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By Root 1402 0

Europe since childhood and barely spoke his native language. He had long been adored for his beauty as much as his talent, and both qualities attracted legions of female devotees. (In Weimar a lady at court wore always at her breast, in a golden locket, one of Liszt’s cigar butts.) Yet despite the wild adulation he had aroused since his teens, in the first of several retirements from the world the young Liszt, inspired by the uncanny virtuosity of the violinist Paganini, had secluded himself with the intention of making himself the greatest pianist who ever lived. By all accounts, he succeeded. Even Brahms would say with genuine admiration: “Whoever has not heard Liszt cannot even speak of piano playing.”15

In accepting a position as Kapellmeister of the provincial court of Saxe-Weimar in 1848, Liszt curtailed his stupendous career as a recitalist. He gave himself completely to composing, conducting, and proselytizing for his New German School. From the title of a famous essay by Liszt’s colleague Richard Wagner, the Wagnerian branch of the movement would be associated with the tag “The Artwork of the Future.” For both Liszt and Wagner, the underlying doctrine was the unity of the arts—literary, visual, musical. For Wagner that meant making his operas into music drama and his theater productions into a Gesamtkunstwerk, a “total work of art” uniting music, poetry, drama, and the visual arts. Liszt’s path was to base his instrumental music on literary or visual-art foundations, with the cross-fertilization of arts creating freer forms, fresh harmonies, new kinds of musical organization. Thus Liszt’s invention of the symphonic poem, with its literary or pictorial underpinning, called a “program.” (Unlike many who followed him, Liszt cited evocative ideas for his programs rather than dramatic scenarios.)

A prime inspiration for the new movement was Hector Berlioz, whose Symphonie fantastique and its program of an artist’s opium dreams, its melodic idée fixe recurring in new guises in every movement, had marked the high noon of Romanticism in orchestral music. Now the aging Berlioz served as godfather to the revolution of Liszt and Wagner.

No doubt by 1853 Liszt suspected that his former concertmaster Joachim was turning against him. But he still admired the violinist, and when Joachim’s letter arrived announcing the approach of Brahms (Liszt already knew Reményi), word went out to the faithful to assemble at the princess’s mansion, the Altenburg, to behold this new star.

Brahms and Reményi arrived at the mansion on June 12, 1853, and stood chatting with guests as Liszteans Peter Cornelius, Joachim Raff, and the American William Mason perused manuscripts Brahms had deposited on the piano. Finally, Liszt made his entrance and his usual gracious introductions. Gesturing to the piano, he asked the young man to play. Brahms declined; as sometimes happened in those days, he was paralyzed with nervousness. “Well then,” said Liszt, picking up the E Minor Scherzo with its barely decipherable handwriting, “I shall have to play.”16

This was Brahms’s first experience of Liszt at the keyboard, and it must have been a revelation—not only hearing his own music from an incomparable virtuoso, but witnessing a tour de force that few have duplicated and Liszt accomplished time and again: to put on the piano rack any piece, of any difficulty and medium, and sight-read it brilliantly in notes and expression, accompanied by a running commentary. In this case the commentary was highly pleased.

Brahms’s E Minor Scherzo, written when he was eighteen, is demonic in tone and relentless in rhythmic drive, with two lyrical trios as contrast. Even if he did not sign it Kreisler Junior, it has the Kreisler voice. The main melodic idea, which seems to arise from fragments accumulating and dissolving, is the first surviving example of the distinctive Brahmsian minor theme. Its relations appear mainly in his later works evoking death: the Begräbnisgesang (Funeral Song) of 1858, the “All flesh is grass” movement of Ein deutsches Requiem, the song “For it