Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [62]
After “Neue Bahnen” the musical world awaited his next steps. Brahms and Joachim knew that many hoped he would fall on his face.
SOON AFTER THE ARTICLE APPEARED, Schumann sent a copy to Johannes’s parents in Hamburg with a note: “We have come to feel great affection for your son Johannes, and his musical genius has given us richly joyful hours.… I send you these pages and think they will bring your fatherly heart a little joy. You may look forward with complete confidence to the future of this darling of the Muses.”29 Brandishing Schumann’s letter, Johann Jakob Brahms charged into the house of a musician friend shouting, “You, Fritz, now what d’you say to this? Schumann declares my Hannes a great, important artist and he’ll be a second Beethoven!” Fritz bellowed back, “That stupid, tow-headed little urchin is to be a Beethoven? Are you crazy?” And so it went, back and forth, before Johann Jakob retreated with a parting shot: “But Schumann says so!”30
In Hanover, Brahms let it all stew for three weeks, sitting with Joachim talking late into the night, before he wrote Schumann these circumspect thanks for a great and terrible gift.
Honored Master,
You have made me so immensely happy that I cannot attempt to thank you in words. God grant that my works may soon prove to you how much your affection and kindness have encouraged and stimulated me. The public praise you have bestowed on me will have fastened general expectation so exceptionally upon my performances that I do not know how I shall be able to do some measure of justice to it. Above all it obliges me to take the greatest care in the selection of what is to be published …
Further I wish to tell you that I have copied out my F Minor Sonata, and made considerable alterations in the finale.… I should like also to thank you a thousand times for the dear portrait of yourself that you have sent me as well as for the letter you have written to my father. By it you have made a pair of good people happy, and for life Your
Brahms31
Putting the music in print was the next step. Schumann had continued to prod Breitkopf & Härtel and urged Brahms to visit the publisher in person. He wrote Joachim, “He must go to Leipzig; persuade him to do this, or they will get a wrong idea of his works; he must play them himself.32 After some resistance, Johannes gave in. He arrived in Leipzig, city of J. S. Bach and Mendelssohn, Goethe and Lessing, on November 17, 1853.
His welcome in Germany’s musical center proved warmer than expected, given the jealousy and resentment that must have been seething in town after the article. Heinrich von Sahr, Albert Dietrich’s friend, introduced Brahms to Dr. Härtel the publisher and to leading Leipzig musicians, among them Clara Schumann’s father Friedrich Wieck, the celebrated Beethoven pupil Ignaz Moscheles, and Gewandhaus concertmaster Ferdinand David. Once a teacher of Joachim’s, and the man for whom Mendelssohn wrote the Violin Concerto, David asked Brahms to join him in a chamber music program at the Gewandhaus.
Sahr wrote to Dietrich in Düsseldorf: “He is perfect, the days since he has been here are amongst the most delightful in my recollection. He answers so exactly to my idea of an artist. And as a man!”33 Countess Ida von Hohenthal invited Brahms to her estate near the city for a few days; he wangled a piano-teaching position there for his brother Fritz.34 For her kindness the countess would receive the dedication of the F Minor Piano Sonata, but Fritz soon bungled the job and returned dejected to Hamburg.35
Another new Leipzig acquaintance, composer and conductor Julius Otto Grimm, kept pace with Brahms as a brash young artist discovering his powers. From Düsseldorf, Grimm wrote Joachim the following spring, “Kreisler is the most marvelous person … he wants to go to Grafenberg, so that we can lie in the moonlight in the woods. He is as mad as he can be—as the artistic genius of Düsseldorf he has adorned his room with … [pictures] of Madonnas and brats—so as to have something worthy of his contemplation