The Spoken Text

CD 1

1 A door creaks; wind, thunder, and woman’s scream.

Well that, as you may have guessed – if with a certain puzzlement – is the beginning of a ghost story; and this – though you mightn’t guess it – is the ghost.

Beethoven: Sonata in B flat, Op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’ (opening)

There, with a characteristic shake of his spectral fist, speaks the spirit of Beethoven – a spirit whose unique combination of intellectual toughness and emotional depth has loured, sometimes menacingly but always inspiringly, over composers as diverse as Wagner, Berlioz, Tippett, Dvořák (who once in his youth rushed out after a performance of the Beethoven Ninth and proclaimed ‘I must write music like that!’), and Brahms, who knew from the beginning that that privilege was Beethoven's alone. Or perhaps not quite from the beginning, because at the beginning he was haunted. So let's renew our acquaintance with the ghost.

Beethoven: Sonata in B flat, Op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’ (opening)

And now let's get on with the haunting. Let us turn to Brahms's Opus 1:

Piano Sonata No. 1 in C, Op. 1(opening)

The opening bars of Brahms's First Piano Sonata. When that was first published, its resemblance to the opening of Beethoven's so- called 'Hammerklavier' Sonata was widely remarked. And wherever he went, whatever he wrote, the name and image of Beethoven haunted him, sometimes almost to the point of obsession. In fact, his coming to terms with Beethoven's ghost is one of the great dramas – perhaps the central drama – of Brahms’s creative life. It was a life that began on the 7 th of May 1833, in a small slum dwelling in the docklands of Hamburg, one of the great port cities of Germany, then much better known for its commerce than its culture. At one level, Brahms’s life is a classic tale of rags-to- riches, except that he never had any interest in riches and gave away, anonymously for the most part, vast quantities of the money that poured into his coffers, as he reaped the benefits of his reputation as the greatest composer of his time. Nor, though his relative poverty in childhood was genuine, was he ever remotely in rags. He was, however, the product of one of the most unlikely marriages in musical history. His father, Johann Jakob Brahms, was the son of an innkeeper and grandson of a wheelwright. There was nothing much in the way of culture in the family, and when Jakob began to develop a passion for music his parents did everything to discourage it. With a stubbornness which he later passed on to his son, he ran away from home three times in search of tuition before his father finally relented and had him apprenticed to the local town musician. He now began training in earnest and became fairly adept at all of the stringed instruments as well as the flute, the French horn, and the bugle. At the end of his apprenticeship, with a double-bass strapped on his back, he set off on foot to seek his fortune in the city of Hamburg. He wasn’t very talented, he had hardly a bean to his name, and the only work he could find in the big city was playing in various dockside dives, near which he lived in a sequence of ramshackle dwellings, before working his way through the ranks to become a horn player in the Hamburg militia. He wasn’t brilliant, but he had a lot of charm, and to say that he was impulsive would be, at the very least, discreet. Within a very short time of his arrival he found himself a bride. Many years later, in a letter to their by then very famous son, she told him a little about his origins and the circumstances preceding his birth.

CHRISTIANE BRAHMS: Your Auntie and I grew up very simply. I was thirteen when I started going out to sew. In the evenings I came home at six o’clock, then I liked to give mother a hand, and sometimes I sewed until midnight. Six years I went on like that. Then I worked for ten years with very respectable employers as a general servant. Then again I

2 went out sewing... Then Auntie married, and I lived with her, helping out in the family shop, and earning what I could by sewing. Your father took a room with us, and so we got acquainted. When he said he wanted me to become his wife, after only being with us for a week, I could hardly believe it, because our ages were so different.

They certainly were. He was twenty-four, she was forty-one – seventeen years his senior. Frail and physically handicapped (one leg was longer than the other, resulting in a marked limp), Johanna Christiane Brahms was almost spectacularly plain and had long since resigned herself to spinsterhood when the mercurial Johann Jakob proposed to her. She was wasn’t well educated, but she was conspicuously intelligent and extraordinarily charitable. In the 120 letters she wrote to Johannes there’s scarcely a complaint to be found, about anyone or anything, from beginning to end. She loved all three of her children, but from the start it was clearly Johannes who was the light of her life. Despite the poverty of their circumstances, the children grew up in a generally happy household – though cracks in their parents’ marriage became plain to see well before Johannes left home, plain enough to colour his outlook on marriage for life. As a child, Brahms saw his mother as the perfect woman: loving, protective, encouraging, uncomplaining – and compounded of natural common sense. The order, peace, and spirit of thanksgiving in the Brahms household came almost entirely from Christiane. And in spite of her very limited education, it was she alone who seemed to have an intuitive understanding of Johannes’s inner world. As a result, it was with her that he spent most of his free time. In the whole of his life, his love for her never wavered. By the time Johannes was born, the couple were living in a cramped apartment in one of Hamburg’s most notorious districts, the so-called Lane Quarter, known to the locals as ‘Adulterer’s Walk’. After Brahms’s death, Florence May, a former pupil and his first English biographer, visited his birthplace and left us a description which is borne out by the surviving photographs.

FLORENCE MAY: The house and its surroundings testify only to the commonplace reality of a bare and repulsive poverty... Each of its habitations is planned exactly as every other, excepting that those near the top are contracted by the sloping roof. Jakob

3 and Christiane lived in the first-floor dwelling to the left on facing the house. On entering it, it is difficult to repress a shiver of bewilderment and dismay. The staircase door opens on to a diminutive space, half kitchen, half lobby, where some cooking may be done and a child’s bed made up, and which has a second door leading to the living-room. This communicates with the sleeping-closet, which has its own window, but is so tiny it can scarcely be called a room. There is nothing else, neither corner nor cupboard. Where Jakob kept his instruments and how he managed to practise are mysteries which the ordinary mind cannot satisfactorily penetrate.

2 It would be hard to conceive of a greater contrast in Brahms’s experience of the opposite sex than that between his mother, with her continuous emphasis on the beautiful and the good, and the painted whores of the Hamburg docklands who introduced him to the world of sex, lust, and prostitution. It was here, in the beer halls, dancing parlours, and so-called ‘stimulation saloons’ which flourished in and around ‘Adulterer’s Walk’, that the young Brahms first plied his own trade for money, playing popular music on the piano in taverns which doubled as brothels. It left scars which never entirely healed. On the rare occasions when he spoke of this chapter in his life at all, it was with undisguised bitterness:

BRAHMS: I was surrounded by the basest kind of public women – they called them the ‘singing girls’. And these half-naked whores, to fan the appetites of the men still further, would sit me on their laps between dances, and kiss and caress and excite me. This was my first impression of the love of women.

Not quite true, of course – he seems for just a moment to have forgotten his mother. But the point holds. In these ‘saloons’, on the threshold of puberty, and beyond, Brahms regularly saw sex, avarice, and lust at their most degraded. But, typically, he distracted himself by reading while he played – mostly volumes of poetry by the leading Romantic poets, and the fantastic novels and stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, which he bought from the second- hand bookstalls lining the canal. He had a hunger for knowledge and literature which

4 stayed with him to the end of his life, and despite his unprivileged circumstances he had a very reasonable general education and two music teachers who were amongst the best in the business. By the time he was fourteen, he was composing in earnest and had his first experience of conducting a choir in music of his own; and at fifteen he made his solo debut as a pianist, playing, among other things, a work of his own, and Beethoven’s great ‘Waldstein’ Sonata – a handful even for seasoned pianists. His compositions of this period reveal a taste for popular salon-type entertainment which was to vanish almost without trace.

Souvenir de la Russie (excerpt)

Part of the Souvenir de la Russie, written by the fifteen-year-old Brahms under the pseudonym G.W. Pabst. By the time he was twenty, though he looked more like sixteen, Brahms had already composed several works which are still very much in the repertoire today – more on that later – and had developed into a quite extraordinary pianist. (He’d have had to be that to play at all the big virtuoso works he was writing at the time.) And it was in the spring of that year, 1853, that he embarked on his first concert tour, with the brilliant if rather shallow Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. Brahms's meeting with Reményi was significant on several counts. For a start it was Reményi who introduced him to the music of the Hungarian gypsies – music which was to become indelibly associated with his name.

3 Hungarian Dance No. 1

The first of Brahms's famous Hungarian Dances .

4 Brahms's tour with Reményi was a life-changing event , and it got off to a spectacular start. On finding that the piano at their first port of call was mistuned, Brahms, quite unfazed, spontaneously transposed the entire programme up a semitone –

5 effectively playing Beethoven’s difficult C minor Violin Sonata in C sharp minor, and entirely from memory. He hadn’t bothered to pack any music, but, as his teacher Marxsen observed many years later, that was par for the course.

MARXSEN: His memory was so astonishing that it never crossed his mind to take any printed music with him on his concert tours. Even at twenty, many of the works of Beethoven and Bach, plus a great number of modern concert works by Thalberg, Liszt, Mendelssohn, and many others were indelibly impressed upon his mind.

But with Brahms’s very feat at that first concert, relations between him and the star violinist began to worsen. Wherever they went, whatever they played, it was the unknown, diminutive, almost bashful boy at the piano who stole the show.

5 It was in the course of this tour that they decided to call on the great Hungarian-born violinist Joseph Joachim, who’d been a classmate of Reményi’s in their student days. Hearing Joachim play the Beethoven Concerto in Hamburg in 1848 had been one of the greatest artistic experiences of Brahms’s life. Although he was only two years Brahms’s senior, Joachim was internationally renowned, not as a dazzling prodigy but as one of the towering figures of his day: a conductor and composer of distinction, and one of the very few violinists of any age whose interpretations of great masterworks like the Bach Chaconne and the Beethoven Concerto were regarded as definitive. Joachim, who knew nothing about Brahms, received the pair at his home, and though he was characteristically gracious to his flashy former associate, it was this quiet, unassuming boy who attracted his interest from the start. After some coaxing Brahms was finally persuaded to play some of his own music. Joachim was dumbfounded.

JOACHIM: Never in the whole of my artistic career have I been overcome by a more joyful astonishment than when my fellow-countryman’s shy, fair-haired accompanist played, with a noble uplifted expression, music whose astounding originality and power no-one would have suspected. It affected me like a revelation. And his piano playing! So tender, so imaginative, so free and so full of fire that it held me absolutely spellbound.

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6 Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5 (Scherzo)

The Scherzo from the Sonata in F minor, Op. 5. 7 By the time of their visit to Joachim, Reményi was getting tired of being continually up-staged by his accompanist, and Joachim realised at once that their partnership wasn’t likely to last much longer. Finding a suitably discreet moment, he invited Brahms to join him at Göttingen in the summer if for any reason the tour with Reményi should come to grief. Well of course it did, and Brahms took Joachim at his word. In Joachim, Brahms found not only an artist of incomparably greater distinction than any he’d yet encountered, but a real kindred spirit. And Joachim, whose knowledge of society and of the world at large was vastly greater than Brahms’s, felt the same. As each seems instinctively to have recognised, their meeting marked a turning-point for both. Neither was ever to experience a closer sense of kinship, and though their friendship was later to be clouded, as sooner or later all Brahms’s friendships were, they held each other, unceasingly, in the highest esteem to the end of their days. Brahms, who’d never meant to be away from home for so long, stayed with Joachim for much of the summer. Nor, for all the genuine love he felt for his family, was he in any hurry to return to Hamburg. But for all the euphoria of these heady days, Brahms was in an awkward position. The break with Reményi had left him with no visible source of income, yet he was unwilling to go home empty-handed. As he put it to Joachim at the time:

BRAHMS: I can’t even consider going back home with nothing to show... I have to have at least two or three compositions in print, so that I can cheerfully look my parents in the face.

Well Joachim had his own thoughts about that, as we’ll see. In the meantime, he wrote to Brahms’s parents:

7

JOACHIM: Göttingen, 25 July 1853. Please allow me, although I am unknown to you, to write and tell you how infinitely blessed I feel in the companionship of your Johannes; for who better than his parents can know the joy which their son can give. Your Johannes has stimulated my work as an artist to an extent beyond my hopes. To strive with him for a mutual goal is a fresh spur for me on the thorny path we musicians have to tread through life. His purity, his independence, young though he is, and the singular wealth of his heart and intellect find sympathetic utterance in his music, just as his whole nature will bring joy to all who come into spiritual contact with him. How splendid it will be when his artistic powers are revealed in a work accessible to all! And with his ardent desire for perfection, nothing else is possible. You will understand my wish to have him near me as long as his presence does not interfere with his duty to himself. I believe, moreover, that Johannes too must find it pleasant to live undisturbed in quiet Göttingen, where he is sure of finding, in Musikdirektor Wehner and myself, two men who are glad to follow his idiosyncrasies in life and art. How glad I should be if I could ever render my friend Johannes a real service, for it goes without saying that my friendship is always at his disposal. I can only hope that our new bond will find the blessing of your approval. Truly yours, Joseph Joachim.

A single concert with Joachim brought in enough money to see Brahms through the next few weeks at least, and in August he set off for western Germany, to widen his musical acquaintanceship and in the process to fulfil a long-cherished dream. In September he wrote to some friends:

BRAHMS: I’ve passed the most heavenly summer, such as I’ve never known before. After spending some gloriously inspiring weeks with Joachim at Göttingen, I’ve now been rambling about for five weeks according to my heart’s desire, among the hills and valleys of the Rhine. I’m hoping to stay in Hanover this winter so as to be near Joachim, who is equally noble as man and artist.

But, thanks to Joachim, Brahms was about to meet a still nobler man in both respects. A man of extraordinary genius, imagination, and commitment who was to transform the

8 whole course of Brahms’s life. As it happens, Brahms himself had approached the man in question, in Hamburg, some time before, but nothing came of it.

8 The great composer Robert Schumann, and his pianist wife Clara, had visited Hamburg in 1850. Brahms, then seventeen, sent a parcel of his own compositions to the Schumanns’ hotel, but it was returned unopened. Now, three years later, and armed with an introduction from Joachim, he approached Schumann again, this time at his home in Düsseldorf. On the last day of September he stood before the house – a comfortable but unostentatious middle-class German home – and rang the bell. The door was opened by a little girl. Her name was Eugenie Schumann, and she remembered that moment for the rest of her life.

EUGENIE SCHUMANN: One day – it was in the year 1853 – the bell rang toward noon; I ran out, as children do, and opened the door. There I saw a very young man, handsome as a picture, with long blond hair. He asked for my father, but I told him that our parents were out. If he returned the next day, at a similar time, he would find them in.

He did as bidden. This time Schumann himself answered the door, and, with the greatest warmth, invited him in. Eugenie was witness to it all.

EUGENIE: The young man sat down at the piano. But he had hardly played a few bars when my father interrupted and ran out, saying: ‘Please wait a moment, I must call my wife’.

He left the room. ‘Clara!’ he called out.

SCHUMANN: Clara! Come! You must hear this! Do come! Now!

At thirty-four, Clara Schumann was widely held to be among the greatest pianists of the century. Chopin had said of her: ‘She is the only woman in Germany who can play my music’. Yet Brahms felt none of the inhibition and discomfort he’d felt at an earlier visit

9 to Liszt’s. Here, in the double presence of genius, he felt only exaltation. Clara sat down next to her husband. Brahms, who had risen to greet her, returned to the piano. ‘Now,’ said Schumann:

SCHUMANN: Now you will hear music such as you have never heard before.

Clara looked with interest at their visitor. A small, delicate, rather beautiful boy, he looked sixteen or seventeen at most, and still spoke with the high, unbroken voice of a child. He seemed at the same time rather shy and yet curiously self-possessed. But when he began to play, the child vanished entirely.

9 Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5 (first movement)

Part of the Piano Sonata No. 3, by the twenty-year-old Brahms.

10 He played many things that day, after which he thanked his hosts profusely for hearing him and took his leave of them. It was a day which not one of the Schumanns ever forgot.

EUGENIE SCHUMANN: The midday meal which followed was simply unforgettable. Both our parents were in a state of the most joyful, even uncontainable excitement – again and again they began, and found they could speak of nothing but the young morning visitor, whose name was Johannes Brahms.

