Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [377]
“But no goulash?” Brahms asked anxiously.
“Absolutely not!”
“Really?” Brahms groaned, but added slyly, “Then I’m going to tell people I didn’t see you till tomorrow, and eat goulash at the Eibenschützes’ today—after all, it was cooked especially for me.”33
Protesting, he made his reservation in Karlsbad. With his healthy man’s habit of seeing illness as a sort of moral failure, Brahms dubbed his condition “my petit-bourgeois jaundice.” Visiting Viktor Miller’s villa just before he saw the doctor, Brahms seemed in high spirits: in a photo he stands between two laughing attractive women, Viktor’s wife Olga and their daughter, brandishing his cigar and looking roguish.
He stopped off in Vienna, then headed for Karlsbad in early September. The petit-bourgeois jaundice had gotten worse. He arrived in Karlsbad feeling poorly on September 3, then seemed to respond to the cure and the scene. Soon he was working at the organ chorale preludes and writing letters to friends in his vacation mode. To Hanslick: “I am grateful to my jaundice for having at last brought me to famous Karlsbad. I was at once greeted by glorious weather.… What is more, I have an absolutely charming lodging.”34 To Widmann: “My indisposition need not make you in the least uneasy: it is quite a commonplace jaundice, which unfortunately has the idiosyncrasy of not wanting to go away. But it has no further significance, as affirmed by the doctors.… Besides, I have not had pain or suchlike for a single day—nor even lost my appetite for a single meal.”35
In Vienna that autumn Richard Heuberger ran into Dr. Schrötter, a specialist who had earlier examined Brahms. The doctor kept shaking his head saying, “Poor fellow! Poor fellow!” When Heuberger said that Brahms was in Karlsbad taking a cure, the doctor could only respond, “For Brahms’s illness there is no Karlsbad! It doesn’t make any difference where he spends his money!”36
At the resort Brahms consulted a Dr. Grünberger. The physician asked to examine him a second time, privately hoping it was not as bad as it looked. The second examination confirmed his worst fears. On September 3, 1896, the doctor noted in his book: “Hr. Johannes Brahms—Wien. hep. hyp. m.” It stands for hepatitis hypertrophia maligna, cancer of the liver. The same had killed Johann Jakob Brahms.37 The doctor did not reveal the diagnosis to his patient, who had expressly requested, Widmann reports, “on no account to tell him anything unpleasant.”38
At the same time it is clear that soon enough Brahms came to understand that he was under a death sentence. There were many evidences of it, but the most poignant were his neo-Baroque choral preludes for organ, eventually eleven, part of a larger planned set that he never finished composing. Most of the old chorales on which he based the pieces concern death, and two are based on “O Welt, ich muss dich lassen”: “O world, I must leave thee.” The preludes would be found in his apartment after he died.
He returned to Vienna at the beginning of October, trying to convince himself he was on the mend. He told everyone he could not be getting thinner because his clothes fit just the same. In fact, his housekeeper Frau Truxa had quietly been taking them up, in hopes he would not notice how much weight he was losing. Most of the time, he felt miserable.
On October 11, Anton Bruckner died. Wearily, Brahms descended the stairs to attend the funeral next door at the Karlskirche. He arrived to be told he was late and the church full. An attendant offered to let him in, but Brahms shook his head and turned away, muttering, it is said, “Never mind. Soon my coffin.”
His condition went up and down, inevitably more down than up. On some occasions he was his old joking self in company, at other times subdued, drifting, visibly in pain though he rarely admitted it. He continued through the autumn to try to put the best face on his condition. At a dinner in October he reported to Heuberger that he felt better, was eating and drinking fine, and the doctor had permitted him half a bottle of