Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [47]
At seventeen Joachim had become professor of violin at the Leipzig Conservatory, then two years later accepted a call to be concertmaster of Franz Liszt’s court orchestra in Weimar. It amounted to joining the most exciting musical laboratory in Europe. Liszt devoted his orchestra to spreading his musical revolution, what would eventually be called the New German School. But despite the adulation Joachim received in Weimar, and the Hungarian patriotism he shared with this mentor, he had felt uncomfortable there, with the orchestra spending much of the time reading over Liszt’s trial sketches.9 For all his admiration for an incomparable pianist and generous friend, Joachim could not escape his growing disillusion with Liszt’s music, could not endure the circle of sycophants or Liszt’s shameless grandstanding in performance—the grimacing and fainting, the suffering-Christ act. By 1852, when Joachim left Weimar and went to work as concertmaster and soloist for the Hanover court orchestra, he was divorcing Liszt and his revolution, even if he did not yet admit it.
Part of the process of divorce would involve finding alternative visions of the future to which Joachim could commit himself. The first alternative proved to be Schumann. The enthusiasm Joachim’s Beethoven performance aroused at the 1853 Lower Rhine Festival led to a close connection with Robert and Clara Schumann. Even critics were beside themselves; one reported: “We will not attempt to describe his success; there was French frenzy, Italian fanaticism, in a German audience.”10 Robert, then town music director in Düsseldorf, found the performance a revelation not only of Beethoven but of violin-playing. Schumann’s D Minor Symphony and A Minor Piano Concerto had been aired at the festival, the latter naturally with Clara soloing. Caught up in the music of a composer he had admired only from a distance, Joachim eagerly returned the friendship offered by the Schumanns.
After leaving Düsseldorf and the ovations of the festival, Joachim had an uneasy week’s visit with Liszt in Weimar, then returned to Hanover to prepare for summer courses in philosophy and history at the University of Göttingen. At the end of May, Joachim was pleasantly interrupted by a visit from his old schoolmate Reményi, who had brought along his shy blond accompanist. Brahms was a composer, was he? Well then, they should hear something.
The youth played. Fifty years later Joachim was to recall, “Never in the course of my artist’s life have I been more completely overwhelmed.” Some of it was Brahms’s manner, “noble and inspired.”11 Joachim found the music blindingly strong and fresh. Beyond that, perhaps Joachim already sensed that here in this youth, in the first flush of his genius, lay the alternative to Liszt.
Besides some music later discarded, Brahms played Joachim the Sonatas in C Major and F# Minor, the E Minor Scherzo, and the song “Liebestreu” (“Fidelity”). The song begins, “Oh sink your sorrow, my child, in the deep sea!” The expression is Romantically urgent, the technique masterful and original; the piano’s bass line seems to create the voice’s melody as an echo, making the music a duo between a singer and her shadowy double. Like some of Schubert’s youthful lieder, “Liebestreu” is the kind of song that takes the world by the ear. Joachim described it as a revelation.12
Nor had he ever heard anything like the sonatas. To Joachim, who was young and fiercely earnest and looking for new heroes, these pieces flashed from Brahms’s hands like a bolt of lightning. If the violinist was still half-consciously fleeing the Weimar progressives back to a familiar world of formalism and continuity with the past, the hair