Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [51]
On June 9, Brahms wrote in fury to Joachim in Göttingen: “If I were not named ‘Kreisler’ I should now have well-founded reasons to be somewhat dispirited, to curse my art and my enthusiasm, and to retire as a [clerk] into solitude … Reményi is leaving Weimar without me.”21 He added that he cannot return to Hamburg with so little tangible to show, but if there he “should feel happiest with my heart tuned in C-G sharp.” (The Key of C# minor is Kreisler’s.) In the letter Brahms asked to visit Joachim in Göttingen and was happily accepted. Meanwhile, Reményi made haste to write Liszt with nationalistic ardor as “Admirable Compatriot!” “Conceive the immense joy,” he continued. “Your favor is my talisman!” Et cetera. At the bottom of the page Reményi added a curt postscript: “Brahms has left for Göttingen.”22
That June of 1853, Brahms’s mother, having received reports from Johannes about his friendship with the famous Josef Joachim, wrote him a prophetic reply:
Happy Johannes, and we his happy parents.… Now, Johannes dear, your life really begins, now you will reap what you have sown with toil and diligence here. Your great hour has come. You must thank Divine Providence which sent an angel to lead you out of the darkness into the world where there are human beings who appreciate your worth and the value of what you have learned. How much we should love to be with you a few hours, to see your happy face.23
In Göttingen in July and August, sharing small quarters as Joachim attended his university lectures, Brahms and Joachim began using with each other the familiar du, “thou,” which signifies deepest affection. Johannes called Joachim by his nickname, Jussuf. They played together constantly, their own music and the masters’, and talked art and religion and philosophy late into the night. Brahms began to study Joachim’s music, convincing himself that this friend had greater talent for composing than his own. History would fail to find a distinctive voice in Joachim’s work, but he knew the orchestra inside out; soon Brahms would need that knowledge. The violinist was working then on a couple of overtures; without telling Joachim, Brahms made piano arrangements of them. Their music copying began to look remarkably similar. Meanwhile Johannes sampled the jolly undergraduate life of the Sachsen, the student clubs whose songs he would draw on decades later for the Academic Festival Overture.
Around that time in “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein,” then over two hundred entries long, aphorisms begin to appear with an attribution of three musical notes drawn on a staff: F-A-E. With Johannes’s encouragement, Joachim had written these entries into the notebook. The pitches serving as signature were the violinist’s motto, perhaps arising from his ongoing lovesickness over Gisela von Arnim, daughter of the famous Achim and Bettina. For Joachim the notes F-A-E signified frei aber einsam, “free but lonely.”
In the “Schatzkästlein” Joachim wrote, “Artists should not be servants, but priests of the public.” “Write down everything that you feel, so that it becomes part of you, as if it were a reminiscence.”24 In response to these, Johannes added a fragment of dialogue from Goethe that was prophetic for both friends:
A: It’s said you’re a misanthrope.
B: I don’t hate men, thank God.
But hatred of mankind, that blew over me like a cold wind,
And I’ve responded in kind.
A: So what came of it?
B: I’ve resolved to live a solo-fiddler.25
For Johannes, that first visit with Joachim in Göttingen seems to have been for the most part blithe and sociable. During the summer he produced several songs, including the two versions of “Liebe und Frühling,” the folklike and gently lilting “Wie die Wolke nach der Sonne,” and “Nachtigallen schwingen,” with its vivacious rhythm