Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [48]
The music went by Joachim, movement after movement, all of it too new and marvelous to grasp. One could only say that it was marvelous and wait to hear it again. For Joachim, as for others to come, all of it worked together like an epiphany: this delicate-looking figure appearing out of nowhere and playing unheard-of music with heavenly grace on the keyboard. Within days the two musicians had formed a bond of affection and shared ideals that would endure for life.
If the affectionate part of their friendship was to be like a stormy marriage, with terrible arguments and long separations, that is only to say that this was for both men like most of their relationships. Brahms and Joachim had both been reared as virtuosos, and in that consuming discipline their social instincts, the skills of friendship and love, had been forced to the side. Joachim tried to remedy the narrowness of his education by studying history and philosophy; he would become a friend of poets and philosophers, and in his personal relations he often revealed a clear-headed perception of people and events. But he lacked wisdom in knowing how to live, never learned to handle a brooding and vindictive streak that drove him over and over to turn on his loved ones.
On their first meeting, Joachim did more than listen to Brahms and express his pleasure. At twenty-two the violinist was an old pro and knew how to promote an artist. He also happened to be one of those who admired Johannes’s playing. For his employer, George V, King of Hanover, he arranged a private soiree to show off Brahms and Reményi. To his friend the court pianist Joachim wrote, “Brahms has a quite exceptional talent for composition and a nature that could have been developed in its integrity only in the strictest retirement—pure as the diamond, tender as the snow.” Perhaps later he would wish to amend the adjectives—say, “hard as the diamond, cold as the snow”—but Joachim had astutely noted the effect of seclusion on his friend. He wrote the Countess Bernstorff at court that Johannes possessed “that concentrated fire, what I may call that fatalistic energy and precision of rhythm, which prophesy the artist, and his compositions already contain much that is significant, such as I have not hitherto met with in a youth of his age.”13
At the court of Hanover on June 8, 1853, Brahms played his E Minor Scherzo. The blind king, a knowledgeable musical amateur, dubbed the youth “little Beethoven.”14 In one form or another, that name would come up for the rest of Brahms’s life—the comparison all young composers wanted to earn, as in an earlier time they aspired to be “another Mozart.” (Those acquiring such a tag would spend their careers, as Brahms did, trying to escape it.) Reményi also played in the king’s soiree. Had he noticed yet that his accompanist was stealing his thunder?
There were a few more pleasant days in Hanover before the chief of police heard of this Hungarian revolutionary who had played at court. Reményi was hauled in to be grilled by the police, and barely escaped being escorted across the border; it was time for the duo to get out of town. For his friends, the old one and the new, Joachim did the best favor he could think of: he dispatched them with his blessings to Weimar and Liszt, sending a letter of introduction ahead. Privately, he told Johannes that if things did not work out with Reményi—and if he knew Reményi they would not—Johannes must come to stay with him in Göttingen.
FRANZ LISZT held at Weimar the post of court Kapellmeister, and lived in the mansion and on the manna of his mistress, polemicist, and ghostwriter Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. Wherever he went, the virtuoso maintained something like the style of an Oriental potentate, with a court of acolytes singing his praises. Hungarian-born (in 1811) and another fiery nationalist, Liszt had nonetheless been a citizen of