of you, who were associated with her by the closest possible ties.… It would do me so much good just to sit beside you quietly, press your hand, and share your thoughts of the dear marvellous woman.30
Brahms was being kindly there and also, between the lines, coldly honest: the only thing Heinrich really meant to him was the connection with the dear marvelous woman. From that point Heinrich, devastated by her death, went into virtual seclusion for years, composing works in his wife’s memory. He also published eight piano pieces Elisabet had written, part of a lost body of work from one of the most extraordinary musical figures of her time. Now there would be relatively few letters between Brahms and Heinrich von Herzogenberg. Brahms was no more inclined to smile on Heinrich’s work now than he had ever been; he preferred to avoid the subject entirely.
Mühlfeld and the Joachim Quartet performed both clarinet pieces again in Vienna the same January. After one of the concerts they and friends retired to the Igel for a noisy evening, Brahms and Joachim joking the night away. Maybe it was a release for Brahms after the wrenching, if long anticipated, death of Elisabet. At the dinner he passed up sitting beside two attractive and attentive women to sit between the clarinetists who had played his pieces in Vienna that month, Mühlfeld and