Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [45]
When it came to touring, in those days concert managers hardly existed; soloists and their friends did the planning, arranging, and legwork themselves. Brahms’s Winsen admirer Amtsvogt Blume found them engagements through contacts in Lüneburg and Celle, the latter conveniently close to Hanover and Joachim. Their repertoire for the tour would include the Beethoven sonata, the Vieuxtemps, the show-stopping alla Zingarese tunes, plus Johannes’s A Minor Violin Sonata and E Minor Scherzo.
They left Hamburg with blessings from Johannes’s parents, who agreed that it was time for the boy to try his hand in the larger world. No doubt Johann Jakob remembered his journey to Hamburg at the same age, nineteen. Mother and son vowed to write regularly. A half hour after the duo left Hamburg, police showed up at the Brahms house looking for Reményi on suspicion of subversion.47
Two musicians, a semi-famous violinist and his obscure accompanist, set out on a small-time concert tour. That day an uninterrupted trajectory of growth and fame and triumph was set in motion that continues to the present day, and bids to continue until the last days of music.
CHAPTER THREE
Two Journeys
IT WAS A MISMATCHED DUO that set out on their concert tour in April 1853: violinist Eduard Reményi twenty-three, choleric and swaggering, ever impersonating the great virtuoso; his accompanist unassuming, quiet, watchful behind flashing blue eyes. Although Brahms turned twenty that May, the face under the long blond hair was still girlishly pretty—virginal and innocent, people were apt to infer, before they knew him. From walking and gymnastic exercises he had made himself wiry and athletic, for all the slightness. Graceful he was not. A Hamburg acquaintance described him in his teens as “shy, awkward, and constrained.” Eugenie Schumann remembered a lumbering gait and wobbly tall hat.1 There had been no teenage growth surge and Brahms’s voice remained high as a boy’s. He was trying to cover his baby fat with a beard when he left Hamburg with Reményi, but it was not working.
When he sat at the piano, however, Brahms suddenly assumed maturity and authority. He aimed his playing toward musicians, who understood his subtleties, in contrast to virtuosos like Liszt who seized the public by the throat. Still, sometimes nerves inhibited Brahms’s performances, especially in his own work. Even when he did well, some critics would not like his playing, but few missed the ferocious intelligence that informed everything he did.
Following the Winsen concerts that hatched the tour, in the first half of May the duo gave two concerts each in Lüneburg and Celle playing Beethoven, Brahms, Vieuxtemps, and the Hungarian melodies. Besides the friends of his Winsen patron who had helped arrange the tour, a newspaper notice in each town served to bring in listeners. Brahms seems to have played the repertoire out of his head. He had an extraordinary memory for music, as for everything else good and bad.
At their Celle concert on May 2 he accomplished a coup that became legendary. They found the piano tuned nearly a half tone flat. Rather than ask Reményi to retune his violin so radically, in the performance Brahms transposed the whole accompaniment of Beethoven’s C Minor Sonata to C#, and apparently did it without the music in front of him.2 At the end the violinist announced the feat to the audience and it caused a sensation.3 Brahms probably shrugged—Eduard Marxsen had taught him to transpose as a matter of course.
Offstage the duo did not get along; rehearsals were punctuated by shouts. One problem was that both of them inclined to rhapsodic tempos and it is hard to rhapsodize together, especially when the accompanist does not have the temperament to follow anybody.4 To the end of his life Brahms tended to play chamber music as if he were alone.
The emotional peak of each program came when Reményi, his fiddle sobbing with nationalistic zeal,