That evening, Schumann, having recovered his composure, wrote tersely in his diary: ‘Visit from Brahms – a genius’. Clara, in her diary, was more expansive:

CLARA: Here is one who seems to have come straight from God. He played us sonatas, scherzos, and other pieces, all his own, each showing the most exuberant imagination, depth of feeling, and mastery of form. Robert says that there was nothing he could tell him to take away or to add. It is really very moving to see him sitting at the piano, with

10 his interesting young face, which becomes transfigured when he plays, his beautiful hands, which overcome the most fearsome difficulties with perfect ease (his things are very difficult), and in addition, these remarkable compositions. He has studied with Marxsen in Hamburg, but what he played to us is so masterly that one can only believe that the good God sent him into the world ready-made. He has a great future ahead of him, for he will first find the true field for his genius when he begins to write for the orchestra. Robert says there is nothing to wish except that heaven preserve his health.

If Robert had been terse in his diary, he could hardly have been less so in a long article which he wrote for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , which he’d founded in 1834 and which had become, under his editorship, one of the most influential musical journals in Germany. He’d begun his journalistic career by recognising the true stature of Chopin in an article whose injunction – ‘Hats off, gentleman! A genius!’ – may well be the most famous utterance in the history of musical criticism. He now closed it (though he didn’t know that at the time) by doing the same for Brahms. In an article entitled ‘Neue Bahnen’ (New Pathways), he hailed this hitherto unknown young man of twenty as a musical Messiah.

SCHUMANN: It seemed to me... that there would and indeed must suddenly appear one man who would be singled out to articulate and give the ideal expression to the tendencies of our time, one man who would show us his mastery, not through a gradual process, but, like Minerva, springing fully armed from the head of Zeus. And he has come, a young man over whose cradle Graces and Heroes stood guard. His name is Johannes Brahms and he comes from Hamburg, where he has been working in quiet obscurity. He carries all the marks of one who has received a call. Seated at the piano, he began to disclose the most wonderful regions… There were sonatas, or rather veiled symphonies ; songs whose poetry would be clear even if one were ignorant of the words, though a profound singing melody runs through them all; individual piano pieces of an almost demonic nature and charming form; then sonatas for violin and piano, quartets for strings – and all so different from one another that each seemed to flow from a fresh spring. When he waves his magic wand where the power of great orchestral and choral

11 masses will aid him, then we shall be shown still more wonderful glimpses into the secrets of the spirit-world. May the highest Genius strengthen him for this. We salute him on his first journey through the world where wounds may await him, but also palms and laurels.

Almost three stunned weeks after reading Schumann’s unexpected hymn of praise,

Brahms wrote to him:

BRAHMS: Honoured Master, You have made me so immensely happy that I cannot attempt to thank you in words. God grant that my works 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. I hope that you will never regret what you have done for me, and that I may succeed in becoming fully worthy of you.

On the day of Brahms’s first arrival in the Schumann household, Clara, fourteen years his senior, had discovered that she was carrying her seventh child, and Robert, at forty-three, was the very picture of familial contentment and robust good health. But the picture was deceiving. For more than two decades Schumann had increasingly been subject to severe, recurrent headaches, dizziness, insomnia, ringing in the ears, sudden and debilitating anxiety attacks, and wildly fluctuating moods. In the weeks just before Brahms’s arrival he’d begun to find difficulty in speaking and was experiencing aural hallucinations. Behind the facade of normality he’d become increasingly dependent on Clara, who was balancing the roles of principal breadwinner, wife, mother, and world-famous pianist with an energy and inner resourcefulness that beggar belief. On the 27 th of February 1854, hounded by infernal shriekings in his ears, Schumann threw himself into the Rhine. Rescued before drowning, he was committed at his own request to an asylum at Endenich near Bonn, where he died on the 29 th of July 1856. In the intervening months, Brahms, ‘the young eagle’ as Schumann had called him, devoted himself almost wholly to the support and consolation of Clara, her young family, and Robert himself, whom he visited

12 and with whom he kept up a steady correspondence. Early on in this desperately difficult time, Clara confided to her diary:

CLARA: That good Brahms always shows himself a most sympathetic friend. He does not say much, but one can see in his face, in his speaking eye, how he grieves with me for the loved one he so highly reveres. Besides, he is so kind in seizing every opportunity of cheering me by any means of anything musical. From so young a man I cannot but be doubly conscious of the sacrifice, for a sacrifice it undoubtedly is for anyone to be with me now.

In that, she was mistaken. The young man was deeply in love with her.

11 Piano Trio No. 2 in C, Op. 87 (Scherzo)

Part of the Piano Trio No. 2 in C.

12 We have no evidence, but it seems likely that Brahms fell in love with Clara more or less on sight. As soon as he heard the news of Schumann’s breakdown, he rushed to be at her side, with the heartfelt support of his mother, who even found money to send him. That the twenty-one-year-old found himself in a state of considerable emotional confusion seems clear from a letter to Joachim in the spring of that year:

BRAHMS: I believe that I do not have more concern and admiration for her than that I love her and am under her spell. I often must restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting my arms around her and even... I don’t know, it seems to me so natural that she could not misunderstand. I think I can no longer love an unmarried girl – at least, I have quite forgotten about them. They only hold out the promise of heaven while Clara shows it revealed to us.

In August, he confessed to one of his older friends, one Herr Blume:

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BRAHMS: Frau Schumann went with a friend on the tenth of this month to Ostend for the benefit of her health. I, after much persuasion, resolved to make a journey through Swabia in her absence. I did not until now know how greatly I was attached to the Schumanns, how I lived in them; everything seemed barren and empty to me, every day I wished to turn back, and was obliged to travel by rail in order to get quickly to a distance and forget about turning back. It was of no use; I have come as far as Ulm, partly on foot, partly by rail; I am going to return quickly, and would rather wait for Frau Schumann in Düsseldorf than wander about in the dark. When one has found such divine people as Robert and Clara Schumann, one should stick to them and not leave them, and inspire one’s self by them.

In the Schumanns Brahms had found people whose experience and sophistication were far beyond his own, a fact which lends added poignancy to the paternalistic attitude evident in certain of his letters to Clara, who was biologically old enough to be his mother. ‘My dear Clara,’ he wrote in 1857, a year or so after Schumann’s death…

BRAHMS: …You really must try hard to keep your melancholy within bounds and see that it does not last too long. Life is precious and such moods as the one you are in consume us body and soul. Do not imagine that life has little more in store for you… You must seriously try to alter, my dearest Clara… Passions are not natural to mankind; they are always exceptions or excrescences. The man in whom they overstep the limits should regard himself as an invalid and seek a medicine for his life and for his health. The ideal and genuine man is calm both in his joy and in his sorrow.

No sentence in this letter is more striking than Brahms’s immaturely mature assertion that ‘passions are not natural to mankind’. In what light, then, are we to see not only Schumann and Brahms himself but the entire Romantic movement? And with what feelings of guilt and bewilderment must Brahms have written, as he was soon to do:

BRAHMS: My beloved Clara, I wish I might write to you as tenderly as I love you, and do all of the good things for you that I wish you. You are so endlessly dear to me that I

14 cannot express it. I would go on forever calling you ‘darling’ and all sorts of other things without ever tiring of endearments... Oh my dearly beloved, I am a man of straw and far from worthy of being thus locked in your heart, my dear and glorious Clara. But go on doing it, in and to your heart, as I do with you!... No thought goes from me to you that does not entirely surround you and pay heed to all your cares... I love you more than myself and anyone or anything in the world... Deeply beloved Clara, now the longed-for Sunday, for which I have so fervently been waiting, is finally drawing near. If only it brings you with it! I’m actually shivering with expectation. It’s becoming harder and harder to get used to being separated from you.

Elsewhere, he beseeches her:

BRAHMS: What have you done to me? Can you not release me from this magic?

And again:

BRAHMS: I regret every word I write to you that does not speak of love. You have taught me and are every day teaching me more and more to recognise and to marvel at the nature of love, affection, and self-denial... I wish I could always write to you from my heart, to tell you how deeply I love you, and can only beg of you to believe it without further proof.

And on one occasion he even turned uncharacteristically poetical:

BRAHMS: Thy missive, oh Lady, has dropped balsam into a soul tormented by longing and desire, and brought healing to a torn and ailing heart... Reason is deranged, and the heart lost. Would to God that I might be allowed this day to tell thee, rather than to send this letter, that I die from love of thee!

At other times he was more down-to-earth, and had reluctantly to concede that the age gap between them was more than a merely conventional disadvantage:

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BRAHMS: You bear your sorrow with such dignity that it is only too easy to forget your pain and to indulge lightly in jests. I am still young, even boyish at times: you must forgive me. You surely believe and know that my feelings are more serious and that youthful exuberance or lightheartedness make me seem different, but can never let me forget.

In another of his letters to Clara, he paints a fascinating verbal self-portrait.

BRAHMS: You take me, I believe, to be quite different from what I am. I am never, or extremely rarely, satisfied with myself. Perhaps never comfortable, but pleased and darkly moody by turns. However, I am so disinclined and unfitted to lament my lack of genius and skill to others that in any case I always present a different appearance. In addition to which I am so happy about the pleasure I give to others, and especially you, that I cannot help showing it and looking as if I appeared so bright and sure of victory thanks to merits of my own. Oh why can we not look into ourselves and know just how much of divinity there be in us?

That Clara’s debt to Brahms was incalculable, she freely acknowledged:

CLARA: Like a true friend, he came to share all my sorrow; he strengthened the heart that threatened to break, he uplifted my mind, brightened my spirits where he could. He was, in short, my friend in the fullest sense of the word.

But more than a friend? An entry in her diary in 1855 sounds rather as though she’s trying to convince herself otherwise:

CLARA: There is the most complete accord between us. It is not his youth that attracts me: not, perhaps, my own flattered vanity. No, it is the fresh mind, the gloriously gifted nature, the noble heart that I love in him.

16

November found her in Hamburg, where she met Brahms’s parents, and, like everyone else meeting them for the first time, she was much struck by the great disparity in their ages. That evening she wrote of Johannes in her diary:

CLARA: Perhaps I am appointed to be a mother to him in her place... for indeed I love him like a son.

There were certainly times, throughout her life, when she behaved towards him like a mother – a fact reflected in numerous little asides as when Brahms, in sending her some songs, added:

BRAHMS: Please don’t judge them harshly at first reading... Forgive me, but… I’m just afraid of being scolded.

In a letter to Christiane, again in 1855, a year or so before Schumann’s death, she sounds something more than merely maternal:

CLARA: From here, my dear friend, I can send you little or no good news. I am feeling the separation from Johannes too painfully... He is the dearest friend I have in all the world.

And so he was. For all his youth and boyish appearance, he had in fact taken over the supportive role once played by Schumann; he gave her the opportunity, as Schumann himself had, to stand as midwife to a burgeoning musical genius; he drew out and stimulated her musical imagination, as Robert had; he loved and entertained her children; and despite her deficiencies in humour he made her laugh. And the children adored him. He made them laugh too, especially Eugenie, who nourished memories of his visits to the end of her days.

EUGENIE: I see, as though it were in a picture, a group of children standing in the hall of our house in Düsseldorf. With amazement and admiration they are looking up at the

17 banisters, on which a fair young man is performing the most daring gymnastics. He hoists himself from right to left and up and down; at last he raises himself firmly on his arms, his legs held high in the air, and a final leap lands him below in the midst of the admiring crowd of children. I and my elder brothers and sisters were the enchanted children; the young man was Johannes Brahms.

13 Piano Sonata No. 1 in C (Finale)

The Finale of Brahms’s First Piano Sonata. 14 What Eugenie Schumann was perhaps too young to perceive, but which her mother emphatically wasn’t, was the fact that this really quite beautiful young man was also sexually attractive. There’s no evidence that Brahms and Clara were ever lovers in a physical sense, and this period was so fraught with anxiety and grief on Clara’s part, and derived so much of its character and energy from the fact of Schumann’s illness, that a sexual relationship seems unlikely, even if their deeply entrenched sense of honour had allowed it. Nor was it likely that Brahms could then have reconciled his almost obsessively polarised views of sex and love. Clara represented in every respect his conscious ideal of womanhood. And a part of that ideal was the negation of the animal instincts he’d seen at work in the ‘stimulation saloons’ of Hamburg. The depth of Brahms’s love for Clara was beyond question. This was no boyish infatuation. And it was another of the things that endeared him to the children.

EUGENIE: I liked to look at Brahms when he said, ‘Your mother’. The blue of his eyes showed at its purest and softest. We children loved in Brahms his fresh, youthful virility, his thoroughly German characteristics, his genuineness and reliability, the clarity of his mind, which saw and made others see things as they were. But above all we loved him for his love of our mother. Whatever else I have come to doubt in the course of my life, I have never doubted Brahms’s loyalty. And if to him my mother’s great heart was the strongest attraction, she too knew that her friend had a heart that understood every emotion of hers and would be devoted to her to the end of her days.

18

Nor did the friendship with Schumann himself end with his incarceration. Brahms, unlike Clara, visited him regularly and was sometimes allowed to take him on walks beyond the confines of the asylum. There was also a lively correspondence between them, and though Schumann never once asked either to see or to hear of his wife (naturally to her extreme distress), Brahms kept him well informed, never apparently dreaming that his reports might provoke even the slightest pangs of jealousy on Schumann’s part. In December 1854, for instance, we find him writing from Düsseldorf:

BRAHMS: I returned here the evening before Christmas; how long the separation from your wife seemed to me! I had become so accustomed to her inspiring company, I had lived near her so delightfully all the summer and learned to admire and love her so much that everything seemed flat to me, and I could only long to see her again... I must thank you most warmly for a pleasant word in your last letter, for the affectionate ‘thou’.

Brahms is referring here to the informal use of the German pronoun ‘Du’ as opposed to the formal ‘Sie’; something we have no equivalent for in English, but it’s the same as ‘tu’ and ‘vous’ in French. And he adds:

BRAHMS: Your dear wife also makes me happy now by using the same nice, intimate word. It is the highest proof to me of her favour. I will try always to deserve it more.

And later:

BRAHMS: The day was altogether such a delightful one as one does not often experience. Your dear wife understands well how to give happiness. But of course you know this better than anyone.

It should be borne in mind that the incurability of Schumann’s illness was by no means taken for granted during the earlier part of his confinement, and he enjoyed periods of lucidity during which he seemed much like his old self. He had a piano in his room, on which Brahms would play for him and at which the two of them even joined forces in the

19 occasional duet. In February 1855, Schumann was allowed out, as Johannes reported to Clara:

BRAHMS: It was very fine to see the heavy doors, which are usually bolted, opened for us... He was very pleased with my Hungarian hat, just as he used to be in the old days... So we went to the cathedral, and to the Beethoven monument, after which I brought him back to the road.

When not visiting or writing to Schumann, Brahms consulted with doctors and visited other institutions which might offer superior treatment. The search proved vain, but it left him with a lifelong horror of mental illness, not lessened by the spectacle of Schumann’s own deteriorating condition.

15 By April 1856 it was clear to everyone that Schumann was beyond retrieval. On one particularly distressing visit, he seemed unable to understand a word Brahms spoke, but talked incessantly, apparently to himself, and mostly in an incoherent babble. By the end of July it was clear that the end wasn’t far off, and Clara had her first sight of him since the day of his committal in March 1854. Brahms was there and reported the scene to a friend.

BRAHMS: He lay for some time with closed eyes, and she knelt before him with greater calmness than one would have thought possible. But later on, he recognised her, and he did so again the next day. Once he clearly wished to embrace her and flung his arms around her. Of course, he was past being able to talk any more. One could only make out single words, perhaps in imagination. But even that was bound to make her happy.

Later she despatched a note to Joachim:

CLARA: I saw him yesterday. Let me be silent about my own despair, but I did perceive a few loving glances; I shall carry them with me all my life! Pray God he may have a peaceful end. It cannot last much longer.

