Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [372]
They all knew that Brahms admired Cherubini as well as Wagner. The explosion at Kalbeck had simply been his contrariness, his obliviousness, his compulsion to put an acolyte in his place. Forty years before it had been Joachim who wrote, “Brahms is egoism incarnate. He knows the weaknesses of the people around him, and he makes use of them, and then does not hesitate to show … that he is crowing over them.”11 In old age, Brahms was unchanged. Usually he was forgiven for the same reasons Joachim forgave him: his essential honesty and decency, his genius.
With friends Brahms pored over his life and career, his upbringing and education, his fears for the future. In February 1896, as he and Richard Heuberger waited for the train back to town after a walk in the Vienna Woods, Brahms rambled on. He spoke of Haydn, who after a lifetime of indefatigable production wrote the expansive oratorios The Creation and The Seasons at the age Brahms was now:
That was a man indeed! How miserable we are in comparison to something like that! And if you ask the reason why everything is going to the devil today … it’s due to those who won’t learn anything. If there’s somebody with a little talent here and there, he certainly won’t learn anything. Even the better ones are like that. Neither Schumann nor Wagner nor I learned anything right. Talent was the decisive thing. Schumann went one way, Wagner the other, I the third way. Yet none of us learned what was right. None had correct schooling.—Ja, afterwards we learned.12
By “school,” scholar Imogen Fellinger speculates, Brahms apparently meant “standing in a continuity of tradition,” and also a mastery of musical technique, above all the rules and regulations and lapidary skills of counterpoint. Brahms envied Mendelssohn’s training; having the best teacher in town brought to the house every day to drill the boy in counterpoint and form from the examples of Bach and Mozart, the teenager writing fugues and quartets and symphonies that his parents hired the finest musicians to play. That was learning, that was a school! “What indescribable efforts it has cost me to recover this lost ground,” Brahms said to Heuberger.13 “Look at France, where a school exists to this day.… Cherubini was the great master from whom everything had proceeded, beside him the excellent Halévy, then Auber, who also mastered his craft to a remarkable degree.” Maybe Heuberger did not know what Brahms omitted: that he saw himself as another Cherubini, his work doomed to be obliterated by the decline of schooling, of art itself.
The train approached. “Really, I don’t know where music is coming from,” Brahms concluded painfully to his young friend. “It seems to me it will completely stop!” On the way home, relenting a little, he praised the fugues of Julius Röntgen. And of course there was Dvořák, “a spontaneous talent, who knows from inside himself what’s right. That belongs on its own page!”14
That March, Clara wrote in her journal, “My evenings are terrible. I am always so exhausted that I can hardly hold up my head, and the pain and sickness are dreadful.… Poor Marie tends me morning and evening, and weeps with me when I am miserable.” On the twenty-sixth she had a slight stroke.15
In the same month, Brahms, Dvořák, Röntgen, and others of the circle sat in the director’s box of the Musikverein for a Grieg concert. (Backstage when Heuberger told the Norwegian that Brahms admired his piano-playing, Grieg sighed, “Oh, that’s just one of his stupid jokes.”16) During Dvořák’s visit Brahms tried to persuade him to move to Vienna and teach at the Conservatory, to be a buttress against the encroaching decline: “Look here, Dvořák, you have a lot of children, and I have practically no one dependent on me. If you need anything, my fortune is at your disposal.” Though he was deeply touched by the offer, Dvořák could not bring himself to leave his beloved Bohemia for Germanic territories.
As the two of them talked, Brahms rambled on about his agnosticism, his growing interest in Schopenhauer