Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [42]
Despite Brahms’s later efforts to suppress everything he turned out under aliases, one of these “Marks” potboilers appears to have survived: Souvenir de la Russie, a fantasy/suite of Russian tunes. The piece is entirely self-possessed for its genre, as prettily innocuous as it was paid to be.40 If the work is in fact by Brahms, it displays in some pages his early interest in the “Hungarian” style. In any case, his labor as one of “G. W. Marks’ ” incarnations steeped Brahms in the popular music of the time—a higher level of it than the dances he played in the Lokale—and that would serve him well as he attempted to make a living selling his notes. So by the first two years of the new decade Brahms had become, in addition to a competent professional pianist and piano teacher, a workaday composer like his teacher. He never considered remaining that.
Elsewhere the progressive musical world went its way, Brahms and Hamburg largely oblivious. In Weimar in 1850, Franz Liszt unveiled the first of a new kind of work he invented and championed, a “symphonic poem” called Bergsymphonie, based on an ode by Victor Hugo. That year Robert Schumann completed his finest symphony, if still a flawed entry in the genre—the grand and lyrical Rhenish. That year too, writing in exile in Zürich, Richard Wagner decreed in his treatise “The Artwork of the Future” that Beethoven was the last symphonist and the symphony was dead. Except for the unsteady example of Schumann, the symphonies turned out in the 1850s and ’60s by men like Gade, Raff, and Rubinstein yielded little to contradict Wagner’s requiem for the genre.
Toward the end of 1849 a dramatic concert was given at Hamburg’s municipal theater by a violinist named Eduard Hoffmann. Born to a Jewish family, out of Hungarian patriotism he had restyled himself Eduard Reményi. When Austria and Russia put down the Hungarian revolt in 1848, Reményi had been one of hundreds of political refugees who fled prison or the noose, many of them heading for Hamburg, often on their way to America. A sizable Hungarian community collected in Brahms’s city.
Reményi’s “farewell concert” in Hamburg featured, as always with him, a collection of “national dances,” characterized as Magyar and Zigeuner—Hungarian and/or gypsy folk music. (The terms were fluid.) Partly from the efforts of Reményi and his compatriots Liszt and Joachim, and later of Brahms, this driving, soulful style found a vogue as one of the more exotic nationalistic repertoires. In reality its folk origins were as dubious as any. As Bartók and Kodály were to discover in the next century, this “Hungarian” style arose not as the spontaneous outpouring of peasants, but instead as an urban popular music played mostly by gypsy bands in streets and cafés, the bands often consisting of two violins, cimbalom (a Hungarian dulcimer), and bass. The authentic peasant music, unfettered in mode and rhythm, lay undiscovered in the Hungarian countryside, beyond the musical horizon of the nineteenth century. The familiar “gypsy” and “Hungarian” styles were a distant commercial echo of the real thing, faux-exotic but wildly popular.
Brahms may or may not have attended Reményi’s Hamburg farewell, but he certainly heard about this virtuoso who had made a sensation in the city with his perfervid playing of both the standard and nationalistic repertoires. Meanwhile, Reményi stayed on and concertized for some time after his “farewell.” In August 1850, Brahms got to know him when the violinist asked him to accompany a private concert at the house of a local merchant. That was an honor for Brahms; if this virtuoso was not world-renowned