20

And Brahms contributed a warning to his old friend:

BRAHMS: I’m writing this just in case you should want to see him once more. But you must think it over very carefully; it is a very, very horrifying and pitiful sight. He is extremely thin, and there can be no question of conversation or even consciousness.

Joachim came at once. On the 29th, Clara and Johannes went to meet him at the station. When they returned to the asylum Schumann was dead. His funeral followed two days later. Clara noted in her diary that evening:

CLARA: His dearest friends went in front; I came, unnoticed, behind, and it was best that way. All happiness has gone with his passing. A new life begins for me now.

A new life was shortly to begin for Brahms too: a life of dogged independence, spectacular failures, and triumphant successes – and a life in which he was to affect others as Schumann had affected him, most notably in the case of Dvo řák. Schumann had been among the most generous of men, and Brahms was to follow suit. With Robert’s death, the relationship between Brahms and Clara reached a watershed. On a holiday in Switzerland, in the company of Brahms’s sister and two of Clara’s sons, they seem to have decided to go their separate ways, maintaining and nurturing a friendship which was to last for forty years, but following their different stars. When and how these decisions were reached in such well chaperoned circumstances we’ll never know, but from that time onwards there was no prospect of any formal union. The likelihood is that the motivating impulse came from Brahms, who had written to Clara not long before:

BRAHMS: You have taught me and are every day teaching me more and more to recognise and to marvel at the nature of love, affection, and self-denial.

21

That Brahms consciously, and repeatedly, practised self-denial in the service of his art is beyond question. At the same time, there’s no doubt, either, that in almost every case the ostensible sacrifice released him, if only temporarily, from a deep-rooted fear of entrapment by women. In the autumn, following their return from Switzerland, Clara sold the house in Düsseldorf and moved to Berlin, while Brahms now drifted into a semi-nomadic life, with Hamburg and his family at its base. He had devoted himself body and soul to Clara and her family for the best part of four years, and professionally had little to show for it. Now it was time to set his own course straight.

CD 2

1 With Clara now removed to Berlin and any chance of their permanent union now dissolved, Brahms’s thoughts turned not only to the future but to the past. Four years earlier he’d been an unknown composer of twenty, uncertain of his future and very little experienced in worldly matters. But he’d had his pride, and a sense of obligation too. What had he said to Joachim in that other age, before his world turned over?

BRAHMS: I can’t even consider going back home with nothing to show... I have to have at least two or three compositions in print, so that I can cheerfully look my parents in the face.

The immediate effect of Schumann’s extravagant prophecy was to put the name of Brahms on the lips of every musician in Germany, with publishers practically queuing up to get their hands on his works. He was now in the unenviable position of having to live up to impossible expectations. He must at least have had moments when he wondered whether Schumann, with his great generosity of spirit, had really done him a favour, or quite the reverse. His already chronic perfectionism had seen to it that the works he had to show were few, and he now felt less ready than ever to expose them to public scrutiny. If his first letter to Schumann after the publication of the famous article was not one of unalloyed joy, for all its very genuine gratitude, there was a good reason.

22

BRAHMS: The public praise you have bestowed on me will have so greatly increased the musical world’s expectations of my work that I have no idea how I shall manage even approximately to do justice to it. Above all, it forces me to exercise the greatest caution in the choice of pieces for publication.

Caution is hardly the word for it. What followed was a typically Brahmsian purge. First into the flames were two trios and a string quartet in B flat, and there were undoubtedly others as well. Spared were his three piano sonatas, a lone Scherzo in E flat minor, and a group of songs, at least one of which, ‘Liebestreu’, was soon to be famous . Wherever he went in the immediate aftermath of Schumann’s article, the reserved and self-effacing twenty-year-old found himself the object of curious scrutiny, and frequently, too, just as he’d feared, profound scepticism. As the critic Arnold Schlönbach put it:

SCHLÖNBACH: Schumann’s article had awakened mistrust in numerous circles. At all events, it had created a very difficult situation for the young man, for its justification required the fulfilment of great demands; and when the slender, fair youth appeared, so deficient in presence, so shy, so modest, his voice still in transitional falsetto, few could have suspected the genius that had already created so rich a world in this young nature.

Almost invariably, he was not what people expected. In the diary of Hedwig Salomon, a wealthy music-lover and patroness, we read:

HEDWIG SALOMON: Yesterday Herr von Sahr brought to me a young man who held in his hand a letter from Joachim. There he was before me, Schumann’s young Messiah, fair and delicate; though only in his twentieth year, his face showed the triumph of his spirit. Purity, innocence, naturalness, power, and depth – this describes his character. Schumann’s prophecy tempts one perhaps to find him rather absurd, and to be severe with him, but one forgets everything, and loves and admires him without restraint. And with all this independent strength, a thin boy’s voice that has not changed, a child’s countenance that any girl might kiss without blushing, and the purity and firmness of his

23 whole being, which guarantee that the spoiled world will not be able to overcome this man. For, as he has been able to bear his elevation from obscurity to the perilous position of an idol without losing any of his modesty, or even his naivety, so God who created such a beautiful nature will continue to help him!

And from Herr von Sahr himself:

VON SAHR: He is quite perfect! The days since he has been here are amongst the most delightful in my recollection. He answers exactly to my idea of an artist. And as a man!

One unfortunate effect of Schumann’s article had been to diminish at a stroke the sheer pleasure and emotional release which Brahms had previously, though certainly not consistently, found in the act of composition. From 1853 onwards, he carried the weight of destiny on his shoulders. Between the publications of 1854 and 1860, the musical world waited, apparently in vain, for the fulfilment of Schumann’s ringing prophecy. Apart from the Op. 10 Ballades , Brahms published nothing for six years. As far as the waiting public was concerned, the Messiah had simply disappeared. And the strange irony is that it was Schumann’s collapse and its aftermath which were largely responsible. Silent though he may unexpectedly have remained as a composer, Brahms was hardly idle. During the years of Robert’s incarceration, while Clara dauntlessly undertook concert tours to keep the money coming in, the young Johannes, still in his early twenties, effectively ran the household, helping the servants look after the children, of whom there were then seven, assuming responsibility for all the family finances (rent, school fees, servants’ wages, taxes, investments, and so on), and earning a little himself by taking over some of Clara’s pupils and acquiring a few of his own. And from the beginning, he proved himself a born teacher. Among his early pupils was Eugenie Schumann.

EUGENIE: He was strict and absolute; he was gentle and patient and encouraging; he was not only clear, he was light itself; he knew exhaustively, and could teach, and did teach, by the shortest possible methods, every detail of technical study; he was unwearied

24 in his efforts to make his pupil grasp the full musical meaning of whatever work might be in hand. He was even punctual! He gradually put me through an entire course of technical training, showing me how I should best work, for the attainment of my end, at scales, arpeggios, trills, double notes, and octaves. He had thought about such training and about technique in general much more than my mother, who had surmounted all technical difficulties at an age when one is not yet conscious of them. He also showed me just how to work: to begin with, he made me practise to him during a good part of my lessons, whilst he sat watching my fingers, telling me what was wrong in my way of moving them, indicating, by a movement of his own hand, a better position for mine, absorbing himself entirely, for the time being, in the object of helping me. He was never irritable, never indifferent, but invariably helped, stimulated and encouraged me. At all times he adapted his teaching to my own capabilities and the stage of my progress in a quite wonderful way. Brahms, as well as my mother, was of the opinion that technique, more especially fingering, must be learnt through exercises, so that in the study of pieces, attention may be focused entirely on the spirit of the music.

Yet on top of all his domestic and pastoral activities, and with all the distractions of the most powerful love he’d ever known, Brahms still found time for composition and strove continually to fulfil Schumann’s gargantuan expectations of him. Compositions of this period include the beautiful Variations on a Theme by Schumann , the four Ballades , and, most importantly of all, a major sonata for two pianos, which was then recast as a symphony before finally emerging as the great D minor Piano Concerto we know today.

2 Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 15 (opening)

3 To Brahms’s six years of public silence and unremitting hard work, we owe not only the works already mentioned, but the great String Sextet in B flat, the Variations on an Original Theme, the Piano Quartet in G minor, and a number of choral works. In 1856, when he was twenty-three, Brahms made perhaps the most intensive study of counterpoint ever undertaken by a great composer since the death of Bach in 1750. With extraordinary industry he lifted his already remarkable technique as a

25 composer to a level of mastery achieved by very few in any era. At no time, though, did he rest content with craftsmanship alone. As he begged of Joachim, when sending him some canons:

BRAHMS: Quite apart from the skill in them, are they good music ? Does the ingenuity make them more beautiful and valuable?

During this outwardly fallow spell Brahms relied for his livelihood on teaching and performing, without showing a lot of enthusiasm for either. As a performer he was generally ambivalent, and to certain of his colleagues, Clara Schumann among them, his plaintive attitude to concert tours was understandably offensive:

CLARA: You regard them merely as a means of making money. I do not! I feel I have a mission to reproduce beautiful works, and especially Robert’s, so long as I have the strength to do it. The practice of my art is an important part of my ego. It is the very breath of my nostrils.

The implication here, though, whatever his attitude to touring in particular, is unfair to Brahms. His nostrils, too, could quiver just as fervently with evangelical zeal as hers, and the fact is he was tireless in championing the music he loved best. The cellist Julius Schmidt heard him a lot during this period, and was deeply impressed.

JULIUS SCHMIDT: Brahms loved the great masters with an unquenchable passion. And how he played Haydn and Mozart! With what beauty of interpretation and delicacy of tone! And his transposing!... His score-reading too was extraordinary. Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, all seemed to flow naturally under his fingers, and each point to come out, so to speak, of itself.

The degree and passion of Brahms’s humility in the face of the great masters was not lost on his more perceptive critics. After a concert in Leipzig on the 10 th of January 1855, at

26 which Brahms played the Beethoven G major Concerto and a group of solo works by Schumann, one critic summed up the general reaction when he wrote:

CRITIC: Many artists might have displayed more technical brilliancy, but few have the capacity for bringing out so convincingly the intentions of the composer, or following as Brahms does the flight of Beethoven’s genius and disclosing its full splendour.

But his ‘technical brilliancy’, so called, should not be underrated. The Viennese critic Selmar Bagge was in no doubt about the quality of Brahms’s pianism:

SELMAR BAGGE: We have to bestow the very highest praise not only on the enormous technical acquirement, but also on a performance instinct with musical genius, and a treatment of the instrument quite as fascinating as it was original.

And Joachim went so far as to bracket him with Liszt. Another witness to his virtuoso abilities, of course, was Clara Schumann, who knew, as they say, whereof she spoke.

CLARA: He made a special study of technique, and could do anything he liked with his fingers on the piano.

Not surprising, then, that he wrote some of the most formidably difficult piano music ever written.

4 Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 35

Some of the Variations on a Theme by Paganini .

5 Brahms was always a musician first and a performer second, but, for all his ambivalence about the performing life, he naturally loved being able to do anything he liked on the piano. As he remarked to Clara:

27

BRAHMS: One of the things that give me the most pleasure is that I really have the gifts of a virtuoso. Given a good piano, I play with the greatest calm and ease. And the bigger the pieces, the better I play.

Nor was the normally self-effacing Brahms by any means indifferent to public acclaim. He wrote to his parents after one of his many great successes:

BRAHMS: I was tremendously happy yesterday. My concert went quite marvellously, better than I could have dared to hope. Every piece was loudly applauded. There was real enthusiasm in the room. I played as freely as if I were sitting at home with friends; and I must say that the attitude and response of audiences in Vienna is quite different from those at home.

And like many male pianists before and since, Brahms found that his playing could have an incendiary effect on the opposite sex. This was true even in his early-to-mid twenties, when despite his musical prowess and growing fame he still looked and sounded more like a child than a man. As Julius Schmidt observed of the twenty-four-year-old Brahms:

SCHMIDT: His appearance was so delicate and refined as to be almost girlish – an impression enhanced by his voice, which was even then of the high quality so often remarked.

Brahms at that time – the year after Schumann’s death and Clara’s moving away to Berlin – had accepted a minor post at the tiny court of Detmold, where he served as conductor, court pianist, and as tutor to the young Princess Friederike, whose example led to a stream of wealthy female pupils, whose custom and company made up for his very modest salary. Though Brahms’s attitudes to women were highly complicated, there’s no question that in general he loved to be surrounded by them, especially if they were young and pretty and adored him, which they did in droves, all through his life. And the well- born girls of Detmold were no exception. At the very least, they distracted him from thoughts of Clara, in faraway Berlin. But the main attraction of Detmold for Brahms was

28 neither its musical life nor the attentions of doting young women, but its magnificent surrounding countryside, which perfectly catered to one of his favourite pastimes. As Florence May observed:

FLORENCE MAY: Brahms was a great walker, and he had a passionate love of nature. It was his lifelong habit during the spring and summer to rise at four or five o’clock, and, after making himself a cup of coffee, to go into the woods to enjoy the delicious freshness of early morning and to listen to the singing of the birds... ‘I never feel it to be dull,’ he said one day, in answer to some remark about the depressing effects of long- continued rain. ‘My view is so fine. Even when it rains, I have only another kind of beauty.’

But he valued Detmold for more than its forests. The musical life there was thoroughly congenial, on the whole; he met and made new friends, many of whom were excellent musicians; and at last he had the opportunity to devote himself to composition, without the constraints of seven children and a household to run. He missed Clara, of course, but at the same time he experienced a kind of liberation. Among the works he wrote in Detmold are two very attractive serenades for orchestra, which are still in the repertoire but have never enjoyed the popularity of his other orchestral works.

6 Serenade No. 1 in D, Op. 11

7 For all their charms, the two serenades pale next to the great D minor Piano Concerto, which Brahms completed at Detmold after a long gestation: from a two-piano sonata, to a quickly discarded symphony, and only then to its final incarnation as a concerto. The piece is not only very great but of considerable historical importance, and of still greater importance in the story of Brahms’s creative life. Its historical importance lies in its scope – it’s a massive work, embracing an enormous range of emotions – and in its seriousness of intent. Not even Beethoven had ever attempted a concerto on quite this scale. It’s the first truly epic piano concerto, surpassed in size only by Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, so its long gestation should come as no surprise. Still more amazing,

29 though, is the fact that this was Brahms’s first orchestral work of any kind – perhaps the most astonishing orchestral debut in history. And its phenomenal confidence and self- assurance give no hint of the agonies of self-doubt and indecision that dogged Brahms during the three years of its composition. It was a lifelong practice of Brahms’s to beseech his friends for constructive advice, as when he wrote to Joachim during the work’s composition:

BRAHMS: I am sending you the rondo once more. And just like the last time, I beg for some really severe criticism. Some parts have been completely replaced – for the better, I hope – others merely changed. Especially the ending was improved; it was too sketchy and did not accomplish what it set out to do. One place I left untouched, although it bears a question mark on its forehead. Must it be removed, at all costs? In the first movement I have smoothed out a few of the weak passages. I did not quite succeed with the first one, and therefore left it alone, for the time being. I again enclose both movements; perhaps you can point out a few things I can improve... In the finale several episodes are still very thinly orchestrated. I am still so ignorant, and don’t know how to help myself.

Would anyone connect that sentence with the music in question, or guess that only days before the first performance the composer wrote again to Joachim:

BRAHMS: If you are willing and able, do please write me a few words to let me know whether the effort wasn’t altogether futile, and whether it has any chance. I no longer have either judgement or control of the piece. Nothing decent will come of it anyway.

Something very much more than decent did come of it, of course. Indeed it turned out to be one of the most successful and enduring things he ever wrote.

8 Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 (Finale)

30

9 The first performance of that work, in Leipzig in 1859, has become one of the best remembered occasions in the history of the concert hall. Brahms wrote to Joachim immediately afterwards:

BRAHMS: My concerto here was a glittering and decisive – fiasco. The first rehearsal evoked no feelings in performers or listeners. At the second there was no listener, and not a muscle moved in the musicians’ faces. And after the performance proper three hands started slowly to clap at the end, but a noisy hissing from all sides forbade any such demonstration. There is nothing more to say about this episode, for not a single soul has said a word to me about the work.

