Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [399]
36. After the performance of the G Minor, Clara wrote in her journal: “The last movement took the audience by storm. The quartet only partially satisfies me, there is too little unity in the first movement, and the emotion in the adagio is too forced, without really carrying me away. But I love the allegretto … and the last movement” (Litzmann 200). Joachim wrote Brahms about the piece: “The invention in the first movement is not so pregnant as I am used to getting from you, but it’s often quite wonderful what you make of the themes!”
37. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 10/1861
38. Litzmann Life 199. Around then Joachim tried to convince Clara to join him working at court in Hanover, but she declined in favor of performing.
39. Reich 209. Neither Reich nor MacDonald give details of Clara’s only recently discovered affair. I have surmised its approximate dates from letters, etc.
40. Litzmann Life 375.
41. Litzmann Life 201.
42. Litzmann Life 202.
43. Dietrich 41.
44. Dietrich/Widmann 43–4.
45. Material on the articles is from Frisch “Brahms and Schubring.” Here Schubring seems to define the main factions as the Mendelssohn camp and the New Germans, with Brahms among the Schumannians in between. Excerpts from the articles are in Frisch Brahms and His World.
46. In a note to me, Ira Braus writes that the spread of development outside the development section was a common problem of post-1860 composers, “the price one pays for using developing variation technique in classical forms.”
47. Keys 43.
48. Dietrich/Widmann 46–7.
49. Bickley Joachim Letters 283.
50. Litzmann Life 209.
51. Bickley Joachim Letters 262.
52. Litzmann Life 210–11.
53. May 300.
54. Dietrich/Widmann 51.
55. Stephenson 86–7.
56. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 11/3/1862.
57. Bickley Joachim Letters 288.
58. Stephenson 24.
59. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 11/18/1862. Paragraph breaks added. Brahms never blamed Stockhausen for taking the job. Still, for all his resentment Brahms eventually reconciled to some degree with Avé, who seems to have been a decent and likable sort.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
1. Kalbeck II, 10.
2. Schorske 25.
3. Schorske 36.
4. Schorske 45.
5. Morton 4.
6. During the war the Opera was largely destroyed. The current auditorium is a postwar design—one even more incongruous with the outside.
7. Schorske 4.
8. Blackbourne 9, 24.
9. I have deliberately left Brahms’s mentor Robert Schumann out of this formula of influences, because while Schumann’s influence was profound it was also subtle (for example, the interest in piano quartet as a medium, and in musical symbolism). Brahms can remind one of Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Renaissance polyphony, folk song, and a number of other things; rarely do his harmonies and melodies remind us of Schumann.
10. Botstein “Time and Memory” 7.
11. Graf Composer and Critic 244.
12. Hanslick Criticisms 20–1.
13. Quoted in Gal 80.
14. Janik and Toulmin 103.
15. Watson 191.
16. Hanslick Criticisms 12.
17. Hanslick Criticisms 13.
18. Hanslick Criticisms 289.
CHAPTER TWELVE
1. MacDonald 232.
2. D. McCorkle Haydn Variations 22.
3. May 333 and Niemann 86.
4. Hanslick Criticisms 82–3.
5. Frisch Developing Variation 77.
6. Frisch Developing Variation 81.
7. Frisch Developing Variation 88–9.
8. The sketch is in Joseph.
9. Brahms’s landlady in Mürrzuschlag recalled, “Er stellte sich zum Fenster Klavier, spielte ein paar Töne, ging in Zimmer auf und ab, summte einige Noten und markte sich davon Notizen.” (Exhibition in the Mürzzuschag Brahms Museum)
10. See D. McCorkle “Five Fundamental Obstacles,” which points out that later Brahms editors have not been impeccable either.
11. In fact, Bach made many revisions of his work, on strips of paper pinned to the scores. All that remains of most of these revisions are pin-holes in the manuscripts.
12. Bickley Joachim Letters 283.
13. Quoted in Gal 39.
14. Walker 180.
15. Kalbeck II, 38.
16. Geiringer “Wagner and Brahms” 182–3.
17. Specht 151.
18. Heuberger