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one in Beethoven’s Ninth: “It is no longer [Beethoven’s] humanist fervor of freedom and brotherliness but nature and religion that resolve the issue for Brahms.” I buy the “nature” side of that formulation more than the “religion,” and add: the resolution to nature and perhaps religion may be true and intended, if the coda of the First Symphony is fully effective and purposeful. Hans Gal and Clara Schumann, however, questioned the effectiveness of the coda, saying that its material and tone seem unearned, not quite relevant. Gal (141): “The jubilation with which the movement comes to a close is the result of a self-delusion. One can sense in it more the desire to be joyful than real surrender to joy.” He echoes Clara’s demurral to Brahms (quoted in Gal 142): “To me its intensification [in the coda] seems to lie in external rather than internal emotion; it somehow does not organically evolve from the whole, but seems merely to have been added as a brilliant afterthought.” I tend to agree with those sentiments (Brinkmann cites them as well), but once more add: if Brahms failed to achieve the ultimate apotheosis the coda called for, maybe it was because that was practically impossible. He planned a symphonic unfolding that intensifies between first movement and last—starting from a point of high intensity—and paid that off remarkably in the finale, at least until the coda. And after all, as Clara admitted, the coda is brilliant, even if it does not quite say what it proposes to. Brahms may have seized on the trombone chorale for the climax of the coda simply because it seemed to do the best job logically—but perhaps it doesn’t succeed as well dramatically and expressively (a common complaint about Brahms).

52. Hanslick Criticisms 129–56.

53. Barkan Brahms/Billroth Letters 38–9.

54. Litzmann Life 312.

55. Litzmann Life 320.

56. Litzmann Life 319–20.

57. Schauffler 157.

58. May 492.

59. Barkan Brahms/Billroth Letters 40–1.

60. May 512.

61. Hanslick Criticisms 125–8.

62. Hanslick Criticisms 211.

63. Kalbeck Brahms/Herzogenberg Letters 8–9.

64. Litzmann Life 321–2.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1. The narrative of Brahms’s relationship with Henschel is based on Henschel’s diary, Personal Recollections of Johannes Brahms. Some of the translations, punctuation, etc., of the standard English edition are updated.

2. Brahms Briefwechsel VIII, 122n.

3. Note from Ira Braus.

4. Gal 85–6.

5. Specht 164.

6. Kalbeck II, 110n.

7. Henschel 31–2.

8. Specht 182–6.

9. Kalbeck III, 2.

10. Geiringer Brahms 330.

11. Specht 199.

12. Kalbeck Brahms/Herzogenberg Letters 2/15/1877.

13. Smyth 79.

14. Smyth 88.

15. Geiringer Brahms 125–6.

16. Smyth 102–3.

17. Smyth 105.

18. Barkan Brahms/Billroth Letters 223n.

19. Smyth 101–2.

20. Smyth 90–1.

21. MacDonald 236.

22. Kalbeck Brahms/Herzogenberg Letters 11/25/1880.

23. Kalbeck Brahms/Herzogenberg Letters 8/2/1879.

24. Kalbeck Brahms/Herzogenberg Letters 3/10/1878.

25. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 4/24/1877.

26. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 5/2/1877.

27. Litzmann Schumann/Brahms Letters 6/6/1877.

28. Barkan Brahms/Billroth Letters 50n.

29. Kalbeck Brahms/Herzogenberg Letters 5/5/1877.

30. Kalbeck Brahms/Herzogenberg Letters 11/22/1877.

31. Brahms Briefwechsel X, 56–7.

32. Brinkmann 160, quoting Kalbeck.

33. This letter of Lachner’s, which Brinkmann first published, appears to have been the starting point for his own meditation on the shadows in the Second, which he calls (79) “an emphatic questioning of the pastoral world, a firm denial of the possibility of pure serenity.” The letter exchange is in Brinkmann 126–9.

34. Brinkmann 122–3.

35. May 528–9.

36. Dietrich/Widmann 106.

37. May 519.

38. Barkan Brahms/Billroth Letters 58.

39. Hanslick Criticisms 157–9.

40. Clapham 242.

41. Hanslick “Memories” 169–70.

42. Clapham 252.

43. Schauffler 99.

44. Schönzeler 66–7.

45. Clapham 243.

46. Smyth 79.

47. May 524.

48. Brahms Briefwechsel X, 73.

49. Geiringer Brahms 136.

50. Kalbeck III, 151–2, transl. in Schauffler.

51. Schwarz 513.

52. Brahms Briefwechsel