That was still to come. The most often cited of the reviews came from the critic Edward Bernsdorf:

BERSNDORF: This concerto is composition dragged to its grave. The work can give no pleasure; it has nothing to offer but hopeless desolation and aridity. For more than three quarters of an hour one must endure this rooting and rummaging, this straining and tugging, this tearing and patching of phrases and flourishes! Not only must one take in this fermenting mass; one must also swallow a dessert of the shrillest dissonances and most unpleasant sounds. Herr Brahms has deliberately made the piano part as uninteresting as possible! It contains no effective treatment of the instrument, no new and ingenious passages, and wherever something appears which gives promise of effect, it is immediately crushed and suffocated by a thick crust of orchestral accompaniment.

Faced with a similar fiasco, after the performance of his First Symphony , Sergey Rachmaninov suffered something very near to a nervous breakdown and found himself unable to compose for the best part of three years. And a similar critical catastrophe in the case of Bizet’s Carmen is widely thought to have precipitated Bizet’s tragic death at thirty-six. But to paraphrase Jerome Kern’s popular song, Brahms picked himself up, dusted himself off, and prepared to start all over. He made no pretence of being unhurt,

31 but with a resilience characteristic of his genius he determined to profit from his own defeat. As he wrote to Joachim:

BRAHMS: In spite of everything, the Concerto will meet with approval when I have improved its form, and the next one will be quite different. I believe this is the best thing that can happen to one; it forces one to concentrate one’s thoughts and increases one’s courage. After all, I am only experimenting and feeling my way as yet.

And he knew with complete serenity that he was right about the Concerto. So far from merely meeting with approval, it soon established itself, and has remained ever since, one of the highest peaks of the mainstream concert repertory. But Brahms’s difficulties in 1859 weren’t by any means limited to things musical, aesthetic, and political. And thereby hangs a tale. For his holiday the previous summer, he’d travelled to Göttingen to join Clara, but had found himself very unexpectedly distracted by the young singer Agathe von Siebold, whose voice and natural musicianship inspired some of his greatest songs. Clara, forgetting that her attachment to Brahms was basically ‘maternal’, was unamused and, after glimpsing Brahms with his arm around Agathe’s waist, had retired in high dudgeon, packed her bags, and quickly decamped. Brahms himself, who was now well and truly smitten with Agathe, hardly noticed. He now began to divide his time on a more or less regular basis between Göttingen and Detmold, and if the music he wrote during this period seems at times like love-letters in sound, it’s no accident.

10 String Sextet No. 1 in B flat, Op. 18 (Andante)

Part of the String Sextet in B flat, conceived in the aftermath of Brahms’s falling in love with Agathe von Siebold.

11 Within a year of their first meeting Brahms and Agathe exchanged rings and were secretly engaged. But secrets like that are often hard to keep, especially where rings are

32 involved, and when the news became public Brahms panicked. From Detmold he wrote her perhaps the strangest letter of his life.

BRAHMS: I love you! I must see you again! But I cannot wear fetters. Write to me, whether I am to come back, to take you in my arms, to kiss you, to tell you that I love you.

Rather to her credit, she did nothing of the sort. The engagement was abruptly broken off, and they never saw each other again. Clara, in the meantime, couldn’t shake the matter, and in the following year wrote to Brahms:

CLARA: I had some bad days in Cassel. The poor Agathe, and much besides, would not leave my mind. In spirit I kept seeing that poor abandoned girl, and lived all her suffering over. Ah, dear Johannes, you should not have let things go so far!

It was a messy episode for all concerned. Ten years were to pass before Agathe was able to shake off the trauma enough to marry another man, and it was only in her old age that she could find it in her heart to forgive Brahms. In her Erinnerungen , cast in the form of a novel, she wrote, still distancing herself by writing in the third person:

AGATHE VON SIEBOLD: Her memory of her great love for the young man, of the days of her youth, radiant with poetry and beauty, has never faded... Over and over again, his immortal work has contributed to her happiness. He, however, strode by on his path to fame, and as he, like every genius, belonged to humanity, she gradually learned to appreciate his wisdom in severing the bonds that had threatened to shackle him. She saw clearly at last that she could never have filled his life with her great love.

For Brahms, the matter was more easily resolved, though he too felt the pain of it for years and acknowledged that he had ‘played the scoundrel’ with Agathe. But it was a good five years before he was able to ‘free himself’, as he put it, from his love for her, and it’s interesting that throughout those years his solo songs and choral works in

33 particular were almost obsessively concerned with the theme of young women abandoned by their lovers. It was only a matter of a couple of weeks after their break-up that Brahms received his savaging by the Leipzig critics after the D minor Concerto, and some may feel he was getting no worse than he deserved. Secretly, he may have thought so himself. And there was more to follow. Among other critical bouquets to come his way not long afterwards was a charming review of his sunny Serenade in A, so redolent of his happiness in the countryside of Detmold.

CRITIC: Brahms’s Serenade is a monstrosity, a caricature, a freak that should never have been published, much less performed. It is inexcusable that such filth should have been offered to a public thirsting for good music. This was an hour of fiendish torture that can never be forgotten.

For all his resilience and inner toughness, Brahms was going through a bad patch, no doubt about that. And he was about to make it a lot worse. In 1860 he became completely enraged by an editorial in the influential and much-read Neue Zeitschrift für Musik which flatly declared that ‘even the North Germans’ (of whom Brahms by the way was far and away the most distinguished) had been won over by the Romantic modernism personified by Wagner, and even more so by Liszt – the Neo-Germans, they were called. It went on to state that ‘all the most prominent musicians of the day’ now supported what was widely known as ‘the music of the future’. Spurred by this completely unwarranted claim, Brahms, still only twenty- seven, and nowhere near fulfilling Schumann’s prophecy (at least as far as the musical public could tell), persuaded Joachim to join him in drafting for publication a manifesto attacking the pernicious influence of the Neo-Germans, and the Neue Zeitschrift for promoting it. ‘The above journal,’ it eventually read…

BRAHMS: The above journal continually spreads the view that musicians of more serious endeavour are fundamentally in agreement with the tendencies it represents, that they recognise in the compositions by the leaders of this group works of artistic value and

34 that altogether, and especially in north Germany, the contentions for and against the so- called ‘music of the future’ are concluded, and the dispute settled in its favour... The undersigned... declare that... the principles stated by Brendel’s journal are not recognised, and that they regard the productions of the leaders and pupils of the so-called ‘New German’ school... as contrary to the innermost spirit of music, strongly to be deplored and condemned.

Once this ill-advised text had been agreed on, Joachim set out to canvas the support, and harvest the signatures, of noted musicians throughout Germany. Many refused point blank, some accepted, but in the event, and for reasons never satisfactorily explained, the manifesto was printed prematurely, with only four signatures, of which two belonged to relative nonentities. Its only effect, with few exceptions, was to make Brahms the laughing stock of musical Germany. For some reason, Joachim seems to have got off more lightly. People have often been suspicious of Brahms’s apparent hatred of the limelight, and his habit of brusquely changing the subject whenever anyone was misguided enough, as he saw it, to offer him a compliment (which, of course, they frequently did). But no- one questioned the wisdom of his decision, after the fiasco of the Manifesto, to keep his head down for a while and drop out of sight. He returned home to Hamburg and gave himself and many other people enormous pleasure by founding the Hamburg Ladies Choir. Of all his performing activities, throughout his life, none excited in Brahms a more burning, messianic zeal than his work as a choral conductor. Unlike his orchestral concerts, where he was dealing with hardened professionals, his choral work brought him into regular contact with amateur musicians, many of them women, hungering for knowledge and spiritual enrichment. And Brahms was more than happy to oblige. In acquainting both them and the wider musical public with many long-forgotten treasures of the Renaissance and Baroque eras, he rendered a service, whose enlightening and enlivening effects long outlived him. It may now seem strange to us, but before Brahms’s initiative, the masterpieces of Byrd, Palestrina, Cavalli, Gabrieli, Schütz, Vivaldi, and Handel, like most of the works of Bach, were unknown to most musicians, let alone the

35 public. In the 1860s and 70s, Brahms was in the vanguard of musicological scholarship. At the time of his death, his private library of books and scores contained more than two thousand volumes. And he was the only scholar who was also a great interpreter.

In 1859, Clara Schumann paid him a visit, and was enchanted by what she found.

CLARA: I spent the time very pleasantly. We had a great deal of music together, and on Sunday, a party of us, including some of the choral society, went for a delightful expedition in the steamer to Blankensee. When we got there, we sought out the most beautiful trees in the garden and sang under them, Johannes sitting on a branch and conducting.

This was the relaxed, generous, extending Brahms, who said to one choir, after a performance of one of his motets:

BRAHMS: I didn’t compose it as beautiful as that!

12 Motet ‘Ich aber bin elend’, Op. 110 No. 1

The Motet Ich aber bin elend . 13 After 1860 Brahms himself took no part in the factionalism which supposedly divided the musical world into warring camps of Brahmsians and Wagnerites. Nor did he rise to the bait of Wagner’s own contemptuous, malicious, personal attacks on both him and his music. Indeed after the embarrassment of the Manifesto he made it a point never to rise publicly to any provocation whatever. As he said in later life:

BRAHMS: Even if a newspaper were to print today that I had murdered my father, I wouldn’t bother to reply.

In the case of Wagner, as it happens, there were some of his works that Brahms actually liked, and he had a healthy respect even for those he found boring, repellent, or both – which, it has to be said, was most of them. Ironically, though, one of the first works he

36 himself composed in the aftermath of the Manifesto drew praise even from Wagner – the towering Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel , which he wrote when he was twenty-eight as a birthday present for Clara, and played for Wagner himself. The image of Brahms as a tactless curmudgeon, the quintessential bull in a china shop, is generally associated with him in later life, when he often looked the part of the grumpy, lonely old man who could hardly open his mouth without an insult popping out. But socially, for all his lovability and his lovingness, his tenderness even, he was always accident-prone, and there was hardly a friend in his life – and he had many – who wasn’t wounded at one time or another by some thoughtless remark. Clara herself, whom he loved more than anyone in life, with the exception of his mother, was often hurt by him. But then she could never understand when he was teasing her, which he often did – sometimes rather cryptically, as when he wrote to her about the Handel Variations :

BRAHMS: I composed them for your birthday, and yet you haven’t even heard them, although you should long since have been practising them for your concerts.

She hadn’t heard them because he hadn’t sent them – and when he did, she practised them until she was blue in the face before feeling ready to try them in public. But she needn’t have worried.

CLARA: I was in agonies of nervousness, but I played them well all the same, and they were much applauded.

As indeed they have been ever since.

14 Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, Op. 24 (Fugue)

15 The gigantic conclusion of the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel , first performed by Clara Schumann in Hamburg in November of 1861. But her pleasure at its reception was spoilt by Brahms himself, all too typically.

37

CLARA: Johannes hurt me very much by his indifference. He declared that he could no longer bear to hear the Variations , it was altogether dreadful to him to listen to anything of his own and to have to sit by and do nothing. Although I can well understand this feeling I cannot help finding it hard when one has devoted all one’s powers to a work, and the composer himself hasn’t a kind word for it.

It happened again and again. It was a kind of tragic flaw. Yet his friends learned to live with it and there wasn’t one who didn’t sooner or later forgive him. And anyway, it wasn’t as though Brahms was like that always. Remember that lovely remark to the choir after they sang his motet. But in general the tendency got worse rather than better as the years went by. For all his celebrity and fame in the musical world at large, Brahms nursed a grievance which he could never quite manage to lose. Maybe because of his humble background and those scarring years when he was effectively a brothel pianist, Brahms craved recognition in his own home town more than many far greater honours. When the conductorship of the Hamburg Philharmonic became vacant in 1862, Brahms had every reason to expect that he would be appointed. Joachim was dead certain of it. But the day of decision came and went, and not only did Brahms not get the job, it was given instead to one of his close friends, the singer Julius Stockhausen, with whom he’d given many concerts of his own songs. Stockhausen was an excellent singer and a good musician, but when it came to his qualifications for the Hamburg post he wasn’t even in the same ball park as Brahms. Crushed, dismayed, and frankly bewildered, Brahms wrote to Clara:

BRAHMS: This is a much sadder business for me than you think, or can perhaps understand. As I am altogether rather an old-fashioned person, so I am in this, that I am not a cosmopolitan but love my native town as a mother... And now this hostile friend comes and ousts me… perhaps forever. How rare it is for one of us to find a permanent niche, and how glad I should have been to find mine in my native town! Happy as I am here, with so much beauty to rejoice me, I nevertheless feel, and shall always feel, that I am a stranger and can find no peace... As a general rule, what our fellow citizens like best is to acquire the things that make life worth living, and one dreads solitude. Work, in

38 active association with others, with live social intercourse and family happiness, who is so little human that he does not long for these things?

But this unexpected rebuff from his native town did nothing to stop Brahms’s longing for the post. He probably knew that Stockhausen wasn’t likely to hold it for long, and he can’t have been thunderstruck when his friend resigned after five years. Again his hopes rose, and again, to general astonishment, he was rejected. Joachim was in no doubt that Brahms’s character was permanently affected.

JOACHIM: If the committee and orchestra had met him with confidence and affection instead of with doubt and airs of protectionism, it would have removed the asperity from his nature. Whereas it must constantly make him more bitter, with his touching, almost childlike patriotism for Hamburg, to see himself treated in so shabby a way... I should like to give the committee a moral cudgelling (and a bodily one too!).

For a while, Brahms’s bitterness overflowed, and even after it subsided he was prone to little eruptions of anger in which he blamed the committee for a lot more than his professional disappointment. To his friend Klaus Groth:

BRAHMS: Twice! Twice have they filled the vacant position with a stranger. Twice have they passed me over. Had I been elected at the right time I might still have become a respectable citizen; I could have married and lived like other men. Now I’m a vagabond.

His conductor friend Hermann Levi had tried to soothe him. Expressing his own unbounded enthusiasm for Brahms’s conducting, he then quite rightly pointed out:

HERMANN LEVI: You are not the man to contend successfully with the thousand-and- one petty vexations that are inevitably connected with any official position.

Nor, if he had married, is it likely that he would have coped any better with the vexations of matrimony. But that’s another story.

39

In his apparent determination to prove his point about being a vagabond, Brahms embarked on a phase of almost cultivated rootlessness. He visited Hamburg as little as possible, though of course he did go back to see his parents now and again, and he began to sample other cities. Friends had been encouraging him for years to visit Vienna, probably the most musical city in history, but it wasn’t until after his humiliation at Hamburg that he took them up on it. Unsurprisingly, he liked it and decided to stay for a few months. In March, he wrote to a friend:

BRAHMS: I have spent a whole winter here, very much at a loose end, but rather enjoyably and cheerfully. I regret above all things that I didn’t know Vienna before. The gaiety of the town, the beauty of the surroundings, the sympathetic and vivacious public, how stimulating all these are to the artist! In addition we have in particular the sacred memory of great musicians whose lives and works are brought daily to our minds. In the case of Schubert especially, one has the impression of his being still alive. Again and again one meets people who talk of him as a good friend; again and again one comes across new works, the existence of which was unknown and which are so untouched that one can scrape the very writing-sand off them.

Writing-sand was an old substitute for blotting paper. There was no doubt that Brahms liked Vienna; no doubt, either, that Vienna liked him. He quickly became a familiar part of the scenery, but it wasn’t for another six years that he finally decided to make it his permanent home. In the meantime there were saddening developments at his original home. To the distress, but probably not to the very great surprise of their children, Brahms’s mismatched parents had decided after more than thirty years to separate, though they remained on cordial terms. Brahms was devoted to them both and tried to do all he could to patch things up, but to no avail. In October of 1864, he wrote to his father from Baden-Baden, after hearing that his mother and his sister Elise, who still lived at home, had set aside a room especially for him whenever he came to visit.

