Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [365]
The connection of Brahms and Klinger is most compelling in relation to Brahms the atavist, who kept up with everything that was happening but preferred rereading Hoffmann and Jean Paul and Goethe to steeping himself in modern artists. Yet Klinger seized him. His efforts to get Clara Schumann, Joachim, and Hanslick excited about that artist failed—he was looking further ahead than they were. Still, Klinger is no full-fledged Modernist, and it is hard to imagine that Brahms could have countenanced the kind of painting Van Gogh, Cézanne, Monet, and any number of others were doing in the 1880s and 90s—or the kind of music Debussy was writing. Richard Strauss’s tone poems, the ne plus ultra of the avant-garde in the 1890s, repulsed him.
Klinger is more a transitional figure between Romanticism and Modernism, influenced by the French Symbolists, foreshadowing Surrealism and other creative exploitations of the Freudian unconscious. At the same time, Klinger was grounded in Romanticism, with a pre-Freudian sense of the mysterious and unreachable. In embracing Klinger, Brahms once more revealed, as he had in his own B Minor Intermezzo, how far he was willing to advance into the future.
IT WAS A BAD FEBRUARY for Brahms in 1894, worse for his friends. Theodor Billroth died in Vienna that month, and six days later Hans von Bülow died in Cairo, where he had gone in hopes of a cure for racking illnesses. Brahms’s last note to Billroth had been an answer to some of the surgeon’s queries about folk music, to which Brahms wearily replied, “I most certainly know that where the rhythmic and melodic movement of the songs has for me more and more interest, your interest would be totally absent.” The letter upset the surgeon in his last days, and his wife never forgave Brahms for it. That guilt hung over him after his friend died, and maybe was the reason he avoided the huge procession that accompanied the casket to the Grave of Honor in the Central Cemetery—the kind of burial Vienna liked to give its great men.
As he walked to the graveyard through back streets with Max Kalbeck, Brahms reminisced about the nearly thirty years of friendship since he and Billroth met in Zürich in 1865. “Billroth was attracted to my music at a time when most people didn’t want to hear any of it; this friendship has been a gift of fortune, and his warm enthusiasm has become a necessity to me.” After the funeral he wrote Clara, “The grief over Billroth’s death is extraordinarily widespread, but you cannot possibly have any idea how unique is the manifestation of sympathy in all circles here. His death had been long expected and for his sake was to be desired.” And to Widmann: “I wish you could witness, as I do, what it means to be loved in Vienna.… Others don’t wear their hearts so openly; they don’t show their love as warmly as they do here, and I mean the best of them—I mean the real people, the ones who occupy the cheapest seats in the theater.”65
The second death, Bülow, left Brahms so shaken that he could not bring himself to write a note to the widow in Hamburg. He asked Bürgermeister Petersen’s daughter to buy a wreath for the funeral, and gave money in the conductor’s memory to two institutions for musicians. When Fritz Simrock made those anonymous gifts public, Brahms was furious: “Now I look like any vulgar benefactor!”66 In April, J. A. Spitta, the pioneering Bach biographer whom Brahms had known and corresponded with for years, died in Berlin just as Brahms sent him some folk song settings to look over.67 Brahms began to repeat his aphorism: “Life robs one of more than death.”
In the middle of that wave of loss washing over him, the most brutal of ironies