Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [378]
Then he began joking about losing weight, saying he had exchanged his rounded Romanesque physique for a pointed Gothic arch. In fact he looked wretched: gaunt, eyes yellow, skin yellow going to brown and papery. Eventually his complexion became almost ivy-green. He told Kalbeck that at home he kept the piano closed most of the time, never played or listened to music anymore, just sat and read through Bach scores. He needed company more than ever. He dined out steadily with friends old and new—the Fellingers, Fabers, Millers, Kalbecks, Heubergers, a number of others, all of them leading figures in the business and artistic Grossbürgertum of Vienna. He continued to attend concerts, trying to convince himself and everybody else that everything was as always. But now he sometimes fell asleep at table or in the theater box.
Brahms’s incapacity to face his dying straight on was more than being unused to illness. Dying was the first thing in his adult life he had not been able to figure out, to conquer by force of will, or to flee. At least one day during those months he was practical enough to spend several hours with the Fellingers discussing a new will to replace one he had written at Ischl in 1891, in the form of a letter to Fritz Simrock. Since then his sister and his cousin Christian Detmering had died, so he needed to make changes in the disposition of his estate.
Fellinger drafted a new will with all his requirements. Brahms needed only to copy it out, date it, and sign. Instead, heading out for a dinner when Fellinger arrived with the draft, Brahms stuck it in a drawer and never got around to signing it. The result would be eighteen years of litigation over his estate, with distant relatives as far away as Chicago making claims on it.39 He always said he was no good with finances; here was the proof. Eventually most of the money—some 50,000 crowns—was parceled out to those relatives, not to his stepbrother Fritz Schnack as Brahms had intended. His scores, historic manuscripts, library, and what papers were left went mostly to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, as he had wished. Eventually the papers included many letters he had asked to be destroyed or returned to the senders.
He knew he was dying and he didn’t want to know. Everyone played along with the game. Yet it was unmistakable that something had gone out of him. Though much of the shoptalk and gossip and conviviality was the same, he had gone limp, inside and out. As symptom he became kindlier, at one point exclaiming in wonder at himself, “I’ve even given up being rude to people!”40 Several times he went to visit Theodor Billroth’s widow and children in St. Gilgen. Once, when he was very sick, he sat Billroth’s grandchildren on his knees and stared moist-eyed into their faces for a long time. They looked much like their grandfather.41
By the end of the year his condition had become impossible to ignore. As he sat down to dinner at his friend Hugo Conrat’s at the beginning of December, he groaned to the hostess, “If you knew how wretched I feel!” During that dinner he warmed up and joked a little. A week later he told Heuberger that he could no longer enjoy life, though he still ate and slept well. They talked about Richard Strauss’s new tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, which purports to express in music the eponymous work by Nietzsche. Liszt and his followers had done poetry, novels, patriotic programs with the orchestra; now Strauss proposed to express philosophy. “Have you seen the end?” Brahms said, “B major and C major together! I wouldn’t have anything against it, if something would happen in both keys that in itself was really compelling and inescapable. But like that?”
He spent Christmas Eve with the Fellingers, then invited himself to meals there on the next