40

BRAHMS: Dearest Father, I do so miss news of you, even though I cannot expect to hear much that will make me happy. That mother and Elise have reserved a room for me would please me indeed if I could think that you would occupy it frequently! I hope that this will be the case. You can often take your afternoon nap in the company of my books. Please don’t stint mother as regards my money; it is not important that it should last until the New Year, and money can bring a smile to many a face that would otherwise frown. Do your best, even if things should be unpleasant sometimes. Do help them with the moving, and don’t let yourself be driven away; the time will come when she and all of us will thank you… Where do you have your meals? Do you still go to mother’s? Could you settle a few expenses for me with mother? For example, the cost of sending music to me. Please make a note of this item. I will send the necessary amount at the first opportunity.

Less than a year later, to his very acute distress, his mother died, at the hardly premature age of seventy-six. And he poured out his heart, as best he could, to Clara Schumann.

BRAHMS: As you are getting this letter of mine from Hamburg, I can hardly seek to inform you gently and gradually of what has befallen us here. And so, may it at least be a consolation to you that God made the farewell from mother as gentle as possible for us. Elise is very well, thanks to the fact that she is constantly occupied; she doesn’t have one minute to sit down and reflect, and as a result seems even quite collected. I am concerned about her for later on, but, thank God, she got through the trying first period well. On Tuesday evening my mother returned from a concert in very good spirits, was still joking with Fritz from inside the coach. No sooner had the coach started than she complains that her tongue feels so heavy, and my sister sees with horror that her mouth was twisted sideways and her tongue was swollen and protruding. Knowing full well that Mother had suffered a stroke, Elise nevertheless has to console Mother and remain calm while Mother complains that her whole left side is so benumbed. At home, having been brought there with help, she thinks herself quite well and believes Elise’s assurances that her chill would soon get better in bed. Her speech was barely intelligible. The doctor told Elise right away how grave her condition was. In bed she was still able to recognise my sister most tenderly and to press her hand, then she closed her eyes and gently went to sleep.

41

Perspiration, eventually the death rattle – on the following night at two o’clock she passed away. At this point Fritz telegraphed me, and I arrived here early Saturday morning. Her death I had of course surmised, although my brother had left the word unspoken. Yesterday, at one-o’clock, we buried her. She was quite unchanged and looked as kind and gentle as in life. Everything that can be consoling in the face of such a loss was done for us, particularly for my sister. The fellow residents of the house stood by her side in a really touching and devoted manner! So also her other friends, men and women. After my last letter to you, I kept wanting to send another, because I was afraid you might consider me all too detached. I don’t know exactly when I will go back again, I will probably be kept here for a day or two more. My father is well, and it must have been good for that excellent man that I came. Stockhausen and Ave were most compassionate, and Ave and a great many young musicians escorted my mother on her last journey. Many were the flowers and wreaths that adorned her coffin, and in spite of the grim cold weather, music provided the last farewell. So then, for now, farewell, and the warmest greetings to you from us all, Your Johannes.

Even before his mother’s death, Brahms had been toying with the idea of writing a requiem, though his own Christian faith had long since fallen away. But the first of his major works to reflect the death of his mother was the wonderful trio for the then unprecedented combination of piano, violin, and horn. The slow movement has often been said to be a kind of instrumental requiem for the only woman in his life whom Brahms had ever loved with unswerving devotion and a simple, unquestioning, all- embracing heart. But it has to be said that the mood of the trio as a whole is a long way away from requiems of any kind. In fact it gives us Brahms at his most buoyant, uninhibited – and joyful.

16 Trio for horn, violin and piano, Op. 40 (Finale)

42

CD 3

1 If there’s any one work which might be said to have marked the biggest turning point in Brahms’s career as a composer, that work is the German Requiem , which many people regard as his greatest achievement. Certainly nothing else of his combines such scope with such breadth of conception. At roughly an hour and a quarter in performance it’s his longest work by a very wide margin, outdistancing its closest competitor, the D minor Piano Concerto, by almost half an hour. Born in a century of rampant nationalism, nowhere more extravagantly demonstrated than in Wagner’s Ring cycle, its title is misleading. There’s nothing remotely chauvinistic in the work, its name derives solely from the fact that the text, drawn from the Bible, is in German rather than the customary Latin, but it also serves to distinguish it from the traditional rites of the Roman Catholic Church. By the time of its completion in 1868, Brahms, brought up as a good North German protestant, had long since lost his Christian faith. Karl Martin Reinthaler, Kapellmeister of Bremen cathedral, where the work had its first complete performance, was clearly troubled by its lack of any clear doctrinal message. And he wrote to Brahms:

REINTHALER: The central point about which everything turns in the consciousness of the Christian is absent. ‘If Christ be not risen then our faith is in vain,’ says St Paul. All the same, you say ‘Blessed are the dead which lie in the Lord from henceforth ,’ which can only mean since the accomplishment of Christ’s work of redemption.

To which Brahms replied:

BRAHMS: As regards the title I will confess I should gladly have left out ‘German’ and substituted ‘Human’. Also that I knowingly and intentionally dispensed with passages such as St John’s Gospel Chapter 3 Verse 16 [‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.’]. On the other hand, I have no doubt included much because I am a musician, because I can neither argue away nor strike out a ‘henceforth’ from my venerable extracts.

43

Though it obviously received an added spur with the death of his mother, Brahms had been toying with the idea of composing a requiem in German, based on texts from the Lutheran Bible, ever since 1857, a year after the death of Schumann. Like many of his works, it was a long time in the making. It had its genesis in a funereal, march-like movement, jettisoned from the sonata for two pianos which eventually grew into the D minor Concerto, and ultimately reborn as the Requiem’s second movement, ‘Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras’ (For all flesh is as grass). By 1861 Brahms had found the texts for four additional sections of the Requiem, but it wasn’t until 1865, following the death of his mother, that the work got underway in earnest. From the time of its first complete performance in 1869, it met with near- universal enthusiasm and set the seal on Brahms’s stature as a composer of the front rank. It was neither the first nor the last of his choral works, but it brought that branch of his output to a height which he was never to achieve again.

2 A German Requiem (‘Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras’)

Part of the huge second movement of the German Requiem .

3 Because the work is so great, so serious, so masterly, it’s natural to think of the man who wrote it as the grey-bearded, rather forbidding figure who looks out at us through so many well-known photographs: Brahms the great composer. But Brahms the great composer matured early. At the time he composed the Requiem he was in his early to mid thirties. Already, though, there was an aura about him which immediately marked him out as someone of quite exceptional stature. He was thirty-two when the Swiss poet Joseph Widmann, later a close friend, first encountered him.

WIDMANN: He immediately gave the impression of a gigantic personality, not alone because of his powerful piano playing, with which no virtuoso technique, no matter how brilliant, could be compared, but also through his personal appearance. It is true that the short, already somewhat stocky figure, the almost straw-blond hair, and the protruding

44 lower lip, which imparted an almost sarcastic expression to his beardless face, were conspicuous features that might rather displease. His whole presence, however, seemed suffused with power. The broad leonine chest, the Herculean shoulders, the mighty head that he occasionally threw back with an energetic toss while playing, the pensive, well- formed forehead, radiant as if by some inner illumination, and the Germanic eyes that sparkled a miraculous fire between their blond lashes – all betrayed an artistic personality that seemed charged to its very finger tips with the power of genius.

‘The broad leonine chest, the Herculean shoulders’? – can this be the same person depicted by Schmidt only eight years earlier as ‘delicate’, ‘refined’, ‘almost girlish’? Even though he was still in his mid-thirties, and still clean-shaven, the shape of things to come was already evident in embryo. Our witness this time is Georg Henschel.

HENSCHEL: Despite his tendency to stoutness, the healthy and ruddy colour of his skin indicated a love of nature and a habit of being in the open air in all kinds of weather; his thick straight hair came nearly down to his shoulders. His clothes and boots were not exactly of the latest pattern, nor did they fit particularly well. What, however, struck me most was the kindliness of his eyes. They were of a light blue; wonderfully keen and bright, with now and then a roguish twinkle in them, and yet at times an almost childlike tenderness. Soon I was to find out that the roguish twinkle in his eyes corresponded to a quality in his nature that would perhaps be best described as good-natured sarcasm.

And sometimes not so good-natured. For all his incorruptible integrity as a musician, there was a degree of bitterness in Brahms – we’ve already glimpsed examples of it – which clouded every one of his friendships at one time or another, though he also inspired an extraordinary degree of love and devotion. The true source of his bitterness probably lay with his childhood and adolescence, but, as Joachim suggested, it can only have been intensified by his double rejection in Hamburg. In the aftermath of his mother’s death and his departure from Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his time as an itinerant pianist and conductor, and it was largely under his baton that the Requiem made its triumphal march across Europe. With no fixed abode, as

45 they say, he lived in comfortable though never lavish circumstances, and though he made a lot of money, as ever, he gave most of it away. From 1862 onwards, Brahms spent more time in Vienna than any other city, often staying for long periods of time. But in 1869 he settled there for good. By that time he’d already paid his most delightful dues to the city in the form of sixteen waltzes for piano or piano duet. Vienna, after all, was – is – more associated with waltzes than any other place on earth, and it was the home of Johann Strauss the second, whom Brahms both liked and admired to the point of envy. But perhaps the greatest influence on Brahms’s own waltzes was his adored Schubert, yet the music itself is purest Brahms.

4 Waltz in E, Op. 39 No. 2

5 Although, as I say, Brahms still appeared as a pianist, it was as a conductor (ironically, given his treatment in Hamburg) that he now achieved his greatest reputation as a performer, thus vindicating another of Schumann’s prophecies. Clara Schumann’s first experience of Brahms the fully fledged conductor came at the unveiling, in Bremen Cathedral, of what Brahms then thought was the final version of his Requiem. In fact, it didn’t reach its final final form until the next year, by which time Brahms had added another movement. But that hardly mattered. Like most of the audience, Clara was bowled over – and not just by the music.

CLARA: As I saw Johannes standing there, baton in hand, I could not help thinking of my dear Robert’s words: ‘Let him but once grasp the magic wand and work with orchestras and choirs,’ which is fulfilled today. The baton really was a magic wand, and its spell was upon all present, even upon his bitterest enemies. It was a joy such as I have not felt for a long time. After the performance there was a supper in the Rathskeller, at which everyone was jubilant – it was like a music festival. Reinthaler made a speech about Johannes which so moved me that (unfortunately!!!) I burst into tears. I thought of Robert, and what joy it would have been to him if only he could have lived to see it.

46

Over the next five years, Brahms’s stature on the podium increased with every concert, with the result that his engagements now steadily increased. In 1873 Theodor Billroth noted:

BILLROTH: Brahms is now extremely active as a conductor. He has achieved incomparably fine performances and receives the fullest recognition from all who take art seriously.

Of these, none was more serious than the eminent conductor Hermann Levi, one of several great musicians who demonstrated, in the teeth of fashion, that it was possible to harbour equal enthusiasm for both Brahms and Wagner, and he freely acknowledged his debt to each. In the case of Brahms, he wrote to Clara:

HERMANN LEVI: I believe that my close contact with Johannes has had a deep and lasting influence on my entire character, such as I cannot remember having experienced at any other stage of my musical life. In him I have seen the image of a pure artist and man; and that is saying much nowadays.

Nor was his admiration confined to Brahms the composer. As he wrote to the man himself:

LEVI: I have now seen – and with unprejudiced eyes – that you have a gift for conducting such as no other man possesses .

And this from one of the finest conductors of the day. Nor were such perceptions limited to professionals and connoisseurs. Brahms was very much more than just a musician’s musician, or a conductor’s conductor. Billroth reported of a typical concert in Vienna:

BILLROTH: His conducting awakened such a storm of applause that one almost feared the house would fall in. The old King of Hanover was almost beside himself with musical

47 intoxication. And one does truly become quite drunk with the beauty of such sounds as Brahms elicits from his troops.

One of the great attractions of conducting for Brahms, as for very many others then and now, was the fact that you don’t have to practise. Not that he ever made a big point of practising, even as a pianist, and he played formidable programmes. At one recital in Vienna – one recital – he played Beethoven’s Fantasy, Op. 77, his own E flat minor Scherzo, both books of his ferociously taxing Variations on a Theme by Paganini , Schumann’s Symphonic Etudes , and, finally, his own piano arrangement of the Fugue from Beethoven’s C major String Quartet, Op. 59 No. 3. Less than a month later, having in the meantime given several recitals in the Austrian provinces, he was back with another programme, this one featuring a Bach Toccata, Beethoven’s great Sonata No. 30 in E major, Op. 109, his own Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel , the great Schumann Fantasy, short pieces by Scarlatti and Schubert, a substantial arrangement from Schubert’s great Octet in F, plus a sprinkling of vocal items with Brahms as accompanist. We know that Brahms took no music with him on any of his tours. Can it really be that he delivered himself of programmes like these without practising either? From Joachim, writing to his wife at around this time, comes the only hint we have:

JOACHIM: Brahms says he is going to practise , can you believe!! He makes a new resolution to do so every day.

Ten years on, he was at least practising on the day of the performance. In February 1876 he and Georg Henschel both appeared as soloists at a concert in Koblenz. ‘When I arrived at the hall on the day of the concert,’ wrote Henschel…

HENSCHEL: …I found Brahms quite alone, seated at the piano and working away for all he was worth on Beethoven’s Choral Fantasia and Schumann’s Concerto. He was quite red in the face, and, interrupting himself on seeing me stand beside him, said with that childlike, confiding expression in his eyes: ‘Really this is too bad. These people here tonight expect to hear something especially good, and here I am likely to give them

48 nothing but a hoggish mess. I assure you, I could play today, with the greatest ease, far more difficult things, with wider stretches for the fingers, my own concerto for example, but these simple diatonic runs are exasperating. I keep saying to myself, ‘Johannes, pull yourself together – do play decently,’ but no use; it’s really horrid.

On the contrary. It went brilliantly. If Brahms was inconsistent in performance, he was no more so than many other great artists. True inspiration can’t be put on tap, and truly great playing can’t happen without it. But the Muse won’t be bullied. To hear Brahms at his greatest could require patience. When the young English pianist Florence May arrived in Germany to study with Clara Schumann, she struck lucky sooner than most.

FLORENCE MAY: Frau Schumann wished me to hear him play, but it was no easy matter to do so, as he was extremely dependent on his mood, and not only disliked being pressed to perform, but was unable to do justice either to himself or to the composer when not in the right humour. The first time, indeed, that I heard him, I was utterly disappointed… Frau Schumann answered that I had not yet really heard him; that he had not wished to play, but had yielded to over-persuasion, and that I must wait for a better opportunity.

This arose, as it happens, the next evening. As Florence May wrote to her parents:

MAY: It was an entirely different thing from the day before. Two pieces were by a composer whose name I can’t remember, but then he played a wild piece by Scarlatti. He really did give it as though he were inspired; it was so mad and wild, and so beautiful. Afterwards he did a little thing of Gluck’s. I can only hope I shall hear him often if he plays as he did last night. It was like nothing I have ever heard before, and I would never have believed the piano capable of it.

She did hear him often, and the composer he played most frequently and with the most evident sense of rapture was Bach.

49

MAY: It was my great happiness to hear many of the forty-eight preludes and fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier , and his playing of them impressed me with such force and vividness that I can hear it in memory still. His interpretation of Bach was always unconventional and quite unfettered by traditional theory, and he certainly did not share the opinion, which has had many distinguished adherents, that Bach’s music should be played in a simply flowing style. In the movements of the suites he likes a great variety of tone and touch, as well as a certain elasticity of tempo. His playing of many of the preludes and fugues was a revelation of exquisite poems, and he performed them not only with graduated shadings but with marked contrasts of tonal effects. Each note of Bach’s passages and figures, in the hands of Brahms, combined to form melody that was instinct with feeling. It might be deep pathos, or light-hearted playfulness and jollity; impulsive energy, or soft and tender grace; but sentiment (as distinct from sentimentality) was always there, monotony never. Brahms’s playing at this period of his life was, indeed, stimulating to an extraordinary degree, and so apart as to be quite unforgettable. It was not the playing of a virtuoso, though he had a large amount of virtuosity (to put it moderately) at his command. He never aimed at mere effect, but seemed to plunge into the innermost meaning of whatever music he happened to be interpreting, exhibiting all its details and expressing its very depths.

