Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [385]
On Good Friday of the April when Brahms died, Emperor Franz Josef finally conceded the inevitable and allowed Karl Lueger to take office as Mayor of Vienna. It was the last nail in the coffin of liberal political power. Lueger and his Christian Socialists, with their blend of socialism and antisemitism, would remake Vienna in fateful ways.
In the April Brahms died, the Austrian Parliament passed the disastrous Bardeni Ordinance, which made the Czech language equal to German in communications among government departments. The German-speaking populace erupted in outrage. That autumn saw brawling in the streets and bedlam in Parliament. Shock waves spread through the tottering Empire. Parliamentary government, bastion of the liberals, sank into paralysis.
Two days after Brahms died, the Vienna Opera announced the appointment of Gustav Mahler as new Kapellmeister. After his debut in May, the Deutsche Zeitung commented that even if Mahler had gotten himself baptized in order to be accepted by the Opera, “That does not change the facts at all, that at this stage in one of the few non-Judaized artistic institutions in Vienna, from now on a Jew will be in a position to call the tune. The consequences will be inevitable: the Viennese public will not be held to blame for the proper response to this violation of its patent wishes.”8
A number of well-educated, liberal Jews had signed on to the early nationalistic and even antisemitic manifestos, until they realized that the underlying agenda had to do not with culture but with blood and race, and so every Jew was tainted by birth. In 1896 Theodor Herzl, a journalist and an archetypal assimilated Viennese Jew, published his epochal Zionist manifesto The Jewish State, his answer to the threat gathering around the people he could no longer help belonging to. Vienna had become the territory that Karl Kraus called “The Proving-Ground for World Destruction,” and that Adolf Hitler declared in Mein Kampf “the hardest but the most thorough school.”9
During the preceding decades, which saw Vienna’s (deceptive) golden years and a general peace and prosperity across Europe, Brahms had perfected an art evolving, fresh, utterly distinctive, in many ways prophetic, yet grounded in a conservative set of principles and techniques that he called eternal. For all his singularity, he stands as the model of a middle-class mainstream art at its most vital—and he is one of the last such figures. Malcolm MacDonald calls Brahms “Janus …, the spirit of beginnings and endings, who looks both ways at once, to the past and to the future.”10 Moreover, Brahms proved that the kind of historical eclecticism which compromised the extravagant agenda of the Ringstrasse could, with the addition of genius, courage, and ruthless persistence, achieve an extraordinary integrity. After Brahms’s symphonies, in Vienna came those of Mahler, “Chief of the Insurrectionists”: grandiose, defiant, often tormented and grotesque hymns to the inescapability of eclecticism, and the impossibility of integrity in the modern world. When Mahler’s music finally triumphed some fifty years after he died, a precondition of that triumph was the collapse of the standards of craft and organic unity that Brahms had championed.
“Ours is a century of death,” Leonard Bernstein said, “and Mahler is its spiritual prophet.” In 1905 Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, in his teens a precocious creator of delicate and unworldly lyrics, later a dramatist and Richard Strauss’s librettist, wrote a manifesto for Modernism, though he was probably speaking mainly for Vienna. He wrote, “The nature of our epoch is multiplicity and indeterminacy. It can rest only on das Gleitende, and is aware that what other generations believed to be firm is in fact das Gleitende.” The word means “gliding,” “slipping,” “sliding,” “shifting.” The coming age, Hoffmannsthal wrote, can only be founded on the ultimate reality of the mutable and fragmentary: “Everything fell into parts, the parts again into more parts, and nothing allowed itself to be embraced by concepts anymore.”11 And to