Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [50]
So Brahms’s E Minor Scherzo was Liszt’s kind of music, gleefully demonic, the piano sound big and colorful, almost orchestral. And Liszt was a generous person and always on the lookout for disciples. For a few minutes at least, Brahms looked like a prospect for the cause. Liszt praised the scherzo effusively. Raff observed that its beginning recalled Chopin’s B Minor Scherzo. Brahms denied he had ever heard any Chopin, but he was probably fibbing, and Raff probably right.17 After more pleasant talk, Liszt played over some of the C Major Sonata.
Eventually somebody took his cue and asked Liszt to play something of his own. He picked a new work he knew stood near the summit of his keyboard music, the B Minor Sonata, eventually dedicated to Robert Schumann and one of the towering sonatas of the era. The piece is a dense, one-movement study in the technique of thematic integration and transformation that Liszt pioneered—technique not far, in fact, from the sort Brahms was to perfect: a basic motive pervades the texture and generates the entire melodic discourse.18 But Liszt’s B Minor, even if it subsumes echoes of traditional sonata form and has contrasts in tempo, is no sonata at all as Brahms understood the term, a multi-movement work using familiar formal patterns.
The B Minor Sonata also features, of course, the Lisztean voice—passionate and compelling if one is moved by it, garish and overripe if one is not. Brahms was not. He appreciated Liszt’s cordiality and he was surely stunned by the playing. But he despised the music. When he came to know the aesthetics of the New German School—especially the idea of unifying the arts—he would disdain that as well. Brahms could put aesthetics aside if he liked a composer’s notes; he did just that with Wagner. But Liszt’s work Brahms probably found shaky in form, thin in substance, overwrought in emotion. His eventual term for the whole New German School, Wagner always excepted, was “swindle.”19
Besides, when Brahms first met Liszt he was equally disgusted by the Altenburg. Biographer Max Kalbeck reports that the Princess’s mansion combined “the church with the boudoir, the state hall with the library, the hotel with the residence, the cabinet of curiosities with the workplace.” Liszt did his composing in the Blue Room, a priceless engraving of Dürer’s Melancholia on the wall to provide atmosphere. The opulence, the court of acolytes, the theater of the place, turned the stomach of plain North German Johannes Brahms.
Reményi reported that, as Liszt often did, at a particularly affecting moment in the sonata he looked over his audience to gauge the effect, and discovered Brahms asleep in the chair. Liszt kept playing, but at the end he brusquely rose from the keyboard and left the room.
Reményi, it should be kept in mind, was as given to improvisation in his recollections as in his playing. But that incident or something like it seems to have alerted Liszt that Brahms was not seduced by his music and not likely to serve the revolution. There was nothing new in that for Liszt; it had happened before and was happening now with Joachim. On the surface the virtuoso remained warm, and his cordiality would persist through all the dissonance of the coming years. When Brahms left Weimar, Liszt presented him with a keepsake in the form of a cigar box engraved “Brams.” All the same, Liszt was never to play or conduct a single Brahms work in public.
For his part, however disgusted by Liszt and his milieu, Brahms lingered in Weimar for nearly three weeks. He and Reményi occupied rooms just vacated by pianist, conductor, and New German apostle Hans von Bülow.20 In those rooms Reményi no doubt listened to his companion run down their host day after day, and no doubt Reményi persistently responded