2. New paths.
1853 marked a turning point in Brahms's personal and professional life. On returning from the USA, Reményi resumed his collaboration with Brahms with a recital in January and a concert tour in northern Germany from April to June. Among other places, they visited Göttingen, where Brahms began a lifelong friendship with Joseph Joachim, and Weimar, where he met Liszt, who played the Scherzo op.4 at sight. Brahms's stay at the Altenburg, however, was brief (12–24 June). ‘I soon discovered that I was of no use there’, he later told Richard Heuberger; ‘this was just at [Liszt's] most successful time when he was writing the “symphonic poems” and all that stuff, and soon it all came to horrify me’. Brahms considered himself a ‘musician of the future’, and his music embodied much that was progressive, but he viewed the path to the future differently.
Brahms returned to Göttingen to spend the summer with Joachim, who recognized his genius and encouraged him to meet other prominent musicians, especially Schumann. At the end of August, Brahms departed on a long walking tour in the Rhineland, making the acquaintance of several musicians (including Wasielewski, Ferdinand Hiller and Franz Wüllner). At the country estate of the financier Deichmann in Mehlem he studied Schumann's music, which a few years earlier he had dismissed, and on 30 September he presented himself at the home of Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf.
To the Schumanns it seemed as if Brahms had ‘sprung like Minerva fully armed from the head of the son of Cronus’, as Robert observed in his laudatory essay on Brahms, ‘Neue Bahnen’ (NZM, xxxviii/Oct, 1853, pp.185–6). The ‘young eagle’ showed the Schumanns pieces for piano (including the op.4 Scherzo, the andantes from the sonata op.5 and the sonatas opp.1 and 2), duos for violin and piano, piano trios, string quartets and numerous songs, ‘every work so different from the others that it seemed to stream from its own individual source’. Brahms's playing of his compositions was on a grand scale; Schumann remarked how the piano became ‘an orchestra of lamenting and loudly jubilant voices’, making his sonatas sound like ‘veiled symphonies’.
In October Brahms completed the Piano Sonata in F minor op.5 and contributed the scherzo woo2 to the ‘F–A–E’ violin sonata written with Schumann and Albert Dietrich for Joachim. During the next two months he went twice to Leipzig, preceded by enthusiastic letters of recommendation from Schumann, to present his compositions to publishers and oversee their printing; while there he performed the sonatas opp.1 and 4 in public and met Julius Otto Grimm, Ferdinand David, Moscheles, Berlioz and, again, Liszt. When he returned to Hamburg for Christmas he was able to report the acceptance of his first four opuses by Breitkopf & Härtel and the next two by Bartolf Senff.
The new year found Brahms at work on the B major Piano Trio op.8. In March, on learning of Schumann's nervous breakdown, suicide attempt and removal to a sanatorium at Endenich, Brahms returned to Düsseldorf to assist Clara Schumann with the care of her family, the running of the household and the organization of her husband's library and business dealings concerning his music. He remained there throughout Schumann's protracted illness, attending to matters in Düsseldorf while she resumed her career as a concert pianist and reporting to her from Endenich on the condition of her husband, whom she was not allowed to visit. At the same time he conceived a strong romantic passion for her, despite the great difference in their ages. To him Clara Schumann, as wife, mother and musician, represented all that was ideal in womanhood. In June 1854 he dedicated to her his newly composed Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann op.9; the theme, from Bunte Blätter op.99, is joined by variations that draw upon other works by Schumann (as well as a melody by Clara) and are initialled in Brahms's manuscript variously by the calm, introspective ‘Brahms’ and the mercurial ‘Kreisler’. For her part, Clara drew sustenance from Brahms's creativity, which filled a void in her life after the sudden end of her husband's activity as a composer. On a personal level, though feeling a certain proprietary right to his affection, she viewed him much as a mother would a devoted older son.
After the death of Schumann in July 1856, Clara and Brahms took a trip together along the Rhine and into Switzerland during which they no doubt discussed their future and after which they went their separate ways, henceforth to remain the closest of friends, despite occasional intense disagreements. Brahms shared his joys and sorrows with her, and sought but did not always heed her assessments of his new compositions. He also never forgot the debt he owed to Robert Schumann, and in the roles of composer, performer, arranger and editor he strove to perpetuate the legacy of the man who had championed his music.
The ‘two natures’ of Brahms's personality, revealed musically in the Schumann Variations and acknowledged by Brahms in a letter to Clara Schumann in August 1854, were described by Joachim as ‘eine kindlich, genial, vorwiegend … eine dämonische auflauernde’. This duality is also evident in the contrasts between the demonic scherzos and the gentler trios of the early piano sonatas and the Ballades op.10, composed at this time. Two letters from 1854 offer vivid accounts of Brahms the self-styled, now confident young Romantic who let nothing interfere with his art. In April, Julius Grimm wrote to Joachim:
Br— Kr—… is full of crazy ideas – as the Artist-Genius of Düsseldorf he has painted his apartment full of the most beautiful frescoes in the manner of Callot, i.e., all kinds of grotesque visages and faces of Madonnas.
(The reference is to the engravings of Jacques Callot and E.T.A. Hoffmann's Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier.) The following October Joachim characterized Brahms as
egoism incarnate, without himself being aware of it. He bubbles over in his cheery way with exuberant thoughtlessness … the things that do not arouse his enthusiasm, or that do not fit in with his experience, or even with his mood, are callously thrust aside … He will not make the smallest sacrifice of his intellectual inclinations – he will not play in public because of his contempt for the public, and because it irks him – although he plays divinely.
