Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [370]
After a moment he asked Eugenie to get a particular volume of Beethoven Sonatas from the shelf. In it he pointed out a place where Clara had long ago corrected a mistake that had appeared in every edition. “No other musician has an ear like that,” he said.
It came time to say good-bye, his train was due. They embraced and kissed, as always. Brahms had dispatched young Ferdinand to get him some of his favorite Caporal tobacco and packs of cigarette paper. When her grandson arrived with the goods and Brahms was stuffing them in his bag, Clara asked Johannes what he was going to do with all that tobacco.
“Smuggle it through, Clara!” he said laughing, and set off for the train. They never saw each other again.4
IN OCTOBER, Brahms went to Zürich to conduct the Triumphlied for the inauguration of the new Tonhalle. Looking up at the paintings on the ceiling, he saw portraits of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and himself. On December 1 there was a performance of the First Symphony by Hans Richter and the Philharmonic. Suspecting what was going to happen—the piece had never gone over well in Vienna—Brahms went for a walk during the concert. Heuberger reported that it had been “bad, without understanding, and unpoetically played.” Brahms replied bitterly, “Well, if my symphony were really such insipid stuff, so gray and mezzoforte as Richter performed it for people today, then the people who speak of the ‘brooding, melancholy Brahms’ would be right.”5
A couple of weeks later there was a dinner in Zum roten Igel with Mandyczewski and Antonin Dvořák, who regaled them with stories from the two years he had just spent in America. (The following February, Richter’s Vienna premiere of Dvořák’s New World Symphony would make a sensation.) While Dvořák was away, Brahms had edited his music for Simrock. Here and there he discreetly cleaned up his careless Czech friend’s counterpoint.
Another holiday, lighting the tree on Christmas Eve with Frau Truxa and the boys, next day dinner at the Fellingers. And then it was 1896. That year Alban Berg was eleven, Anton Webern thirteen, Igor Stravinsky fourteen, Béla Bartók fifteen, Charles Ives twenty-two, Claude Debussy thirty-four, and Gustav Mahler thirty-six. Brahms was sixty-three, Joseph Joachim sixty-five, Karl Goldmark sixty-six, Theodor Kirchner seventy-three, and Giuseppe Verdi eighty-three. That year Richard Strauss wrote Also sprach Zarathustra, Mahler his Third Symphony, and Puccini La Bohème. And Arnold Schoenberg, at age twenty-two, composed his D Major String Quartet.
On a visit, Alexander von Zemlinsky showed Brahms the Schoenberg quartet. (Zemlinsky had become something like the mentor for Schoenberg that Brahms had been for Zemlinsky.) The old man was intrigued with the music and asked about this new name. Zemlinsky said that for years this promising composer had been doing workaday musical copying and arranging to get by. Immediately Brahms offered to supply him with a stipend to study at the Conservatory. When Zemlinsky went to Schoenberg with the offer, the young man proudly turned it down.6
Schoenberg must have seen the old-fashioned figure of Brahms in the streets and concert halls of Vienna, but there is no record that he ever shook Brahms’s hand. In his creative maturity, just a decade and a half from then, Schoenberg would challenge much of what Brahms believed to be eternal in music: tonality, lyric melody, an abiding loyalty to the bourgeois audience. All of it changed under the assaults of Schoenberg, his pupils Webern and Berg, his followers, his time. Yet Schoenberg the revolutionary would declare himself a traditionalist, and count himself among the most