Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [360]
The musical world, meanwhile, was aware of an approaching landmark: Brahms’s sixtieth birthday. He was unaffectedly pleased when, on Viktor Miller’s initiative, the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde struck a gold medal of him. Otherwise, his response to the approach of his birthday, and to the flood of deaths around him, was to bolt the scene. In the middle of April, with Josef Widmann and Zürich friends Friedrich Hegar and Robert Freund in tow, Brahms headed for familiar foreign ports. The world could send him birthday congratulations in Italy, if the world could find him.
The friends ate and drank and sightsaw their way through Genoa and Pisa and Rome and Naples, made a side trip to Sorrento, took a ship from Naples to Palermo, and so on for weeks, with sojourns in Brahms’s beloved Taormina. “Fortunately my sixty years come very little into my reckoning,” he reported to Clara, “but I was always bad at arithmetic. On our travels I was certainly the most vigorous and had the most staying power. I was always last to bed and first to rise, though my three traveling companions are much younger men.”49 The trip had been a pleasure much of the way, even if at the outset Brahms had managed to lose all his cash. “I cheerfully concluded that it was merely a sacrifice to the gods, and hoped that it might suffice them. But as luck would have it, they demanded more.”
With the last he was referring to an incident on the boat from Messina to Naples, when a crane knocked Widmann into the hold. The fall might have killed him if his foot had not caught in an iron ring—but he broke his leg. So Brahms spent his sixtieth birthday at the bedside of his crippled friend. Shaken by the painful scene when a doctor set the break, Brahms joked through clenched teeth, “I’m your man if it comes to cutting! I was always Billroth’s assistant in such things.” As he sat with Widmann he read over the telegrams of birthday congratulations. After seeing Widmann and Hegar onto the train to Bern, he boarded his own train for Vienna. He had seen his beloved Italy for the last time.
On May 13 came the ceremony of presenting the Gesellschaft’s gold medal. Designed with a profile of Brahms by Anton Scharff, it was struck in gold for the honoree and dozens more were minted in silver and bronze. At the ceremony Brahms was almost too overcome to speak, but finally he choked out, “I feel myself more shamed than pleased by this great honor. Thirty years ago I would have found the joy and responsibility to make myself worthy of such a distinction. But now it’s too late.”50
IN BAD ISCHL in summer 1893 he got back to his piano miniatures, sending them to Clara as they were finished. Among them was the extraordinary B Minor Intermezzo, in which falling chains of thirds form almost Debussyan ninth and eleventh chords, and create a sighing, dreamlike atmosphere.
Brahms wrote Clara.
I should very much like to know how you get on with it. It teems with discords. These may be all right and quite explicable, but you may not perhaps like them.… It is exceptionally melancholy.… Every bar and every note must be played as if ritardando were indicated, and one wished to draw the melancholy out of each one of them, and voluptuous joy and comfort out of the discords. My God, how will this description whet your appetite?
Her response surprised him: “You must have known how enthusiastic I should be when you were copying out that bittersweet piece which, for all its discords, is so wonderful. No, one actually revels in the discords, and, when playing them, wonders how the composer ever brought them to birth. Thank you for this new, magnificent gift!” Later she called the B Minor a “gray pearl.” He responded with relief and a touch of irony: “I must write