Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [379]
On January 2, 1897, Joachim’s group had a tremendous success in Vienna with the G Major Quintet. Only occasionally in his last years had the two men been able to bear seeing each other, but the violinist had never slackened in championing the music. Brahms listened to the quintet from the artist’s room, declaring that he would not take a bow. But the applause went on so long that he was obliged to come out on the platform. The audience gasped at the sight of his brownish-green complexion, stringy hair, shrunken frame and bony hands, and they redoubled their cheers.
On February 12 he was in good spirits with Heuberger, talking shop. In lesser religious pieces, he said, Christ was a tenor, whereas in the greatest ones—mainly the Bach Passions—Christ was a bass, a man. Brahms admitted to Heuberger that he was getting weaker, but observed resignedly, “Food and drink are still good and so long as that’s good, I’ll eat and drink away! When I see that no longer works, then I’ll go to the Rudolfinerhaus [the hospital Billroth founded].”43
Death advanced on him, slowly here, quickly there, agonizingly, gently, matter-of-factly. A stroke on February 18 temporarily paralyzed the left side of his face. His appetite finally declined and that shook him, though doctors permitted unlimited wine, and morphine when there was pain. He took out his old notebook “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein” and in a trembling hand wrote down a few more pieces of wisdom. From Bismarck: “After nine o’clock it’s all over, says the actor.” From Luther: “As the musicians, when you ask them, won’t sing, but when you don’t ask them, then they can’t quit.” And the last, from Solomon: “But no man knows either the love or the hate that he has before him.”44
He spent much of the days now looking out his windows at the portico and minarets and dome of the Karlskirche. And he sat before the parlor stove reading through old letters and musical manuscripts he had held back, burning them one after another. “It’s so sad,” was all he said when friends found him surrounded by papers, before a stove full of ashes.45
INEVITABLY CAME the last time he heard his music in public, the matinee of the Vienna Philharmonic on March 7. Hans Richter had, for a change, carefully rehearsed the Fourth Symphony, so that the orchestra would play at their magnificent best. Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde conductor Richard von Perger accompanied Brahms to the Musikverein. As they turned up the stairs Perger went on ahead. Brahms called up peevishly in his cracked tenor, “Don’t just skip up ahead of me like that, youngster!” He faltered, “Ja, ja, I’m done for.…” But when Perger offered to give a hand Brahms snapped, “Don’t talk nonsense! I’m not an old lady!”46 He struggled up the stairs to the director’s box.
And the Golden Hall rocked with cheers after every movement of the symphony. Surely in Brahms’s mind there was a sense of a coda, a great cadence in that half hour of his most despairing work. It had come to this, these minor chords. If at moments Brahms still hoped for long life, he knew that it was past dark and the comedy nearly done. It had come to this, so he wept.
At the end of the symphony the ovation roared on and on, hats and handkerchiefs waving all over the hall, men of the Philharmonic on their feet bellowing and waving along with the crowd. Brahms stood weeping quietly in the torrent of love the Viennese were giving him, his wasted hands clutching the balustrade. Finally, with a nod of his head he stepped back, and the Golden Hall saw him no more.47
A WEEK after hearing the Fourth Symphony in the Musikverein Brahms did rouse himself to go out for one more performance. In company with Hanslick he slipped into the premiere of his friend Johann Strauss’s operetta Göttin der Vernunft at the Theater an der Wien. But after the first act he asked for a cab home. A week later he was brought to a rehearsal near his apartment at the