6 Five Studies for Piano (No. 3: Presto in G minor, after Bach)

7 No, not Brahms playing, of course. And not quite Bach’s music either, but rather one of Brahms’s studies based on Bach – in that case, the Presto from Bach’s Sonata in G minor for unaccompanied violin. But back now to Florence May. She’d come to Germany specifically to study with Clara Schumann, but basically ended up studying with Brahms instead – a privilege granted to very few – and it took a lot of pluck on her part. He may not yet have been the grey-bearded, tramp-like figure he later became, stomping around Vienna and insulting friend and foe alike, but he was already notorious for his often unintended tactlessness. He never acquired anything like the discipline over his behaviour that he wielded with

50 such awesome mastery in his music, and he was particularly unpredictable where women were concerned. Anyway, Florence May had the courage to enter the lion’s den, but once inside it there was no lion to be seen. As she wrote home to her family:

MAY: My lessons with Brahms are too delightful; not only the lessons themselves, but he makes me feel I must practise all day and night... He is so patient, and takes such pains. I can’t understand his giving lessons, and yet he is never angry at any sort of foolishness, but only says: ‘Ah! that is so difficult!’ As for an hour’s lesson, that is nothing. He systematically arranges for an hour and a half. I absolutely revel in my lessons. He never expects too much, but is always satisfied if one is really trying… And in spite of his extraordinary conscientiousness about detail, he is entirely free from pedantry.

He could also be surprisingly unconventional.

MAY: ‘How can I most quickly improve?’ I asked him one day. ‘You must walk constantly in the forest,’ he answered; and he meant what he said to be taken literally.

It was in the forest that many of his own best ideas came to him, many of his greatest inspirations. Why shouldn’t it be the same for her? Florence May was exceptionally observant, and few people have left us more vivid or perceptive snapshots of Brahms’s complex personality.

MAY: His most striking physical characteristic was the grand head with its magnificent intellectual forehead, but the blue eyes were also remarkable from their expression of intense mental concentration… He was already near-sighted, and made frequent use of a double eyeglass that he wore hanging on a thin black cord round his neck. When walking out, it was his custom to go bare-headed, and to carry his soft felt hat in his hand, swinging the arm energetically to and fro. The disengaged hand he often held behind him. In his demeanour there was a mixture of sociability and reserve that gave the impression of a kindly natured man, but one whom it would be difficult really to know.

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Though always pleasant and friendly, yet there was something about him – perhaps it may have been his extraordinary dislike of speaking about himself – that suggested that his life had not been free from disappointment, and that he had reckoned with the latter and taken his course. His manner was absolutely simple and unaffected... And he was considerate of others, even in trifles.

Now that remark will come as a great surprise to anyone familiar with Brahms’s reputation for the reckless and often brutal insult. But Florence May was by no means the only person to be impressed by his consideration; another was the critic Richard Specht.

SPECHT: The man who in Italy and elsewhere took off his boots on returning to his inn late at night and crept upstairs in his stockings lest he wake the tired servants, who even in a smoking compartment never lighted one of his passionately desired cigars without asking the permission of ladies who might be present, who in Catholic churches forswore his Protestantism by taking holy water and making the sign of the cross, not to offend the believers – that man too was Brahms.

But, as those of us who love his music – and the man – have sadly to admit, there was more to Brahms’s bad manners than he himself was generally prepared to acknowledge. Late in life, he wrote to Clara:

BRAHMS: In my dealings with my friends I am aware of only one fault – my lack of tact.

Well, he wasn’t a man given to euphemism, but to describe his worst verbal assaults as a mere lack of tact pretty well takes the cake. Our first witness is the wife of the German baritone Max Friedländer:

FRAU FRIEDLÄNDER: When I first met Brahms, I felt self-conscious and embarrassed. Scarcely realising what I was saying, I remarked on the discrepancy between my husband’s long acquaintance with him and my own short one. ‘I only wish,’ Brahms

52 barked at us, ‘that it had been the other way around!’ Even in paying compliments he could not help his sarcastic, mischievous, biting tone.

On another occasion, when he was introduced to a conductor’s fiancée, he congratulated her with great warmth:

BRAHMS: But this is wonderful! You’re bringing a musical element into the family!

At a dinner party, he was accosted by a society woman of his acquaintance who asked, coyly, and probably a little drunkenly, whether he didn’t agree that she bore a close resemblance to a certain famous beauty. Came the answer:

BRAHMS: Oh absolutely. I simply can’t tell you apart. Whenever I’m with one I invariably wish it was the other.

At another party he loudly described the wife of his own concert manager as an ‘emetic’. But it wasn’t only women who caught the lash of his tongue. When the violist of the Rosé Quartet once asked him at a rehearsal whether he was satisfied with the tempo of a certain movement, Brahms answered:

BRAHMS: Oh yes… Especially with the viola’s.

And then there was the banquet attended by the composer Hiller, whose music Brahms himself had performed. Most of the foremost contemporary music-makers had been toasted when Brahms rose to his feet.

BRAHMS: And now, having drunk to so many living composers, let us drink to a dead one! I lift my glass to Ferdinand Hiller.

And unfortunately such stories abound. Many people, naturally, took Brahms to task over this kind of abominable behaviour, others just retired to lick their wounds and resolved to

53 stay out of his way in future. Clara chided him a lot over this, of course, but it seems the only friend from whom he could really take criticism, of any kind, without being somehow difficult or defensive was his one-time pupil Elisabeth von Stockhausen, a powerfully attractive woman and a brilliant musician who later married the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg. Over the years, she became one of Brahms’s closest friends, indeed in the story of his life as a whole she came second only to Clara. Her response to Brahms’s chronic outbursts of rudeness was the epitome of gentleness and affection.

ELISABETH VON HERZOGENBERG: Dearest Johannes, I know you don’t actually intend harm at such moments. But there is an imp sitting on your shoulder, with whom, thank Heaven, you are not usually on intimate terms, but who whispers a few words to you which, when uttered by you at the wrong time, inflict sharp pain on others. If only you knew how sharp you wouldn’t do it. For you are basically good-natured and would never repay love with derision.

So sad, so almost tragic, that such pain was inflicted by a man whose music so often is tenderness personified.

8 Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat, Op. 83 (Andante)

Part of the slow movement of the Second Piano Concerto.

9 There’s a poignancy – more than that, an abiding sadness – that runs through a lot of Brahms’s music, as there is also in his beloved Schubert’s. Almost unbelievably, it was Schubert, the composer of the effervescent ‘Trout’ Quintet, who once asked, ‘Is there any such thing as happy music?’ And there’s certainly no denying that there was a lot of sadness in Brahms’s life: the childhood poverty and the moral degradation he saw in ‘Adulterer’s Walk’, the growing tension between his mismatched parents, the death of Schumann, the unfulfilled yearning in his love for Clara, his seemingly endless capacity for falling in love with unavailable women, his tragic addiction to insult, the death of his mother, his lack of a wife and family of his own, and so on. At the same time, there was

54 his almost childlike sense of fun and discovery, his love of nature, which often had him in ecstasies of wonder and delight, his uncontainable enthusiasm for so many things, and his boundless love of helping others. To call him an unhappy man would not only be wrong but a gross disservice to him. For all his tactlessness, and worse, he had a genius for making friends and he often delighted in the company even of relative strangers, as when he wrote to Clara from Switzerland:

BRAHMS: It’s wonderfully beautiful and pleasant here, and as I’ve often said before, I am made continually enchanted by the charming people around me.

And, unlike many single men, he delighted in the company of children – even as a very young man indeed. The Schumann children could attest to that. It was therefore not news when he wrote, again from Switzerland, and to Clara:

BRAHMS: You ought to see me here in the role of the children’s friend! There are no more lovable and agreeable folks and little folks anywhere than in this neighbourhood. I cannot go for a walk without my heart laughing; and when I caress a couple of these adorable children I feel as though I’d taken a long, cooling drink.

And children, on the whole, adored him – charmed by his vitality and humour, and by his seemingly inexhaustible curiosity. Widmann wrote of him:

WIDMANN: I have never seen anyone who took such fresh, genuine and lasting interest in the surroundings of life as Brahms, whether in objects of nature, art, or even industry. The smallest invention, the improvement of some article for household use, every trace, in short, of practical ingenuity gave him real pleasure. And nothing escaped his observation... He hated bicycles because the flow of his ideas was so often disturbed by the noiseless rushing past, or the sudden signal, of these machines, and also because he thought the trampling movement of the rider ugly. He was, however, glad to live in the age of great inventions and could not sufficiently admire the electric light, Edison’s phonographs, and so on. He was equally interested in the animal world.

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But whatever the rewards of his company, and they were many, there’s no doubt about it that he was a very demanding friend.

WIDMANN: His weekend visits were high festivals and times of rejoicing for our family, but days of rest they were emphatically not, for the constantly active mind of our guest demanded similar wakefulness from all his associates and one had to pull one’s self together to maintain sufficient freshness to satisfy the requirements of his indefatigable vitality.

And Albert Dietrich had similar experiences:

DIETRICH: With all his depth, Brahms was fresh and lively and entirely untouched by modern morbidity. His nature was healthy through and through, and even the most sustained mental effort hardly strained it. But then he could fall fast asleep at any time of the day he chose. In his intercourse with those of his own capacity he was lively, sometimes exuberant, rough and full of wild notions. He would come bounding up my stairs with a youthful impetuosity, knock at the door with both fists, and without waiting to be bidden would enter the room like a whirlwind.

But once in, he would never, like many natural egotists, hold forth so that nobody else got a word in edgeways. He relished conversation and delighted in arguments. He was always ready to listen. And, like a child, it never seemed to occur to him that his enthusiasms weren’t shared by all his friends – including Clara, who was one of the least childlike people one can imagine.

BRAHMS: I often pass a toy shop in which I’ve discovered the most beautiful soldiers. Yesterday I went in to buy an acrobat for your darling Felix, and at the same time, of course, to have a closer look at the militia... At present I have the most fascinating battle- piece I ever saw, complete with a little tower as well. I am simply overjoyed with it! At

56

Christmas I shall set out all my troops so beautifully for you that you’ll simply delight in them!

Brahms’s lifelong obsession with tin soldiers had been with him almost as long as he could remember. In the warm, enveloping haven of his very humble home, he’d never tired of setting them up, in endlessly varying combinations and arrangements. A curious passion, on the face of it, for such a sensitive and introspective child, but the fascination was organisational not militaristic. For Brahms, it was a kind of visual, tangible counterpart to the invisible, unmaterial world of composition. A mixing and juxtaposing of colours and textures, a deploying of finite and clearly delineated forces in a theoretically infinite variety of combinations. Above all, perhaps, it arose from a deep- rooted need and love for order, but an order reflecting the organic unity and flexibility of life itself. Most music is at one level or another an art of variation. In Brahms’s music, the concept of developing variation within the confines of a logically constructed form is fundamental. To this extent, the difference between his soldiers and his symphonies is only slight, and his continuing enthusiasm for both isn’t hard to understand.

10 Variations on a Theme by Haydn (or Variations on the St Antony Chorale), Op. 56a

Part of the Variations on a Theme by Haydn , as Brahms called it, though nowadays it tends to be called ‘Variations on the St Antony Chorale’, since the theme has turned out not to be by Haydn after all.

11 Brahms’s passion for tin soldiers never left him and, even in his last year, he could be found lying on the floor, helping his landlady’s children in the deployment of their own battalions. Nor did he outgrow the favourite books of his youth. Late in life he showed a friend his dog-eared copies of Robinson Crusoe and other books, confessing that they still captivated and thrilled him.

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Throughout his life, Brahms was prone to the unbridled and unselfconscious enthusiasm of happy children everywhere, often deriving a keen pleasure from the most unlikely sources, as when he wrote to his publisher Simrock:

BRAHMS: Not for a long time have I had such a beautiful treat at a fire as in Schwerin recently. Standing near a hose, on the flat roof of the house adjoining, I looked right down upon it. It was extraordinary! If a house must burn, the very least one can do is to enjoy watching it!

It wasn’t the first house he’d seen burned. Among the most vivid memories of his boyhood was the terrible Hamburg fire of 1842 which had raged for three days, levelling five thousand buildings and sparing the nine-year-old Brahms’s home thanks only to a last-minute change in the wind. As sometimes happens, the fear and horror experienced at the time were resolved into a cathartic enthusiasm, and Brahms retained a weakness for incendiary delights to the end of his days, even in one instance allowing it to overcome his chronic reluctance to stay overnight at the homes of his friends. The occasion was the seventieth birthday party of his friend Hanslick.

HANSLICK: Customarily he excused himself from such hospitality on the specious ground that he did not possess a suitable coat. But this time he had been promised fireworks, which he adored. I watched him leaning over the balustrade; and as each rocket went up he gave a great ‘Oh!’, in which his whole stocky frame took part. He almost yodelled with joy at the spectacle.

In other pleasures he took a more active role, joining in snowball fights with the schoolgirls of Krefeld or wrestling on the lawn with some of his friends’ more obstreperous dogs. For all his undoubted melancholia, his loneliness, for all his occasional bitterness and his cyclical bouts of misanthropy, Brahms had a childlike genius for finding joy in simple things. His capacity for enthusiasm was unbounded, and he never lost it. It was the life-blood of his apparently limitless energy. In 1881, he wrote to Clara from Rome, in a characteristic transport of delight:

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BRAHMS: Why do I not stay here until driven out by heat and insects? It is the most lovely spring imaginable; I enjoyed the first spring in Sicily, the second here, and in Vienna I shall have my third!

Nor did he forego the joys of nature in the autumn, or in town. From Vienna in October:

BRAHMS: I eat midday and evening in the open air and the chestnuts above me are luxuriantly blooming for the second time.

Other, more occasional pleasures likewise rekindled the child in him. When he was forty- three, for instance, he joined his friend Georg Henschel for a nature crawl on the island of Rügen, in the Baltic.

HENSCHEL: We lay in the grass and caught tiny frogs, then letting them jump from a stone down into the water. This pleased Brahms enormously, in particular when the sprightly little creatures, glad to be again in their element, hastily swam away, moving their hind leglets in accordance with all the laws of the swimmer’s art. Then, when the little frog thought it had escaped, Brahms caught it gently again, and, letting it go, he laughed with all his soul.

Little would anyone have guessed that this was a genius on the brink of one of the great landmarks not only in his own career but in the story of nineteenth-century music. He was just putting the finishing touches to a work which in one way or another had obsessed him for more than twenty years.

12 By the year 1876, Brahms had contributed to almost every musical genre you could think of: songs, chamber music, orchestral and choral works, piano pieces, the towering D minor Concerto… Only two still eluded him: opera, which he never tried, and the symphony, which had been expected of him ever since Schumann’s extravagant skyrocket of 1853. But it wasn’t Schumann who stayed his hand where the symphony

59 was concerned, as we’ve seen, it was Beethoven. The fact is that from adolescence onwards, Brahms saw himself (and was increasingly seen by others) as the natural recipient of Beethoven’s mantle. But with every passing year this sense of destiny rested more and more heavily on his shoulders. As he famously wrote to Hermann Levi:

BRAHMS: You can’t imagine what it’s like always to hear that giant marching along behind me.

