Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [356]
That winter the Fellingers surprised and did not entirely please Brahms by having electric lights installed in his apartment.33 Maria’s photographs show a kind of track light in his living room, a shaded bulb that could travel from the piano to the table beside it that held his coffeemaker. There was a similar setup in the library. On February 20 Frau Maria spread before Brahms a feast of brain consommé, lobster salad, beef filet garnished with vegetables (Viennese Tafelspitz), ham cooked in Madeira, hazel grouse, ice cream, pastries, champagne, and coffee.34 In May he celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday as had become his habit, with an asparagus dinner among friends in Vienna. Clara, who had been forced by worsening health to resign her place at the Frankfurt Conservatory, wrote him a painful birthday note: “I am not allowed to write much, but I feel I must send you my warmest greetings for your birthday with my own hand.… May you enjoy good health and once more this year be able to give further glorious gifts to mankind. Oh, how hard it is for me—I could not get to know anything because everything I hear sounds all wrong.”35
Then Brahms headed back to Salzburgerstrasse in Bad Ischl, indeed with plans for new pieces. There would be no more talk of quitting, but also no more large projects, no more glorious gifts to mankind. Now, he told Clara, he was composing for himself alone.
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THE YELLOW HOUSE with white trim owned by Frau Grüber, whose second floor he had rented on all his visits to Ischl, lay on a slope above the River Traun. From his windows and porch Brahms had an expansive view of the river and of the surrounding mountains that beckoned him for morning walks and weekend excursions. From there it was a short stroll to the Esplanade along the river, the middle of the “Kaiser Village,” and the Café Walter, his favored spot for coffee and chats with Ignaz Brüll and the others who gathered around him.
In the basement of the Hotel Kaiserin Elisabet on the Esplanade he had long ago found a frugal restaurant to his taste. The place became another center for his circle to joke and tope and gossip. The proprietor reserved for them a choice spot under the window, dubbed “the patriarch’s table.” After lunch they would retire to the Walter to have a “Schwarzer,” read the papers under the trees, and watch the elegant tourists stroll by, many of them acquaintances. Since he did not like to wear his pince-nez in public, now and then Brahms nearsightedly hailed a stranger, who would be thrilled by how friendly the eminent man seemed to be toward everybody.
It was in the Kaiserin Elisabet that theater critic Julius Bauer uttered a famous bon mot after listening to Brahms’s habitual gossip and put-downs. You, Herr Doktor, said Bauer, are “the greatest Schimpfoniker in the world.” The pun unites Symphoniker (composer of symphonies) with the verb schimpfen, which is to insult, abuse, revile, affront, use bad language, or scold. Brahms roared with laughter at the line.36
In 1892 he was working on little piano pieces that would become the Seven Fantasias of Opus 116 and Three Intermezzos of Opus 117. In connection with them, it may have been that summer when his future biographer Max Kalbeck experienced a peculiar vision. He was visiting Ischl and went walking on a warm early July morning. Emerging from the woods and rushing toward him he saw what he took to be a peasant, or maybe the owner of the property, coming to shoo him away. Then Kalbeck realized it was Brahms, with hat in one hand and his coat in the other dragging on the ground, running through the dewy meadow as if a demon were after him. Wild-eyed, weeping and gasping and sweating, Brahms brushed past Kalbeck and disappeared in the distance, apparently without seeing his friend at all.
Another day Kalbeck came to visit