JEFFREY DANE - INTERLUDES

The Essays of Jeffrey Dane

Interludes

Brahms in the 1890s. Like his beard, his ever-present cigar was one of his distinctive visual hallmarks.
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We usually see only the proverbial tip of the iceberg. As there's more to Leonardo da Vinci than his Mona Lisa and more to Beethoven than his "Moonlight" Sonata, there's more to Johannes Brahms than just his "Lullaby." His character is one of the most fascinating in the entire history of music, and his nature one of the most noble. He sometimes spoke and wrote his letters as though he were actually trying to conceal his meaning rather than clarify it.

His lifelong personal friendship and professional collaboration with pianist Clara Schumann, wife of composer Robert Schumann, paralleled the later personal friendship and professional collaborations between Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, "the actor's actor." Tracy himself found Brahms' personality so interesting that he considered portraying him in a film biography of the composer, provided he could grow his own beard for the role. Interestingly, Katherine Hepburn had once portrayed Clara Schumann in a film.

The following incident is characteristic of Brahms' lifelong generosity to others, and particularly of his devotion to his own family. Preparing to leave for Vienna, he wrote to his father, who was also a musician, "If things ever go badly with you, bear in mind that music is always the best consolation. Just read industriously in my old copy of Saul, and there you will find what you need." Not long afterward, Johann Jakob Brahms remembered the advice. When he turned for spiritual comfort to his son's tattered score of Handel's oratorio, he was elated to find that his son had left the pages liberally interleaved with banknotes. The most influential musical figure in Austria, Brahms also put pressure on his own publisher, Simrock of Berlin, to bring out the music of a still-struggling young Czech composer named Antonin Dvorak.

While on a holiday, Brahms' gold pocketwatch was stolen one day from his rooms, which he had never locked. When he was urged to take the matter up officially with the police, he's said to have dismissed the notion with the remark, "Leave me in peace. The watch was probably carried off by some poor devil who needs it more than I do."

A practical man, his choice of holiday destinations depended upon the ease and convenience of railroad schedules and train connections. When traveling, in a train compartment Brahms would considerately ask a lady's permission to smoke. When entering a Catholic church, observant of protocol he would pretend, with his Protestant hand, to take holy water. In hotels he would place his shoes in the corridor in the early evening, and go about stocking-footed "…so as not to shorten the sleep of some poor servant."

Brahms was unassuming, but his modesty, while genuine, could also be facetious. On his arrival in Mürzzuschlag, in the Styria region of Austria, where he spent the summers of 1884-1885 composing his Fourth Symphony, the already famous composer registered with the authorities as "Itinerant musician." Once when Clara Schumann stopped in Mürzzuschlag to visit him, he arranged in advance to have the entire railway station restaurant cleared so they could dine with each other undisturbed.

The Brahms Museum in Mürzzuschlag. It permanently exhibits more personal Brahms material than any other entity in the world.
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During his second summer in Mürzzuschlag, a fire broke out in a carpenter's shop very close to the composer's dwelling, which is now the only museum in the world devoted exclusively to him. While everyone has an ego, it's the creative artist who acknowledges it more readily than do others, but Brahms' conduct on this day, and his subsequent deeds, are clearly not the mark of The Egotist. Having already fled from his desk in his shirtsleeves to join the bucket brigade, he impelled the stylish onlookers to lend a hand. Soon he was warned by a friend that the fire's direction was threatening his rooms - and the precious manuscript of his nearly-completed Fourth Symphony (now in the Central Library in Zürich, Switzerland). After a moment's pause, Brahms simply continued with his fire-fighting. The friend had difficulty getting the room-key from the busy Brahms, to get the irreplaceable score to safety. Ultimately, the ruined carpenter actually benefitted from the fire, thanks to Brahms' munificence, which was both practical and anonymous, in keeping with his usual procedure in matters of personal generosity with those he didn't know.

Two of Brahms' idiosyncracies were his reluctance to put enough stamps on his letters, and to pay duty on what he smoked - cigarettes in his youth, later graduating to the cigar. Once he himself turned contrabandist, but with unfortunate results. His first biographer, Max Kalbeck, tells how Brahms, before being graced with unlimited funds, hid a large quantity of his favorite Turkish mixture in his bag. He evidently thought he had an imaginative cunning that would deceive the ablest Customs sleuth. Brahms had an absolutely towering musical intellect but his innocence in Customs matters was woeful, and the masks of Pathos & Comedy were now worn simultaneously. At the border, to his dismay, the Customs officers unerringly homed in on something that looked like a disembodied leg. The composer had stuffed a stocking full of tobacco, under the naïve impression that no official would bother with such a thing. This caprice cost Brahms loud cries of rage a-la-Beethoven, the amputated leg, and a fine almost in keeping with the magnitude of his music.

