Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [359]
The Variations are remarkable and irresistibly charming. The other day … I again sat down at my piano and without any particular object in mind played them over to myself quite naturally and with profound emotion. I felt as though I were walking on a beautiful soft spring morning, in a grove of alders, birches and lovely flowers, with a babbling brook at my feet. One never gets tired of the mild still air, the delicate azure, the tender greens; there is nothing to remind one of the hurly-burly, and one feels no wish for darkling woods, for rugged rocks and waterfalls amid all this beautiful monotony.43
So much for Brahms the great abstractionist.
Clara told her journal about eleven new piano pieces he had sent her, “full of poetry, passion, sentiment, emotion, and with the most wonderful effects of tone.… In these pieces I at last feel musical life stir again in my soul.… How they make one forget much of the suffering he has caused one.” At the end of the year she recorded, “I had a dear letter from Brahms … it arrived on Christmas Eve, a thing that has not happened for years.”44
AS THE LATEST CONFRONTATION with Clara subsided, there remained Brahms’s rankling and unspoken resentment of Billroth for cutting up his manuscript, for speaking badly of Johann Jakob, for being sick. The year before, the surgeon had been so weak that he could not climb the stairs to Brahms’s apartment.45 When that October there were festivities marking his fiftieth semester at Vienna University, Billroth wrote Brahms, “The excess of honor and love at my jubilee, was, I admit, wonderful, but it was at the same time a sort of funeral service. I prepared my body with digitalis and other poisons so that I could join in the festivities looking like a well man.”46 Now this old admirer could not find any enthusiasm for Johannes’s new piano miniatures. Billroth wrote his daughter, “I like this type of thing the least except for the Rhapsody in G minor.… Brahms should stick with the great style.”47 Brahms in turn would have sensed the lack of enthusiasm, even if his friend tried to gloss it over.
It came to a head in November, when Brahms played out one of the calculated scenes he was given to now and then. Billroth had invited him to play some of the piano miniatures in his music room, for a gathering of friends. For himself the surgeon wanted to give the pieces another chance. Maybe suspecting what was going on, Brahms sulked and growled in his beard from the beginning of the party. When asked to play the new pieces he balked at going to the piano at all, then sat down and played something else. When asked if that was Bach he sneered, as if he knew Billroth’s appraisal of his new pieces: “Whether Bach or Massenet or me, what difference does it make?” He struck off a few fragments of the new work and then rose imperiously from the piano.
It was a dismal evening and of course Brahms never apologized. Billroth, aged and suffering, was very much hurt, and confirmed in his conviction that such conduct reflected a poor upbringing: “It doesn’t make any difference to him,” Billroth wrote his daughter, “whether serious men are present who are very much devoted to him or whether he has a crowd of rascals as an audience.… In any case this evening has deprived me of any desire to undertake anything similar with Brahms again. He really makes it very difficult for one to keep on loving him.”48 Their friendship would stumble on, mostly in brief notes, but after years of hearing his songs and chamber works regularly in Billroth’s beautiful music room amid delightful gatherings, Brahms never set foot in his friend’s house again.
In January 1893 he went to Meiningen to play in the Clarinet Trio and Second Cello Sonata. Though he was no longer touring as he used to, he spent the month making rounds of friends. After Meiningen he made a reconciliatory visit with Clara in Frankfurt, then went to Hamburg to see old friends including Friedchen Sauerman née Wagner, and finally in Berlin visited Woldemar Bargiel, Heinrich von Herzogenberg,