And just to make sure he never forgot it himself, he had a large bust of Beethoven looking over his shoulder as he sat at the piano in his music room. The fact was, as he knew all too well, that if he was to justify the hopes and expectations invested in him by Schumann, and by now many others, it would have to be in the realm of the symphony, transformed by Beethoven, with his own nine, epoch- making contributions, into an empire, which he straddled like a Colossus. Not until Brahms was forty-three, after more than two decades of struggle, did he finally feel ready to meet the challenge head on. In 1876 he finally unveiled his mighty First Symphony. And what was he told by the critics at the time? According to one, who spoke for many:

CRITIC: The most striking motif of this whole tedious work, the leading theme of the last movement, is so much like the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that it should be put in quotation marks.

Well, it seems to me to be stretching a point, but since it’s often been said, let’s put it to the test. Here, then, is the Beethoven:

Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (Finale: ‘Ode to Joy’ theme)

And now, from Beethoven’s last to Brahms’s First:

Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (Finale)

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Well, I guess they don’t make quotation marks the way they used to. But even well-meant observations had their sting in the tail: to have his first symphony described, after perhaps the longest gestation in musical history, as ‘Beethoven’s Tenth’ (which was the great conductor Hans von Bülow’s description of it) was to Brahms a distinctly mixed blessing – gratifying on the one hand, certainly, but galling on the other. Nevertheless, he’d taken the plunge, and the work was soon widely acknowledged as a masterpiece.

13 Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 (Finale)

CD 4

1 The achievement, at last, of the First Symphony marked a kind of watershed in Brahms’s career. If the Requiem had established his true stature throughout the musical world, the First Symphony seemed to confirm Schumann’s prophecy in every particular. Its success did Brahms’s spirits no harm, and the Second Symphony followed quickly, coming as easily to him as the First had come hard. And unlike its predecessor, it was – is – a work of almost pure sunshine, serenity, joy, and lyricism, more like Schubert than Beethoven, and it too scored a hit with large swathes of the musical public.

2 Symphony No. 2 in D, Op. 73 (third movement)

The third movement from the Symphony No. 2 in D.

3 By the time that was unveiled, Brahms was famous to a degree that made him distinctly uncomfortable. It had to have pleased him at some level, but when even such penetrating and uncompromising musicians as Hans von Bülow began to eulogise him, he became genuinely embarrassed. Honours started pouring in, but one of the greatest, an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cambridge, he declined – not on any moral grounds but because, despite having grow up in a major port, he hated the sea and wasn’t prepared to travel to England. And Cambridge wouldn’t bend the rules enough to award it to him in

61 his absence. Another, rather amusing reason for Brahms’s reluctance was the fear that he would have to get all dressed up for the duration of his stay in Cambridge. As he grew older, his fame progressing steadily, Brahms seems to have taken less and less care of his appearance. Not for him the dandified elegance of a Chopin. He was not, however, merely negligent. Mindful of his childhood and youth, and proudly conscious of his ancestral roots, he often made a special point of emphasising his solidarity with the poor and the so-called working class. Indeed in his adopted Vienna he must have cut a very curious figure indeed. ‘I live in town as if I were in the country,’ he once said (though he was a city-dweller born and bred and had never himself lived in the country, except on holiday). But as a Mrs Frederick Partington remarked, he certainly looked the part:

MRS PARTINGTON: When I met him in 1888, he had a pleasant, ruddy, outdoor complexion. He was so burly and florid that he looked more like a farmer than like a man who spent his days in writing music. His hands, too, were hard and rough to the touch, a fact attested to by many and unconvincingly ascribed by one observer to his ‘economy in gloves’.

That ‘ruddy, outdoor complexion’ was honestly acquired, and not only on his long cross- country wanderings. ‘For his noon meals,’ Widmann reports:

WIDMANN: Brahms went to some outdoor restaurant whenever the weather permitted. He always disliked eating at the table d’hôte and avoided it whenever possible for the simple reason that he didn’t like to get dressed up. He felt most comfortable in a striped woollen shirt without collar and without a necktie. Even his soft felt hat was more often carried than worn. Whenever he came to stay, he would carry a leather travelling case that resembled a mineralogist’s specimen bag filled with rocks, but which primarily contained the books I had lent him the previous week, which he brought back to be exchanged for others. In bad weather an old, brownish grey plaid, held together in front by an enormous pin, hung over his shoulders and completed his queer, unstylish appearance, causing people to stare at him in astonishment.

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Writing of Brahms in 1886, Florence May employed that tact and understatement for which Britain in those days was still renowned.

FLORENCE MAY: Brahms’s ordinary costume was chosen quite without regard to appearances. Mere lapse of time must occasionally have compelled him to wear a new coat, but it is safe to conclude that his feelings suffered discomposure on the rare occurrence of such a crisis. Neckties and white collars were reserved as special marks of deference to conventionality.

As his fame increased, and his girth expanded, Brahms added a feature to his increasingly tramp-like appearance which took almost all of his friends by surprise. Georg Henschel was no exception:

HENSCHEL: Quite suddenly, he considerably changed his outward appearance by the growth of the long and flowing beard in the frame of which his face has become familiar to past and present generations. I remember at the end of a concert in Vienna, Ignaz Brüll and I were in the artists’ room receiving the congratulations of friends, when suddenly I saw a man quite unknown to me, short, rather stout, with long hair and a full beard, coming towards me. In a very deep, hoarse voice, he introduced himself – ‘Musik- Direktor Müller’ – making a very stiff and formal bow, which I was on the point of returning with equal gravity, when, an instant later, we all found ourselves laughing heartily at the perfect success of Brahms’s disguise.

To many of his friends, including Clara Schumann, the beard, whatever his motives for growing it, was a regrettable development. Characteristically, Brahms himself offered no explanation except for a preposterous claim made to his friend Widmann:

BRAHMS: One is taken for an actor or a priest if one is clean shaven.

By that token, he’d suffered these misapprehensions in silence for decades.

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4 As we’ve heard, Brahms the composer was never a shrinking violet. After all, remember, he effectively began his adult career at the age of twenty with a stupendously self-confident piece which openly invited comparisons with Beethoven from bar 1:

Piano Sonata No. 1 in C major (opening flourish)

And the famously cathartic First Symphony also succeeds (though probably not intentionally) in specifically evoking the spectre of Beethoven. But the work which most gloriously demonstrates Brahms’s escape from his chronic Beethoven complex is the great Violin Concerto in D. For more than a quarter of a century, Joachim had been waiting for Brahms to write a violin concerto. In the absence of any from Brahms, he’d written a few for himself, but when Brahms did finally oblige, there was no question in Joachim’s mind that the long wait had been more than worth it. Here was a truly Beethovenian work, which was at the same time entirely, overwhelmingly, and inimitably Brahms’s own: a concerto of symphonic dimensions, which was even in the same key as Beethoven’s famous Violin Concerto, which had been until now the grandest and most ambitious ever written. Because of its symphonic emphasis on the orchestra and the tremendous demands it makes on the soloist, the Brahms Concerto was famously described by Hans von Bülow as a concerto not for but against the violin. But perhaps the great violinist Bronislaw Huberman came closer to the truth:

HUBERMAN: This concerto is neither against the violin, nor for violin with orchestra; it is a concerto for violin against orchestra – and the violin wins!

Certainly the violin had never been asked to combat the orchestra as it does here. For all the beauty in the work, there are moments in the first movement when the style of the violin-writing is deliberately un beautiful. Indeed this is perhaps the first violin concerto, and certainly the first great one, in which the composer demands downright violence from the soloist. When it came to the expression of human emotion, Brahms, like Beethoven before him, was an uncompromising realist, and the rapturous, sometimes

64 heartbreakingly poignant love music which permeates so much of his output is all the more affecting because of the pain and strife which are also there. Brahms originally planned to give the work four movements, setting the seal on his conception of it as a kind of symphony with violin obbligato. In the end he scrapped that idea and inserted what he typically described as ‘a feeble Adagio ’, which ranks with the most expressive and beautifully crafted things he ever wrote.

5 Violin Concerto in D, Op. 77 (slow movement)

The slow movement – no ‘feeble Adagio ’, that – from the great Violin Concerto in D. Like virtually all of Brahms’s violin music – and a lot else besides – that was written very much with Joachim in mind. Joachim had been pleading with him to write a violin concerto for years, and naturally when Brahms finally obliged he dedicated it to Joachim, who also gave the first performance with Brahms himself conducting. It would be nice to report that the two friends had never been closer, but it wasn’t true. Because for some years they’d lived far apart from one another, there’d been fewer opportunities to get together, but there was more to it than that. Their musical aims, and their respective ways of life, had been diverging somewhat, though Joachim never lost his love and admiration for Brahms’s music and remained one of its most dedicated champions to the end of his career. But though both men were aware of a kind of generalised drifting apart, neither could have foreseen at the time of the Violin Concerto that within two years their friendship would be all but dead and buried. As with the ends of many men’s friendships, a woman was involved, but not in the way you might suppose. In 1880 Brahms had written a letter which was to have a more far-reaching effect on his personal life than he had the foresight to imagine at the time. In sexual matters, Joachim was given to bouts of violent, self-destructive jealousy. For some time, he became increasingly obsessed with the idea that his wife had been unfaithful to him. She was almost certainly blameless, and Joachim hadn’t a shred of real evidence to back up his belief, but inevitably it put their marriage under a tremendous strain, and caused considerable difficulties for the couple’s friends. Brahms sided with the wife, for whom he’d written his famous ‘Alto Rhapsody’, and he wrote to her at great length, supporting

65 her claim to complete innocence in the matter (though he could hardly have had any proof one way or the other) and saying many harsh things about her husband. When Joachim sued for divorce, this letter, to Brahms’s horror and the shocked disbelief of his oldest friend, was produced in evidence by the defence, thereby assuring at a stroke Joachim’s defeat in court and the instant demise of his friendship with Brahms. It’s a measure of his artistic integrity, though, that he continued to champion Brahms’s music with undiminished vigour. As he told a rather puzzled friend:

JOACHIM: You must understand that artist and man are two different things... I can’t help but feel this music with my entire being... it works on me like a force of Nature.

Which is rather the way it worked on Brahms as well, at least in the act of creating it. Not that you’d guess it by listening to Brahms himself on the subject.

6 One of the things which set Brahms apart from most of his more Romantic contemporaries – well, come to that, it set him apart even from his revered and beloved Schumann – was his obsession with what I can only call structural logic. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that there isn’t a single note in all the published works of Brahms that isn’t there for a precisely articulated reason, precisely articulated in Brahms’s own mind. In a fascinating conversation with his friend Georg Henschel, he spoke about the way a composition took shape in his head, and on one point he was not only emphatic but categorical:

BRAHMS: There is no creating without hard work. That which you would call invention, that is to say, a thought, an idea, is simply an inspiration from above, for which I am not responsible, which is no merit of mine. Yes, it is a present, a gift, which I ought even to despise until I have made it my own by right of hard work. And there is no hurry about that either. When I have found the first phrase of a song, say, I might shut the book there and then, go for a walk, do some other work, and perhaps not think of it again for months... If, afterwards, I approach the subject again, it is sure to have taken shape; I can now really begin to work at it. But there are composers who sit at the piano with a poem

66 before them, putting music to it from start to finish until they arrive at the end and it’s done.

And when Henschel asked for advice as to his own compositional practises, Brahms came back repeatedly to the same thing:

BRAHMS: Let it rest, let it rest, and keep going back to it and working at it over and over again until it is completed as a finished work of art, until there is not a note too much or too little, not a bar you could improve upon. Whether it is beautiful also, is an entirely different matter, but perfect it must be.

Now, from all this, you might well think that Brahms at work might have looked and sounded like Scrooge in Dickens’s Christmas Carol , scratching away at his figures with an almost chilling detachment – not so; indeed, far from it. Our first witness is Brahms’s friend and first biographer, Max Kalbeck:

KALBECK: Paying a morning visit to Brahms’s house in the Salzburgerstrasse I went up the outside steps intending to come in by the wide-open back door when I saw that the door of the music room was also open. At that moment bewitching sounds came from the piano which held me entranced on the doorstep. It sounded like free extemporisation, but from the frequent repetitions of certain passages I realised that Brahms was going through and improving and refining a new composition already complete in his head. He repeated the piece several times in individual sections and eventually played it straight through... The solo changed into an extraordinary duet. The richer the shaping of the work became, and the more passionately its delivery arose, the more strongly could be heard a strange growling, whining, and moaning which at the peak of the musical ecstasy became sheer howling. Could Brahms, quite contrary to his inclination, have got himself a dog?... After about half an hour the playing and the howling stopped together, the piano stool was drawn back, and I entered the room: not a trace of a dog. Brahms looked a little embarrassed and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand like a child who is ashamed: he

67 must have wept violently, for teardrops hung in his beard and his voice sounded soft and unsteady... Soon afterwards he was heartily cheerful and in a jesting mood.

The second glimpse, also from Kalbeck, dates from the summer of 1880 – the very year of the rift with Joachim – which Brahms spent at one of his favourite holiday haunts, in Ischl in Switzerland. And the description in this case, down to the finest detail, could well be of Beethoven:

KALBECK: I suddenly saw a man running from the wood across the meadow towards me; I took him for a farmer. I was afraid I had been trespassing and was already reckoning on all sorts of unpleasant eventualities, when to my joy I recognised Brahms in the supposed farmer. But in what condition – what a sight! Bare-headed and in shirtsleeves, no waistcoat, no shirt collar, he brandished his hat in one hand, with the other dragged his cast-off coat in the grass behind him, and ran on quickly, as though hunted by an unseen pursuer. Already from far off I heard him snorting and groaning. When he came nearer I saw how the sweat was streaming over his hot cheeks from the hair which hung about his face. His eyes were staring ahead into empty space and shone like those of a beast of prey; he appeared like one possessed. Before I recovered from my shock he had shot past me, so close that we almost collided. I immediately realised it was inadvisable to call to him. He was glowing with creative fire. I shall never forget that harrowing impression of elemental force.

But the most famous work to come from that summer wasn’t of elemental force, let alone harrowing, it was Brahms at his most exuberantly high-spirited and entertaining: the Academic Festival Overture , written as a token of thanks to the University of Breslau, who had given him an honorary doctorate, and based almost entirely on German students’ songs.

7 Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80

Part of the Academic Festival Overture .

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8 It’s interesting that Brahms quickly followed this up with a very different work, another concert overture, which he very pointedly entitled the Tragic , presumably in order to reassure the faithful that he wasn’t selling out and becoming a high-class entertainer like Johann Strauss or Franz von Suppé. Well, he needn’t have worried – nobody else did. His reputation did nothing but soar. As Clara Schumann rightly put it:

CLARA: Brahms is celebrating such triumphs everywhere as seldom fall to the lot of any composer. This is due in part to the performance of his works by the Meiningen orchestra as conducted by Bülow.

If Bülow had been slow to appreciate Brahms’s music, as he had, he’d more than made up for it now. One of the greatest, and most forbidding, pianists and conductors of the nineteenth century, his opinion carried a lot of weight, and he didn’t mince his words. As he said in a letter to his fiancée:

BÜLOW: You know what I think of Brahms: after Bach and Beethoven he is the greatest, the most exalted of all composers. I consider his friendship my most priceless possession, second only to your love. It represents a climax in my life, a moral conquest. I do not believe that a single musical heart, not even that of Joachim, feels so profoundly or is so deeply immersed into the depths of his soul as mine.

It was Bülow who started the tradition of talking about ‘the three Bs’, and, though Brahms never lacked his enemies in the musical ranks, and amongst the public, it has to be said, Bülow’s became the prevailing view. And Brahms became embarrassed.

BRAHMS: I am not ashamed to admit that it gives me the greatest pleasure if anything of mine has turned out especially well. But how must those gods, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, have felt, whose daily bread it was to write things like the St Matthew Passion , Don Giovanni , Fidelio , the Ninth Symphony! What I cannot begin to comprehend is how people like myself can possibly be vain. As much as we men, who

69 walk upright, are above the creeping things of the earth, so these gods are above us. If it were not so ludicrous it would be utterly loathsome to me to hear colleagues praise me to my face in such an exaggerated manner.