Brahms's withdrawal from the broader stage of German musical life in the later 1850s was nearly complete. After the publication of his Ballades op.10 in February 1856, he released no other works until the end of 1860. In the 1855–6 season, in need of money, he resumed concert activities, playing solo and chamber works and for the first time with orchestra, in Mozart's Piano Concerto k466 and Beethoven's fourth and fifth Concertos. But during the rest of the decade his appearances were sporadic. In autumn 1857 he accepted a well-paid, three-month position as piano teacher, pianist and conductor of the amateur choral society at the court in Detmold, a post to which he returned the following two autumns. In 1859 he founded an amateur women's choir in Hamburg which he conducted for the next three years. Otherwise the mid- and late 1850s were a time of intense self-scrutiny and musical study. Schumann's mental deterioration caused Brahms to ponder the relationship between creativity and insanity. His romantic involvement with Clara Schumann and, in autumn 1858, with Agathe von Siebold (a professor's daughter in Göttingen), forced him, at least to his own way of thinking, to choose (as his hero Kreisler had) between the married life of ‘die guten Leute’ and the existence of ‘echte Musikanten’, who draw inspiration from the veneration of idealized women but must forgo normal intimate relations. During the summer of 1855, with little to show from recent efforts at composition, Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann that he felt he no longer knew ‘at all how one composes, how one creates’. But an exchange of polyphonic exercises and compositions with Joachim soon sharpened his contrapuntal skills; renewed study of early music and folksong for his own edification and in conjunction with his conducting duties grounded his art in tradition and enriched his melodic, rhythmic and textural vocabularies; and work on his Sturm und Drang Piano Concerto in D minor op.15 and the two neo-classical Serenades opp.11 and 16 (written for Detmold) initiated him into the art of orchestration.
Products of Brahms's studies of counterpoint and early music included Baroque-style dance pieces, preludes and fugues for organ, and neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque choral works (motets and a canonic mass); the variation set in the B String Sextet op.18 (1860), which extends the tradition of the folia, likewise testifies to his knowledge and love of earlier styles. Inspired by Agathe von Siebold, Brahms composed a number of songs and duets in 1858; for his women's choir in Hamburg he wrote many original works and arrangements of folksongs. The Variations on an Original Theme op.21 no.1 and on a Hungarian melody op.21 no.2 (both for solo piano) and the passionate opening movement of the Piano Quartet in C minor op.60 also come from this decade. In July 1862 Brahms sent Clara Schumann the prototype of what became the first movement of his C minor Symphony op.68 (at that time without a slow introduction).
The composition that occupied Brahms most during the 1850s was the D minor Piano Concerto. The opening of the first movement was written in spring 1854 as part of the opening Allegro of a two-piano sonata. Realizing that its gestural language exceeded the capabilities of two pianos, he attempted to orchestrate the movement during the summer, with the assistance of Grimm, Joachim and Marxsen. It was not until February 1855 that he thought to recast the symphonic movement as a concerto, and not until autumn 1856 that recomposition was completed. The Rondo-Finale was finished soon after, and the Adagio, which Brahms described as a ‘gentle portrait’ of Clara Schumann and whose opening melody he underlaid in his manuscripts with the text ‘Benedictus, qui venit, in nomine Domini!’ (from over the entrance to the monastery in Hoffmann's Kater Murr, where Kreisler finally found peace), was written late in December. But form and orchestration were still being settled even after the first public performances at Hanover and Leipzig in January 1859. After the investment of so much energy, it was a keen disappointment for Brahms that the concerto's première in the Leipzig Gewandhaus was greeted with hostility by both audience and critics. ‘The work … cannot give pleasure’, observed Edward Bernsdorf, the conservative critic of Signale für die musikalische Welt; ‘save its serious intention, it has nothing to offer but waste, barren dreariness truly disconsolate … one must … swallow a dessert of the shrillest dissonances and most unpleasant sounds’. Although Brahms tried to appear philosophical about the fiasco, a note of pain sounded forth in his letter to Joachim:
my concerto here was a brilliant and decided – failure …. The first movement and the second were heard without a sign. At the end three hands attempted to fall slowly one upon the other, at which point a quite audible hissing from all sides forbade such demonstrations…. In spite of all this, the concerto will please some day, when I have improved its construction…. I believe it is the best thing that could have happened to me; it makes one pull one's thoughts together and raises one's courage…. But surely the hissing was too much?
Instead of establishing him as a composer of the first rank, the Leipzig performance cast a pall over his career, jeopardizing prospects with publishers. When Breitkopf & Härtel rejected a group of works in 1860, including the piano concerto, Brahms turned to the small Swiss publishing house of Jakob Rieter-Biedermann, which accepted the concerto and subsequently published many songs and choral works, including the German Requiem, and to the German firm Simrock, which eventually became Brahms's major publisher.
During the 1850s Brahms's opposition to the literary-orientated music of Liszt and his circle grew. In March 1860, enraged by an editorial in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik claiming that all serious musicians of the day subscribed to the cause of the New German School, Brahms collaborated with Joachim to draft a manifesto deploring the ‘Music of the Future’ (i.e. that of Liszt, but not Berlioz and Wagner) as running ‘contrary to the inner spirit of music’, that is, to the need of music to progress according to its own logic. Prematurely leaked to the press while still being circulated for the signatures of other like-minded musicians, the document, published over the names of only Brahms, Joachim, Grimm and Bernhard Scholz, was soundly ridiculed and became an embarrassment to Brahms, who never again expressed his position on artistic matters in such a public manner.
Brahms, Johannes