Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [382]
As Brahms lay on his deathbed, Heinrich von Herzogenberg wrote Josef Joachim, “For thirty-five years I have asked myself with every note I composed: ‘What will Brahms think of this?’ … He was my ambition, my impetus, my courage.”1 Joachim, who had been touring in England when Brahms died, wrote a friend in Rome: “I often think sadly of the last pleasure it was in our power to give him.… I have never heard him express his gratitude so warmly as after listening to his G Major Quintet; he seemed almost satisfied with his work. We still have his works—as an individual I counted for little with him during the last years of his life.”2
Along with the wave of laudatory obituaries and eulogies came others like the one by a critic of the Fremden-Blatt: “Against the symphonic world-ideas of Beethoven, Brahms’s symphonies express only the private thoughts and private meanings of a clever man.”3 That charge would be echoed many times, because it was partly true. Thereby Brahms, whatever his popularity with legions of concertgoers, slipped into irrelevance in the scholarly and aesthetic dialogue. He would remain in that position for a century.
During that century the heritage of Brahms lay more in the sheer popularity of his music than in his influence on the polyphonic revolutions of Modernism. In his own time, besides his favored performers, who had been prominent in his camp except Hanslick the naysayer and a collection of composers like Fuchs and Röntgen and Herzogenberg—all competent and admirable, but in the end mediocre? (Dvořák being the shining exception to that rule.) As a bulwark against the New German/Wagnerian propaganda machine lay mainly Hanslick’s little pamphlet On Beauty in Music, with its doctrine of absolute music that even Brahms could hardly swallow. Thus the futility of Perger’s graveside vow to keep the legacy together in Brahms’s own terms, and thus the seeming irrelevance of Brahms to the Modernist era.
By the turn of the last century before the millennium, Wagner’s world-ideas were some of the most influential in the Western artistic milieu. In Austria and Germany the reactionary antisemitic nationalism that he helped inspire eventually culminated in violent and world-threatening forms. In the arts, the period called Modern became a vast, sprawling movement, different in every art, splintering into subdivisions from Primitivism to Futurism, Surrealism to Serialism (and including Modernists who claimed to despise Modernism). All the while a necessary underpinning for this Babel was the one Wagner and the New Germans proclaimed in the middle of the nineteenth century: the creator as high priest in the religion of art, not the entertainer of the public but a revolutionary leader to whom the masses owe understanding. For the duration of Modernism, even if the nature and extent of his victory is hard to pin down, Wagner had won the War of Romantics that raged between the two camps in the nineteenth century.
Early in this century, in the concert hall and opera house the competing camps receded into history. Now both Wagner and Brahms were counted among the gods. A Viennese silhouette-panorama made after Brahms’s death shows Bruckner and Wagner at the head of the composers welcoming him into heaven. (If so, he might have put on his hat and struck out for hell.) Brahms, Wagner, and Bruckner were embraced by right and left, each in its own terms.
At the same time the terms of the relationship between artist and public had changed, and in Wagner’s direction. For Brahms and his contemporaries, the middle-class audience had acted as a brake on the burgeoning Romantic imagination. Only at the end of his life did Brahms say he was writing entirely for himself. Until then he wrote for himself first, then for his friends, then for the bourgeois concertgoing public for whom people like Elisabet von Herzogenberg and Theodor Billroth