Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [38]
Bursts of fighting continued into the next year. Lajos Kossuth led Hungary in proclaiming independence from Austria, but in August 1849, Austria reclaimed Hungary by force at Vilagos. In May of that year, Richard Wagner, Kapellmeister of the court of Dresden, ascended a church steeple to direct rebel forces against Prussian troops, and watched his opera house burn down during the fighting. Within days the Prussians had suppressed the Dresden rebellion; Wagner fled an arrest warrant to live in exile from Germany for eleven years.29 Also in Dresden that month, Clara and Robert Schumann were driven from their back door with their oldest child by fighting in the streets. Clara, seven months pregnant, returned through the fields in the middle of the night to face down armed men and lead her other children to safety.30
Progressive forces lost out everywhere in that flare of revolution, yet after the explosions the pieces came down in quite different configurations. In German lands the time before the March revolutions would be given its own name: Vormärz, Before March. With the end of that gemütlich era (only later called the Biedermeier) also ended Metternich’s regime that had made Austria into a police state, with a full complement of censors and spies. The next decades would see the rise to power of Austrian liberalism by means of parliamentary rule. Across Europe the period after 1849 would be marked by lingering unrest but also by prosperity and relative peace around Europe—the Age of Speculators, it has been called, in Germany the Gründerzeit, and in Vienna the Ringstrasse Era. For the moment, Realpolitik and bourgeois prosperity triumphed over ideology. The situation would suit music, and Brahms, very well.
The revolutions of 1848–49 stayed distant from Hamburg, in its far corner of Germany. Citizens went about their business and kept going to concerts. One of the less noticed programs came on September 21, 1848, the first recital with Johannes Brahms as principal. He shared the program with a local soprano, violinist, cellist, and clarinetist, whom he accompanied. His solo pieces, mostly conventionalities of the time, included a virtuosic fantasy on themes from Rossini’s William Tell by Döhler and a Marxsen serenade for the left hand, but also a Bach fugue—the last generally perceived as too intellectual for a normal program.
He gave a second recital on April 14, 1849, this time advertised in the paper with apparently good results in attendance. The program was a potpourri similar to the last, but in addition to the requisite virtuoso piece—Thalberg’s Don Juan Fantasy—Johannes played Beethoven’s fiery and difficult Waldstein Sonata. And there was a novelty, “Fantasia for Piano on a Favorite Waltz, composed and performed by the concert-giver.” Thus Brahms made his debut as a composer, with a little salon piece. Later—history, biography, and sentimentality notwithstanding—he exterminated it.
His teacher Marxsen wrote another anonymous polite review for the paper. Then, gauging the results of these two efforts, Marxsen discouraged more recitals. In a memoir he wrote that his student’s time “seemed to me too precious, as interludes of this kind often upset a man’s studies very considerably. At any rate, the press always spoke of these first attempts with great appreciation.”31 He was joking with the last, because most of the appreciation had come from himself.
In fact the programs generated no particular enthusiasm. Brahms had