But for all their godlike musical qualities, there was one respect in which Brahms was incomparably superior to Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. Like them he’d never been to university and his formal schooling was limited. Unlike them, though, and despite this disadvantage, he was very highly educated indeed, and deeply cultured. As Hanslick pointed out:

HANSLICK: Brahms’s general education was far deeper and more comprehensive than one might think on superficial acquaintance with him. The things that had been denied him through the hardships and deprivations of his youth he later made up with persistent energy. An admirably quick gift of comprehension and an extraordinary, never-failing memory supported him in his studies. Often one would only discover years later, after some cue gave him the necessary impetus, how well versed he was in literary matters. It never occurred to him to flaunt his wide reading: he preferred to hide it (the absolute opposite of Liszt, who constantly tossed around Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Michelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer in his musical essays, along with Plato, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel, of whom he himself had probably read scarcely a chapter). Perfectly obnoxious, in Brahms’s eyes, were those newest critics who quote Schopenhauer and Nietzsche the minute they take up a new opera or symphony. And how intimately Brahms knew our classical literature! How deeply he absorbed the great masterworks! His literary sympathies were not always entirely comprehensible to me, however – for example the fact that he could read Jean Paul over and over again, right into his old age. The same was true of the comic novels of Swift and Fielding, which he knew only in German translations. He had no talent for foreign languages and never learned enough French for even the most minimal household use.

And though he was no churchgoer, and may not latterly have regarded himself as a Christian, he had a theologian’s knowledge of the Bible. In fact Biblical settings are a

70 feature of his choral music from the Mass written when he was twenty-three, in the year of Schumann’s death, to the late motets of 1889 – the last choral works he ever wrote.

9 Motet ‘Wenn ein starker Gewappneter’, Op. 109 No. 2

The late Motet ‘Wenn ein starker Gewappneter’.

10 A curious adjunct of Brahms’s vast knowledge of literature is the fact, hinted at earlier by Hanslick, that, like a child, he seemed to derive a curious comfort from repetition. As we’ve seen, he never outgrew the favourite books of his youth. And this love of repetition, which is not reflected in his music, extended, as Widmann recalled, even into conversation.

WIDMANN: Yes, I remember particularly how I always had to tell him, again and again, about the family customs of the bears in the Bern bear-pits, which we often visited together.

Like Mozart and Bach, though not so much Beethoven, Brahms had a deep love and a profound, intuitive understanding of the human voice. And of the many women who inspired him to some of his greatest works, most were singers, and most of those were contraltos or what today we call mezzo-sopranos: the ill-fated, jilted Agathe von Siebold; Joachim’s wife Amalie; Hermine Spies, with whom he toured in the 1880s and who died, to his acute distress, at the age of thirty-six; and, lastly, Alice Barbi, with whom (as with most of them, actually) he was half in love, or maybe more than half, and who was amongst the mourners at his graveside. The death of Hermine Spies was only one of many which clouded Brahms’s later years. He also grieved bitterly for his beloved Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, whose death at forty-six shook him terribly, for his friends Bülow, Billroth, and Spitta (the great pioneering Bach scholar), and finally for Clara, whose death may well have hastened his own. But almost as painful, in its way, was the loss of a friend who was still very much alive, and who outlived him by a decade. The rift with Joachim was a running sore for

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Brahms, but one which he largely healed after almost seven years with a remarkable work, conceived very much with Joachim in mind and clearly intended as a peace offering. It was a concerto for violin, cello, and orchestra, better known simply as the Double Concerto, and it did the trick. Joachim played it, with the cellist of his own string quartet Robert Hausmann, and, though the friendship with Brahms never regained its former intimacy, it was definitely rekindled and lasted without interruption for the rest of Brahms’s life. The slow movement is almost a love letter to friendship itself.

11 Concerto for Violin and Cello in A minor, Op. 102 (slow movement)

Part of the slow movement from the Concerto for Violin and Cello.

12 After the death of Wagner in 1883, there was no doubt in many people’s minds that Brahms was incontestably the greatest living composer, and it seems that most of musical Europe agreed, though Verdi and Tchaikovsky were also strong contenders. Even his detractors, with few exceptions, conceded that he was at the very least the greatest living exemplar of the Germanic tradition. The rate of his production slowed, but not its quality, and increasingly he cut back on his performing and conducting engagements, though he toured extensively with his long-awaited Second Piano Concerto – still regarded by many pianists as the most difficult of all the great concertos. He practised less than ever, and Clara lamented the deterioration of his piano-playing – without much sympathy, it has to be said.

CLARA: Brahms plays more and more abominably – it is now nothing but thump, bang and scrabble.

Others were more charitable, and so many of the piano pieces of his later years are of such subtlety, delicacy, and intimacy that the great pianist Artur Schnabel once described Brahms as ‘the first Impressionist’. Brahms’s playing of these, at least, must have been unforgettable. But his relations with Clara, while always close, were prone to periods of

72 considerable strain, and as her diaries make clear she was often wounded by Brahms’s unfortunate way with words, even when he meant no harm.

CLARA: Brahms comes today. How anxious I feel at heart! If only we could frankly discuss all that has happened between us, and that has distressed me so much. But with him this is impossible. He gets so violent that one is reduced to silence.

Since Clara destroyed many of Brahms’s letters to her we can only guess, in some cases, at what his offence may have been, but the tone of her replies speaks for itself.

CLARA: Only a mincing little pedant would think of such a thing. You are a regular good-for-nothing; first one is to say all that one thinks, and then if one does, one gets one’s knuckles rapped.

There’s no doubt that Clara’s pride was easily wounded, and one of Brahms’s most persistent vexations where she was concerned was her refusal to accept money from him even when she was plainly in need of it.

BRAHMS: It angers me that you have these financial worries – while I positively swim in money without even noticing it and without having any pleasure because of it. I cannot live otherwise, don’t want to, and will not... and where my heart demands it, I can be helpful, and even do good without being aware of it. After my death, however, I won’t have any responsibilities or special wishes. Until then, just think what a great pleasure it would give me if you were simply and nicely to say ‘yes’.

13 In the meantime, as throughout all the years of his celebrity, Brahms gave away huge sums of money, much if not even most of it anonymously. As Richard Specht put it:

SPECHT: He was not easy to match in generosity and was infinitely delicate in his benefactions, not to friends only, but at times to total strangers who seemed to him in need and worthy of help. He often sacrificed incredibly large sums without thinking

73 anything of it. In his own person he was extremely frugal, spending hardly as much as the interest on his considerable income. He could be fiercely annoyed on hearing that one of his acquaintances was in a bad way and I myself heard him say angrily: ‘Why do people not come to me? I’ve got plenty!’... He would not hear of gratitude and could be exceedingly vexed if anyone whom he had treated so magnanimously began to make words instead of just ‘cordially and simply’ agreeing. He always behaved as if it were he who was under an obligation. What he secretly gave to young musicians exceeded any scholarship, and many owed him the possibility of their artistic careers. From the day on which affluence came to him as well as fame, he knew no greater gratification than that of using his surplus to alleviate the distress of others.

It was Brahms more than anyone who put Dvo řák on the international map, securing financial grants for him, arranging for performances; he even found him a publisher – Brahms’s own: Fritz Simrock. Like Brahms, Dvo řák was showered with many honours in his life, but there was nothing he treasured more than his first direct communication from Brahms – to which, of course, he responded immediately:

DVO ŘÁK: Esteemed Master, I have read your most valued letter with the most joyful excitement; your warm encouragement, and the pleasure you seem to find in my work have moved me deeply, and made me unspeakably happy. I cannot find the words to tell you all that is in my heart. I can only say that I shall all my life owe you the deepest gratitude for your good and noble intentions towards me, which are worthy of a truly great artist and man.

Such was Brahms’s admiration for his protégé that for most of Dvo řák’s years in America, by which time he was a world celebrity, Brahms actually undertook to check the proofs of all the works Dvo řák sent back to Simrock in Vienna, including the famous ‘New World’ Symphony. Dvo řák, unsurprisingly, was dumbfounded.

DVO ŘÁK: I don’t believe there is another musician of his stature in the whole world who would do such a thing.

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14 When Dvo řák visited Vienna for the first performance there of the ‘New World’ Symphony, he and Brahms sat together in the hall. It was the last time they saw each other. Just a little over a year later, Brahms was dead. Not that Dvo řák or anyone else could possibly have guessed anything of the sort. When they parted, Brahms, for all that he now resembled a kind of cross between a shabby Santa Claus and a target of the Salvation Army, was as fit as the proverbial fiddle. Indeed, as Widmann recalled:

WIDMANN: One had to pull one’s self together vigorously to keep fresh on the plane of his sheer tirelessness.

His energy was, had always been, prodigious, but he hardly looked after himself like a modern day athlete. Our first witness is the daughter of his friend Max Kalbeck.

FRAULEIN KALBECK: Oh but Uncle Brahms could drink and eat! Mother would often have a big herring salad ready, made for him, and he would spoon the whole dish empty because he loved it so. He was especially fond of that coarse proletarian dish, Rindspilaw, a kind of beef pilaf. One summer at the Hotel Post in Ischl, when certain too- elegant visitors had deprived him of this for days, he ordered three portions of it and dispatched them one after the other. His regular supper when dining at home was a large selection of cold meats and a box of French sardines.

And as for getting his beauty sleep, forget it. As Robert Schauffler reports:

SCHAUFFLER: Little more than a year before he died, this old Titan could with apparent impunity allow himself alarming extravagances. In Menzel’s Berlin studio he once breakfasted with the old painter, lingered until nightfall drinking Rhine wine and champagne, rushed to his room, immersed his venerable head in cold water, stormed to a banquet, played trios until three in the morning, snatched two hours’ sleep, and appeared at the breakfast table radiantly fit. Whereupon Frau Simrock, his hostess, exclaimed:

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‘You are not only a God-blessed artist but also a giant of health!’ ‘Well,’ was the reply, ‘what do you expect? I have never in my life omitted a meal or taken a drop of medicine.’

And despite his girth he did get his exercise. Almost to the end he was an indefatigable walker. Although he was already ill with jaundice – he didn’t know this yet – he was on a walking holiday in Switzerland when he heard the news he feared the most. Clara Schumann was dead of a stroke at seventy-seven. It couldn’t have come as a great surprise. Her last communication with him, a message on his sixty-third birthday, had made it clear that she was no longer quite herself:

CLARA: Hearty congratulations from your sincerely devoted Clara Schumann. More than this I cannot,… yet,… but… or soon,… your...

And more than this, as she said, she could not. Not even her signature. The letter becomes illegible and then just peters out. On hearing the news of her death, Brahms set off at once for the funeral. It was an arduous journey, complete with missed train connections and other mishaps, and when he finally reached Frankfurt it was only to discover that the funeral was over and that her body had been taken to Bonn for burial next to her Robert. After thirty-six hours of travelling, he arrived, exhausted, just in time to cast his handful of earth on the coffin. He’d caught a bad chill and it was some days before he could resume his normal life – and resume it he did, but he never regained his former health. The jaundice became so evident it alarmed his friends, and eventually it was diagnosed that, like his father before him, he was suffering from incurable cancer of the liver. He carried on with remarkable determination – he hated and feared illness to the point of obsession – but despite his best efforts he couldn’t conceal his condition indefinitely. Professor Julius Wachsmann was only one of many who were horrified at what they now beheld.

WACHSMANN: About two months before his death, I dined with him at the Conrats’. Our hostess had curtained the windows heavily and put red bulbs in the electric light

76 sockets, so that the Master’s dark greenish bronze complexion would not be conspicuous. One noticed his terrifying colour only in the daylight of the anteroom.

Another, later witness was Professor Seligmann:

SELIGMANN: The last time I saw him alive was three weeks before his death. I was dining at the house of Billroth’s widow. On entering the dark lift, I noticed a strange little man, but paid no attention to him. Then, as we rose into the light, I saw that it was Brahms. His complexion was a dark brownish yellow. He was horribly emaciated, with hollows even in the back of the neck on either side of the spine. His beard stood out unkempt and lifeless. Curiously enough, he was in good spirits, eating and drinking with his usual gusto; though, as old people do, he nodded off to sleep once or twice during dinner. Afterwards he started on foot for his home, half an hour away. I went along to see that he was safe; but he walked with such astonishing vigour as to tire me.

Thereafter, as noted by Richard Specht, his decline was rapid, and shocking.

SPECHT: Never have I seen such a devastation in a man within so short a period. His mighty, sturdy figure had shrunk to that of a very old man, his face was a yellowish brown, his skin like leather, his wonderful blue eyes dull with the whites gone yellow as quinces, his hair dry and brittle, his hands cold and hard. He gave me a heartrending glance and I could just contrive to keep my countenance... The changes his illness had wrought in him manifested themselves psychically as well as physically. He had grown quite tender and communicative. ‘I have even given up being rude to people,’ he once said in a kind of sad astonishment. But what one could not help noticing was the effort every step cost him, the dreadful lassitude with which the man dragged himself along who not long before was difficult to keep pace with on a walk in the country.

Specht was one of the many who attended the last concert at which a work of Brahms’s was played in his lifetime. The conductor was the great Hans Richter, one of the foremost conductors of the century. The work was the Fourth Symphony.

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SPECHT: The public was in a frenzy of enthusiasm. But when Richter pointed to the box where only now Brahms was discovered, deathly pale, a hurricane broke out. There were deafening calls, cries and clapping, people stood on their seats the better to see the master’s terribly ravaged figure, hats and handkerchiefs waved to him, he was obliged to come to the edge of the box repeatedly. The acclamations simply would not end. The audience knew they were seeing Brahms for the last time, and he knew it as well. He stood there, both hands convulsively grasping the plush covering of the balustrade, silent sobs shaking his wasted body; once more he inclined his head, with its long hair now thin and wiry, and then stepped back. Vienna and Brahms had taken leave of each other.

In his final days, Brahms was attended by the two Doctors Breuer, father and son.

BREUER: On 2 April 1897, my father came to me and said: ‘Brahms is nearly finished. Would you go and spend the night watching over him?’ Of course I was glad to. When I arrived at No. 4, Karlsgasse and was presented to the Master, he was very weak, but still kind and thoughtful, and showed hospitable concern about finding the best place for me to rest. He slept until half-past one, then grew uneasy. I asked whether he had pain. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but it is not unbearable.’ Then he slept. Again, about four, I heard him tossing, and offered to give him an injection. He said, ‘Perhaps it would be better.’ When this was done, I asked him if he would like some wine, and he nodded. So, I poured him out a glassful of the fine old Rhine wine from his friend the Duke of Meiningen’s cellars, which had been put out for me by the housekeeper. With scarcely any assistance, Brahms sat up, drank it off in two draughts, and exclaimed with satisfaction: ‘Ja, das ist schön!’ [‘Yes, that’s wonderful!’]. Then he slept, and was still asleep at seven, when I was forced to hasten to my clinic. At half-past eight he died.

Within hours, Brahms’s room was transformed in a way that might have kept him alive if he could have had any inkling of how his death would first be commemorated. Flowers were there in such profusion that much of the room was obscured. There were silver

78 crosses and candelabras – everything but an organ, quietly playing mournful music. And this, for a man who had long since lost his Christian faith. Three days later the streets of Vienna were fairly choked with mourners following the funeral procession. Among those present were emissaries from London, Cambridge, Amsterdam, Paris, and of course from all over Germany. Dvo řák was there, Alice Barbi, Henschel, Simrock, and others, all among the torchbearers as Brahms’s coffin was lowered into a grave near those of Beethoven and Schubert, and the famous monument to Mozart, whose grave to this day has never been discovered. Buildings were draped in black, and far away in Hamburg every ship from every country in the harbour lowered its flags to half-mast. But as we remember Brahms – well, as I think of him, anyway – it’s not in terms of black and mournfulness, but of vigour, grace, excitement, warmth, humour – and a particular kind of lyrical joy, worthy – dare I say it – even of his idol Mozart.

15 Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat, Op. 83 (Finale)

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