Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [363]
To that Brahms replied: “ ‘Feeling is everything!’ That’s fine for an examination on religion for a young Fräulein! But we have to have more concern than for the moment; Goethe preaches this so impressively with words and deeds appertaining to art.” By that he means that every moment in a work must also be understood in the context of the whole. He was even more exasperated by the naïveté of Billroth’s theories, such as that cultures only arrive at major keys in the higher stages of development. Sighing, Brahms sent over some folk songs intended to demonstrate the uselessness of such notions. Billroth persevered, but he knew he was not thinking all that clearly. He wrote Brahms in December 1893, “I have such dreadful pains in my left leg that I can scarcely move around. The pain was so violent at night that I took a good deal of morphine, and because of that I’m hardly in a frame of mind to distinguish major and minor.”54
That December Alice Barbi, still Brahms’s favorite singer but now about to marry an Italian aristocrat and retire from performing, presented her farewell concert in Vienna. There was a gasp from the audience when, instead of the advertised accompanist, Brahms lumbered onstage and sat down at the piano. They performed four of his songs, including “Der Tod, das ist die Kühle Nacht.”
If that final cadence of a personal and artistic collaboration was a bittersweet pleasure for Brahms, a new collaboration of a sort appeared in January 1894, when he received a series of forty-one engravings, etchings, and lithographs called Brahms Fantasy, by the Leipzig artist Max Klinger. Years before, Klinger had dedicated his series Amor and Psyche to Brahms. This new Fantasy was all interpretations, in the artist’s most visionary mode, of the impact Brahms had upon him.
Brahms had known Klinger’s work since the 1870s, when Fritz Simrock commissioned the artist to engrave covers for pieces including the Schicksalslied. For some time Brahms had been dubious about the eccentric, haunted style of the pictures, and about the whole idea of illustration. He wrote Simrock in 1885, “That would be fine, if I wrote things with titles like Kreisleriana, Humoreske, Phantasiestücke, Noveletten, Karneval! I doubt, though, that a simple title of Sonata can suggest anything in particular to him.”55 But as he pored over Klinger’s work Brahms fell into its aura, and so a new figure joined Anselm Feuerbach in his private pantheon of visual artists.
In much of his work this artist grounded himself in the same Classical imagery as Feuerbach, but he took that influence in more idiosyncratic directions. Brahms understood that Klinger, with his strangely gesticulating figures and roiling seas and pianists surrounded by spirits, was not trying to do a pictorial “interpretation” of particular pieces (a familiar game with Wagner-inspired artists in those days), but rather to create a visual analogy to music itself: a compelling design of symbols that elude explanation. Brahms wrote Clara about the Fantasy, “They are not really illustrations in the ordinary sense, but magnificent and wonderful fantasias inspired by my [vocal] texts.”56 And he wrote Widmann, “They are perfectly fascinating, and seem to be intended to make one forget all the miserable things of the world, and to lift one into higher spheres. The more one studies them with the eye the more the mind seems to discern their inner meaning.”57 Brahms never spelled out what Klinger’s inner meanings said to him, any more than he would have done so in relation to his own work. But for all their oddities these pictures rang old Romantic, Hoffmannesque, Kreisleresque chords in Brahms: music as an echo of another, greater,