Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [368]
In February Brahms was back with Clara in Frankfurt for more concerts, this time in ill humor. Clara could not stand his piano playing in the clarinet sonatas, and as the applause at the end of the concert pealed on and on, he made a scene in the curtain call: when as an attempt at homage the first violinist refused to take a bow with him he physically ejected another player out the stage door ahead of him. The audience laughed, but the performers were outraged at Brahms, and he with them.77 Everybody swore never to play together again.
The next month he led the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde Conservatory Orchestra in the Academic Festival Overture, part of a concert to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Musikverein. As he conducted the piece in the Golden Hall, Max Kalbeck saw him over and over press his left hand to his breast, meaning: From the heart, from the heart!78 It was the last time he conducted in Vienna.
On his birthday in May, Brahms, Heuberger, and other friends from the Tonkünstlerverein took in a famous gypsy band at the Prater. Brahms greeted the men like colleagues and praised them extravagantly; clearly the band recognized him, and gave him a verse of “Hoch soll er leben!”—“Long may he live!” After dinner the friends indulged in the amusements of the Wurstlprater, ending around midnight with the big slide and the haunted house. On the way home Brahms outdistanced his companions and drew Heuberger with him, to rave about a new collection of Bismarck’s speeches he was reading: “And most of it is impromptu … an improvisation. A colossal spirit! And eighty years old!” Wilhelm II had fired the Iron Chancellor in 1890, but neither Brahms’s loyalty to the Prussian throne nor his admiration for Bismarck had flagged. He would pore over the speeches for the rest of his life.
His days now seemed to be a cheerful skipping from celebration to acclamation, but through it all he carried abiding apprehensions. The day before he left for Ischl in midmonth there was a somber gathering of the Brahms circle at Zum roten Igel. The Christian Socialists under Karl Lueger had just won the election, ending the long liberal rule once and for all. Lueger had been elected vice-mayor of Vienna as the summit of a brilliant political career that mixed populism, socialism, and pandering to the antisemitic instincts of both the working class and the German-speaking Catholics and aristocrats. With Lueger’s victory, successful politics in Austria became antisemitic by definition, from then until Hitler.
In fact, Emperor Franz Josef would refuse to allow Lueger to take office as mayor until he had been elected five times. But that night of May 1895 in the Igel, when Lueger had become vice-mayor and sooner or later was inevitably going to ascend to power, Brahms barked across the table to his friends: “Didn’t I tell you years ago that it was going to happen? You laughed at me then and everybody else did too. Now it’s here, and with it the priests’ economic system. If there was an ‘Anticlerical Party’—that would make sense! But antisemitism is madness!”79
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Who Shall Bring Him to That Place?
IF BRAHMS COMPOSED ANYTHING in Bad Ischl in the summer of 1895, he did not talk about it. He may have been working on a series of organ preludes, but that year would be the first since 1872 that he released nothing. The recent deaths of friends weighed on him, along with the labors and wounds of a long life in the public gaze. One day as he and Heuberger dined, Brahms was reminiscing about his father’s second marriage when suddenly he clutched his fist to his heart and groaned, “Apart from Frau Schumann I’m not attached to anybody with my whole soul! And truly that is terrible and one should neither think such a thing nor say it. Is that not a lonely life! Yet we can’t believe in immortality on the other side. The only true immortality lies in one’s children.”
Calming, he spoke of the Schumanns: “It’s the most beautiful memory of my life, to have been close to these