In Austria then, as now, protocol dictated that even the spouse of a titled individual share the distinction. For example, the wife of Brahms' friend, Herr Dr. Fellinger, would be addressed as Frau Dr. Fellinger. Brahms' widowed landlady in Vienna, Frau Dr. Celestine Truxa, was once called away for several days on urgent business, leaving her two young sons at home in the housekeeper's care. On returning she was surprised and touched to hear that Brahms himself had gone in every noon to see if the children had the right food, and every evening to see if they were properly covered.

Brahms never allowed a score or book in his personal library unless he himself had already read it. His workroom in his Vienna apartment at Karlsgasse 4 had a traditional kneehole desk, but his library contained a tall, console desk at which he could stand while writing. Personal privacy was a ruling passion with Brahms, and even secrecy played a role regarding his compositions-in-progress.

Brahms in his library, seated beside his console desk.

This lectern-type desk had a raiseable hinged top. When a visitor knocked at his door, Brahms would raise the desk's lid and quickly conceal the manuscript on which he was working. Today this very desk is displayed in the special Brahms Room at The Haydn Museum at Haydngasse 19 in Vienna.

Visitors to Brahms' Vienna apartment could have a hard time finding a place to sit. All the chairs were usually filled with books or scores. Photos of his library show volumes piled on volumes in apparent disarray, but the supreme order in his compositions extended to his personal sense of organization. According to his landlady, "He knew by heart the position of every single book; and, on his travels, he might write to me to send him, for example, the fifth from the left on the second shelf from the top."

Brahms had greater priorities than to maintain a reputation as a clothes horse. His sometimes unkempt appearance might be due to his prosaically practical method of "packing" for a journey, which was ingenious in its simplicity: he'd pile his clothing on a table-top, tip the table, and let the clothes fall helter-skelter into an open trunk.

Today three of Brahms' inkwells are exhibited in as many locations in Austria. - His clear glass inkwell - even now dried ink residue can still be seen at its bottom - is on display in the Brahms Room at the Haydn Museum in Vienna; his serpentine marble inkwell is at the Kammerhof Museum in Gmunden; and his bronze inkstand is displayed at the Brahms Museum in Mürzzuschlag. A staunch conservative and by nature a creature of habit, Brahms continued writing with quills even after they were long out of fashion.

Johann Strauss was held in very high regard by Brahms, who was a frequent guest at the Strauss home. Strauss' daughter, Alice, had a folding fan which had been autographed by many of her father's illustrious visitors. Though himself averse to giving autographs, Brahms complied with her request to add his signature to the fan, which he did in an unusually clever and complimentary way. On the fan he notated a few measures of music - not his own, but the first bars of Strauss' own Blue Danube waltz, below which he wrote, "Alas, not by Johannes Brahms."

Brahms' very existence was an effective testimony to how futile pessimism about art can be. No sooner had the Liszt-Wagner school of thought declared that absolute, "pure" music was played out, than Brahms appeared. In the 1890s Brahms was visited in Bad Ischl, Austria, by a young musician. Though Brahms admired the younger man's talent as a conductor, he didn't think highly of his "modern" music. "Music is done for," Brahms lamented. "Nothing new remains to be composed. You and your kind have seen to that with your compositions." As they crossed a footbridge the younger man gazed into the flowing stream and observed, "Master, I have just seen the last ripple." The young man was Gustav Mahler.

An unpretentious man, Brahms usually took the least expensive lodgings on his travels and took his meals at the least expensive restaurants. Nevertheless, one evening he wanted to entertain his guests particularly well at a fine restaurant, and said, "Waiter, give us a good bottle of wine - but it must be your best." Soon the man reappeared with a bottle cradled in its basket, a venerable affair covered with cobwebs and dust. "What sort is that?" asked Brahms. The waiter bowed and said, "Our finest vintage, Master. It is `a bottle of Brahms` ". The composer tasted the wine, pushed it away, tapped the label and said, "Well, then, you'd better bring us a bottle of Bach!"

As Brahms' contemporary Anton Bruckner often wore incredibly baggy pants, Brahms liked to wear his trousers unfashionably short. When his tailor was bold enough to make them the proper length, almost in defiance of the composer's orders, Brahms attacked the pants with his desk shears and just cut them to ankle-length - a wonderfully simple solution to this problem, but sometimes he cut and slashed without overmuch regard for the laws of symmetry. While both pants legs were shy of the ground, one could be noticeably shyer than the other. On one literally historic occasion his trousers temporarily overcame their ground-shyness, but with results that were if not actually calamitous then potentially very embarrassing. Brahms' friend and colleague, the great violinist Joseph Joachim, was introducing Brahms' new Violin Concerto in Leipzig, Germany, with the composer conducting the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Unfortunately Brahms hadn't finished dressing properly. Arriving onstage in grey street trousers, it soon became evident he had forgotten to fasten the braces, so that as he conducted, more and more of his shirt was continually revealed between upper and lower garments. To envision what might have happened if the concerto had been one movement longer, takes little imagination.

