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So we do not know what went through his mind as he studied the most dazzling of the Fantasies, called Akkorde (Chords), in which a pianist plays pealing harmonies beside a stormy seascape that tosses a ship; beyond that lie cloud-swirled mountains with strange temples, and beneath the pianist sea sprites reach toward a wildly carved harp, perhaps that of the Schicksalslied. In the picture scholar Leon Botstein sees “dimensions of communication,” the pianist an immediate reality whose playing evokes vistas of imagination that spread through the picture, “a narrative within the imaginary world” of nature, spirits, muses, myths.58 What appealed to Brahms’s imagination in Klinger’s pictures was their intangibility, their paradox of unfathomable mysteries lucidly delineated: a narrative of unbounded imagination.

He wrote Klinger with perhaps deliberate ambiguity, “I often envy you with your pencil for being able to be so precise; I am often glad that I do not need to be.”59 A pencil can be precise about the intangible, but he preferred to withdraw even further than that, into the endlessly suggestive enigmas of tones. But Brahms also told the artist, “Seeing them it is as if the music resounded further into eternity, and everything that I might have wished to say was said, more clearly than music can, and still so filled with secrets and foreboding.”60

It is startling to find Brahms declaring that a visual artist can deepen the mystery of his own art, its secrets and foreboding, and in that way somehow complete the music. With that suggestion Brahms touched on New German themes, and he was even more forthright when he wrote Klinger, “all art is the same and speaks the same language.”61 With Liszt and Wagner gone, he was prepared to accept a kind of unity of the arts, if not a Gemsantkunstwerk. At least that seems to be what he saw in Klinger—drawing that approached the mystery of music.

Klinger had an indelible memory of standing in the living room at Karlsgasse as Brahms opened the Fantasy on top of the piano and turned through them slowly, studying each page with manifest delight, reveling in this echo of his work. Maybe there Brahms was paid for his labor in the coin he valued most: artistry answered by artistry.

There was another artist whom Brahms took up in those years, more conservative in style than Klinger and in fact a considerable influence on Feuerbach. This was Arnold Böcklin, whose personal and intensely evocative reflections of Classical imagery can be seen in his most famous painting, The Isle of the Dead: a boat with sails furled drifts toward an island of towering rocks and gigantic cedars looming over a mysterious Classical temple. Brahms visited Böcklin’s studio in 1885 and saw the painting Centaur at the Village Blacksmith, and the two men got along well. The painter had notions about evocation in pictures that Brahms probably found sympathetic: an image should “touch the eye,” he said, “without having to explain or describe the effect with words,” to create a “felt impression” beyond the explicit, like music.62

In other words, Klinger and Böcklin, late enthusiasms for Brahms who rarely took up living artists, rang his yearning for the inexpressible. At the same time, like Feuerbach, they shaped elements of tradition—images from history and mythology—into a personal expression: not really neoclassical but something more integral, original, and ultimately Romantic: secrets and foreboding.63 At the same time, in taking up Klinger, Brahms unknowingly made a connection to the future, to Modernism, by way of Klinger the proto-surrealist, creator of the Beethoven sculpture that someday would form the centerpiece of an exhibition of the Vienna Secession, and inspire a fantastical work from Klinger’s friend Gustav Klimt.

In 1894, Brahms read Julius Allgeyer’s biography of Anselm Feuerbach, which he had encouraged Allgeyer to write. Around the same time he bought collections of Böcklin prints and received from Max Klinger a special printing of the Brahms Fantasy on Japanese paper. Since