Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [389]
If Brahms had lived to be seventy-nine, he would likely have been there in the middle of the fray. The year before, he could have heard one of the two seminal works in the Modernist musical canon, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Had he survived that, in 1913 he could have experienced the other, Stravinsky’s Sacré du printemps. Both were born accompanied by riot. The son of the Hamburg docks and protégé of Robert and Clara Schumman would not have been pleased by what he heard.
Instead, by 1913 Brahms was present in Vienna only in his music and in monuments. Opposite the Musikverein, on a spot that used to hold a bench where he would rest on the way home from too much wine, lies the city’s primary memorial to him. Designed by Rudolf Weyr and erected in 1908, it stands as one of the last gasps of the style and spirit of the Ringstrasse. Brahms sits in the attitude of Michelangelo’s Moses, and the Muse lies prostrate at his feet. She touches a silent lyre that she is clearly unsure will ever ring again. That Brahms hated representations of the Muse and her harp enough to cover up the one in his picture of Cherubini, did not deter Weyr’s hoary iconography. In Hamburg, Max Klinger’s Brahms Monument was installed in the Musikhalle: there he stands shrouded and ageless, imaginary figures gathered around his feet, a boy-cherub hanging suspended from his neck. Once more, in contrast to the solemn backward-looking icon of the Vienna monument, Klinger combined the “real” figure with the unruly shadows of imagination.
Today in Vienna the House of the Secession stands in its still-startling severity in that Baroque city, the little white building modeled on pagan temples yet entirely modern, beautiful and strange, its defiantly blank walls relieved by intertwining floral friezes at the corners. Floating atop the front door are three Jungendstil muses wearing necklaces of serpents biting their tails. From the roof the golden crown spreads like a magical tree, an echo from a different age of the nearby dome of the Karlskirche.
This year inside the Secession, the same art lovers and tourists who take in Klinger and Feuerbach and Makart and Brueghel elsewhere in the city, have a look at Klimt’s Beethoven-Frieze—still shocking but tamed by time. In an exhibition room there is a forest of television sets on pedestals, each showing a video of a naked body-pierced skinhead jumping up and down and screaming. Now traffic flows around the museum, a bus stop faces it, pedestrians trudge past unheeding, tourists queue up. The House of the Secession has become, over time, a familiar icon, herald of a bygone artistic movement that still bears the paradoxical name of Modernism, and which Vienna helped shape as much as any city did.
And across the way from The House of the Secession lies its predecessor, Johann Fischer von Erlach’s Karlskirche, High Baroque yet herald of Austro-German Romanticism and its yearning for the Unknowable, and the first thing Brahms saw from his window each morning for twenty-four years.
As of the end of the Romantic century, call those two splendid buildings the past and the future.
SOME TWO WEEKS BEFORE HE DIED, Brahms struggled out to the rehearsal of the Soldat-Röger Women’s Quartet with Richard Mühlfeld. Despite his illness he still commanded enough of his old imperiousness to demand that they play Weber, not Brahms. Afterward the hostess offered to call a carriage for him. Complaining, “It’s just around the corner!” Brahms insisted on walking home. He left leaning on Max Kalbeck.
As they slowly made their way, Kalbeck was shocked by the bony, almost fleshless arm draped in his. It was a heroic effort for the sick man, after all his years of hiking, to shuffle a few blocks. “This is the longest way I’ve made it since New Year’s,” Brahms sighed. Then in a whisper, “I tell you, it’s wretched!” Kalbeck offered to find a carriage, but once more Brahms protested: “No, let me go! It