Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [376]
Brahms returned to Ischl apparently in fair spirits and good appetite, but friends became concerned over his appearance. He looked ill, his skin yellowish. But he got down to work again, now at the chorale preludes for organ that he perhaps never intended to publish. Concerned about Marie and Eugenie Schumann, who had never married and lived with their mother until the end, he wrote Marie Fellinger, “Neither young nor healthy, the poor maidens sit alone in that big house.”29 In July he sent Marie the Vier ernste Gesänge, saying,
These songs really concern you very closely. I wrote them in the first week of May. Some such words as these have long been in my mind, and I did not think that worse news about your mother was to be expected—but deep in the heart of man something often whispers and stirs, quite unconsciously perhaps, which in time may ring out in the form of poetry or music. You will not be able to play the songs yet, because the words would affect you too much, but I beg you to regard them and to lay them aside merely as a death offering to the memory of your dear mother.30
It may have been that July when Gustav Mahler, recently through Brahms’s influence appointed to the Vienna Hofoper, made a visit to Ischl that lives in legend—because of a quip, but one that said much about the divide between Brahms’s generation and the next. As they walked along the River Traun, Brahms was singing his familiar refrain: music was going to the devil, after he was dead it would be finished once and for all. Suddenly Mahler took Brahms’s arm and gestured excitedly toward the river, exclaiming, “Look, Doktor, just look!”
“What is it?” Brahms said, taking the bait.
“Don’t you see?” said Mahler. “There goes the last wave!”
Maybe that got a cheerless chuckle from Brahms. He said only, “That’s all very fine, but maybe what matters is whether the wave goes into the sea or into a swamp.”31 By then, with his usual meticulous care he had studied the score of Mahler’s Second Symphony. That work, with its glowing instrumentation and grandiose Brahmsian close, perhaps intrigued him at the same time as it made him shudder. Yet the second movement, the scherzo with its juxtaposition of the ecstatic and grotesque, Brahms declared a work of genius—a term he did not use lightly. But he also said, “I used to think Richard Strauss was the Chief of the Insurrectionists, but now I see it’s Mahler.”
As Mahler left from that last visit to Ischl, he glanced through the window to have one more look at Brahms. He saw the old man wearily taking a sausage and a slice of bread from the stove for his lunch. It all comes to this, Mahler thought.32
Brahms’s other break from Ischl that summer was a quick trip to Vienna in July, for the silver anniversary of Maria and Richard Fellinger. There are photographs of Brahms in the Fellingers’ garden during the party. He looks just detectably shrunken and strained. The exhaustion he had felt at Clara’s funeral lingered through the summer. One hot day he walked eight miles from Ischl to Steg, further than he had intended, then turned around and walked back most of the way. That night he felt so sick he thought he was going to die; he passed out again and again.
Still, he seemed stunned in July when Richard Heuberger confronted him, saying his eyes and skin looked yellowish and he must see a doctor. Brahms had rarely visited a doctor in his life, though he had submitted to a dentist to have his upper teeth pulled and a plate made. He put up a brief resistance, then held his head in his hands and said to Heuberger, “I’m no hypochondriac.… Nobody has told me that I seem to be altered. I thank you from my heart. You know I don’t like to have anything to do with doctors, but if it’s something serious, it ought to be looked at. But it’s annoying … the few years one has left to live … and to go to the doctor!”
Three weeks later, at the end of July, Brahms called on Dr. Hertzka in Ischl. He received a diagnosis of jaundice and an order to take a cure in Karlsbad. The doctor also placed