The J.B.Streicher piano Brahms had in his Karlsgasse 4, Vienna apartment where he lived for 26 years.
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After attending the funeral of Clara Schumann in 1896, Brahms spent the night at a large estate on the Rhine. That evening he tried to take part in playing his c-minor Trio but he was overcome by grief at the loss of his friend, and had to stop after a score of measures. His loss of Clara Schumann marked the beginning of the end for Brahms, and he outlived her by less than a year.

The following will illustrate the enlargement and strength of the links in the chain that binds us to the world's history. The man who cared for Brahms shortly before his death was Dr. Joseph Breuer - the very physician who gave Sigmund Freud the germinal idea that led to the development of psychoanalysis. It was also Dr. Breuer's son, himself a physician, who spent some time with Brahms during the composer's final hours.

Johannes Brahms accomplished more in a single year than most others do in their own lifetimes. The twelve intermittent summers he spent during the 1880s and 1890s in Bad Ischl, near Salzburg, were fruitful creative holidays: he graced the world and posterity with treasures that outlived him and which will outlive us. By that time he had already cultivated what became one of his distinctive and characteristic visual hallmarks: the beard he had grown in Pressbaum, Austria, during the composition of the B-Flat-Major Piano Concerto, arguably the greatest such piece ever written. - - Though Brahms often met with friends for dinner at the Hotel Elisabeth (now a pharmacy, the D.M.Drogerie), or at Zauner's Restaurant (still a popular establishment), the dwelling he occupied in Bad Ischl was in a private house at Salzburgerstrasse 51, a short walk from the center of town, in keeping with his need for seclusion and privacy. We must remember that he had already reached iconic status as a composer and was the dominant musical figure in Austria, beseiged even then, before the era of mass media coverage, by autograph hunters. The house he chose was owned by the Gruber family, who rented the second, uppermost storey to Brahms and gave him the use of a Bösendorfer grand piano (now displayed in the Brahms Collection at the Kammerhof Museum in nearby Gmunden). The Grubers had a young son, born in 1875. - - Brahms would compose for most of the morning and often part of the afternoon. During his first summers in Bad Ischl, when leaving the house Brahms would address the young Gruber boy, "Hello, child." As the boy grew older, Brahms modified his greeting to, "Hello, young man." He'd occasionally talk with the boy, asking him how he had done in school that year, and so on. - On his last day at the Gruber house in the fall of 1896, as the carriage waited to take Brahms to the railway station for his departure from Bad Ischl, the 63-year-old composer approached the now 21-year-old man, shook his hand, and said to him, "Aufwiedersehen, Herr Gruber" (Goodbye, Mr. Gruber). - - The passage of time and sad sequel have shown us that Brahms had cancer of the liver, and he might have sensed that he'd not return to Bad Ischl. Fate verified this: he died less than a year later, on April 3, 1897. - - The foregoing vignette was reported to this author in the fall of 1987 in Bad Ischl, by the elderly lady who was then living in the Gruber house. The young boy whom Brahms had seen grow to manhood was her father.

Author's Biography

Jeffrey Dane is a New York-based music historian, researcher and essayist who has written extensively about Brahms and other composers. His work is published in the USA and abroad in several languages, including German. His most recent book is Beethoven's Piano, published by New York's Museum of the American Piano. He has lived in Europe where he spent time in several of the continent's musical centers, and has researched in Germany (Leipzig and Weimar), Switzerland (Zürich), and Austria (Salzburg, Bad Ischl, Gmunden, Baden, Mürzzuschlag, & Vienna, his favorite European city, "where it all happened"). His personal recollection of Leonard Bernstein, whom he knew when a student and who was a mentor and significant influence during his formative years, appeared in the Musical Performance Journal (London), and a special Bernstein-related article, Gone But Not Lost, was published in Prelude, Fugue & Riffs, the official publication of The Leonard Bernstein Society. He has met and spoken with innumerable renowned musicians and contemporary composers, some of whom have been the subjects of his articles. As a historian, and as a relaxing diversion from the norm of routine, he has travelled widely and has researched and written articles having a non-musical focus, on subjects ranging from Goethe to George Washington, antiques, travel, the Alamo and other historic structures, essays on the relationships between the independent and the academic scholar, articles about the practical and conceptual difficulties authors face today, and a historical perspective of James Bowie. His goal is to make a contribution to the sum of human knowledge. He prefers to let his work speak for him rather than he for his work, and he views writing as a reason for living and not just a means of earning a living. He's been called by some a real idealist and by others an ideal realist. Both views have merit. If given a choice of meeting only one person in the entire recent history of the world, it would be Johannes Brahms.

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