Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [367]
HIS LIFE IN 1894 had been agreeably scattered and patchy, a time of big Brahms concerts and festivals all over the map. In November, Brahms visited Clara and her family, which now included teenaged grandson Ferdinand. Joachim also came to Frankfurt then, to play the Violin Concerto in an all-Brahms program. Ferdinand was fascinated by this first encounter with his grandmother’s celebrated friend, shorter and plumper than he looked in pictures, the mustache gray on one side and fiery red on the other.73
He still had some of the boyish fervor. “It was astonishing,” Eugenie Schumann recalled, “how full of life the house seemed as soon as Brahms set foot in it.” It was as if he had been saving up talk for Clara. News and ideas and jokes and stories poured out of him: an operation Billroth had described to him, Dvořák’s new pieces, plays he had seen, Widmann’s books.74 Joachim could sleep like a rock on tour, Brahms reminisced, but he was a wretched card player. There was a proposal for a monument to Hans von Bülow in Hamburg, but Brahms was against it and refused to contribute: a performer, who leaves nothing behind, is not entitled to a monument.75 Brahms would make the same point in objecting to a Bülow memorial in Vienna: “There’s not even a monument to Wagner yet!”
If he had a performance to give he would put off getting ready, sitting talking with Clara and family and their guests until Marie Schumann prompted, “Herr Brahms, you really must practise now or you won’t play properly at the concert.” He would rise obediently and trudge into the next room, stick a cigar between his teeth, and play pealing arpeggios from one end of the keyboard to the other. “Interesting as this playing was,” Eugenie recalled, “there was always something of a fight or animosity about it. I do not believe that Brahms looked upon the piano as a dear, trusted friend, as my mother did, but considered it a necessary evil.” Often in the morning Eugenie came into the dining room to find Brahms sitting amid clouds of tobacco smoke, and her mother with glowing eyes and a beautiful smile. After so many years and so much pain between them, Clara still looked young when Brahms was around.
There were the shadowed moments too, the explosions from some deep wellspring of sorrow and loneliness. One day he burst out in inexplicable fury to the family who were his dearest friends: “I have no friends! If anybody tells you he is my friend, don’t believe him!” Everyone was speechless. Finally Eugenie said, “But, Herr Brahms, friends are the best gift in this world. Why should you resent them?” He looked at her with wide haunted eyes and said nothing.76
During the November 1894 visit Ferdinand watched one of the marvelous hours, Brahms playing over a new clarinet sonata with Mühlfeld. Clara sat beside Johannes, turning the pages. After each movement they waited for her expressions of pleasure, then Brahms would politely ask, “Shall we go on?” and she would nod with a smile. That night at the end of the all-Brahms orchestral concert there was, recalled Ferdinand, a “hurricane of applause, thunderous bravos and cheers. The orchestra played a fanfare.”
The year 1895 added to the list of all-Brahms celebrations. After one in Leipzig in January, which included the clarinet sonatas played by Mühlfeld and both piano concertos by Eugen d’Albert, Brahms wrote Clara that it was “really one of the most pleasant concert adventures that I have ever had.” This was in the new Gewandhaus, not the one in which the D Minor Piano Concerto had found the worst fiasco of his life. Surely now the noisy success of the D Minor Concerto anywhere in that town was especially gratifying to him. He had always resented Leipzig, and on the whole the city and its musicians had responded in kind. This time the critic of the Signale, the very same who in 1859 had declared the D Minor premiered “to the grave,” felt obliged to report “what can only be described