CHAPTER XIII
1864-1867
Frau Schumann in Baden-Baden—Circle of friends there—Hermann Levi—Madame Pauline Viardot-Garcia—The Landgräfin of Hesse and the Pianoforte Quintet—Death of Frau Brahms—Concert-journey—The Horn Trio—Frau Caroline Schnack—Last visit to Detmold—First Sonata for Pianoforte and Violoncello—The German Requiem—Brahms at Zürich—Billroth—Brahms and Joachim on a concert-tour in Switzerland—Hans von Bülow—Reinthaler.
In the year 1864, or possibly at the end of 1863, the domestic troubles that had arisen from Jakob Brahms' early marriage with a delicate woman nearly twenty years his senior came to a crisis which Johannes, loving both father and mother with tender devotion, could no longer bear. By his wish the ill-assorted couple separated. Jakob had long since become fairly prosperous in a small way, holding a recognised position as a double-bass player amongst the orchestral musicians of Hamburg, and had even been appointed a member of the Philharmonic band since Stockhausen's election as the society's conductor. He now found quarters for himself in the Grosser Bleichen; the home in the Fuhlentwiethe was given up. Fritz, who, in spite of his want of energy, was doing well as a teacher, took lodgings in Theaterstrasse, and Frau Brahms and Elise removed to comfortable rooms in the Lange Reihe, Johannes, poor as he was, taking upon himself the sole responsibility of their maintenance. The time was still distant, in spite of the composer's steadily-growing fame, when his circumstances were to become prosperous. Had money-making been one of his immediate objects, he could certainly have attained it with little difficulty; but his aims were wholly ideal, and directly included pecuniary profit only so far as this was necessary for his own decent maintenance and for the exercise of ungrudging generosity to his family. His income, derived from the sale of his copyrights and from his public activity as a pianist—for he practically gave up teaching on going to Vienna—sufficed for these ends; he had learned from early youth to find happiness in the realities of life, and to treat as superfluities as many things as possible. The cultivation of happiness he viewed, not only as a part of wisdom, but as a duty. 'Let us, so far as we may, retain a fresh, happy interest in life, which we have at any rate to live' was not with him a mere phrase to be offered for the benefit of a friend in trouble, but one of the abiding principles by which he shaped his own daily existence.
No year would have been possible to Brahms without sight of his parents and he stayed near them for part of the summer, his first visit after embracing father and mother being, as usual, to Marxsen. Further plans were not difficult to arrange, and chief among them was that of a long visit to Baden-Baden. 'Johannes took us by surprise on July 30' is Frau Schumann's entry, in her diary, of his arrival. He stayed on for the remainder of the season, residing in a charming villa close to the grounds of the Kurhaus, which was placed at his disposal by Rubinstein, who had taken it for the summer, but left in August.
Frau Schumann's residence at Baden-Baden brought in its train results which are of much interest in the history of Brahms' career. The not-distant capital of the duchy of Baden, Carlsruhe, was to become, in the course of the next few years, an important centre for the cultivation of his art. It seems convenient, therefore, to mention at once the names of a few members of a group of friends belonging to Frau Schumann's circle who resided or stayed frequently in the neighbourhood, and with whom Brahms became more or less intimate.
Jakob Rosenhain (born 1813), a composer now forgotten, but esteemed in his day, and recognised both by Schumann and Mendelssohn, lived at Baden-Baden, and was sometimes to be met at Frau Schumann's house. His name heads the programme of Johannes' first public concert of 1848. The painter Anselm Feuerbach (1829-1880), a little-known and disappointed man in 1864, whose art has attained great posthumous celebrity, came annually with his mother to pass a few weeks there. The name of Frau Henriette Feuerbach appears on the title-page of Brahms' work 'Nänie,' which was composed soon after the premature death of her son. With the mention of Feuerbach must be associated that of Julius Allgeyer, introduced to our readers in an early chapter as a student of copperplate engraving at Düsseldorf, and now settled in Carlsruhe as a high-art photographer. Allgeyer had a genius for friendship. He was extraordinarily attached to Feuerbach, of whose art he made himself the apostle; but though his four years' residence in Rome (1856-1860) in close intercourse with the painter caused an interruption of his personal intimacy with Brahms, the two men remained in occasional correspondence, and held each other in cordial esteem. Now the old friendship was renewed, and it was not long before Brahms came to occupy a place in the engraver's affections second only to that of Feuerbach. The thought that he had known and loved both musician and painter through the period of their dawning fame was, in after-years, a source of satisfaction and pride to Allgeyer, whose name has become well known in Germany as that of Feuerbach's biographer.
In the middle of the sixties Carlsruhe, under the encouragement of its reigning Grand-Duke Frederick, occupied an exceptionally brilliant position amongst the smaller European centres of dramatic and musical art, to which it had been raised by the talents and devotion of Edward Devrient, the eminent stage-director of its court theatre, whose name may be familiar to some English readers as that of one of Mendelssohn's intimate friends. A man of wide general culture, the author of the standard work on its subject—'The History of German Dramatic Art'—playwright, singer, actor, possessed of an intimate knowledge of the best traditions of the German stage in the wide sense that includes opera, which had been derived from thirty years of professional association with the court theatres of Berlin and Dresden, Devrient was an ideal man for his post. His own sympathies remained faithful to the classical school of opera upon which his taste had been formed, but he did not allow his devotion to Gluck and Mozart and his interest in the revival of works of an early period to narrow the sphere of his activity. Taking a broad view of the duties of his position, he recognised the claim to hearing of the New-German school, and several of Wagner's musical dramas had been performed in the Carlsruhe court theatre by his permission, if not on his initiative, before his resignation of his post soon after the celebration of his artistic jubilee in April, 1869.
Not the least of his services to music was his choice of a successor to the post of court capellmeister at Carlsruhe, which fell vacant on the resignation of Joseph Strauss (not of the celebrated Vienna family) early in 1864. By recommending Hermann Levi (1839-1900) for the appointment, famous after the middle of the seventies amongst the famous Wagner conductors, and director of the first performances of 'Parsifal' (July-August, 1882), and by the generosity with which he permitted the youthful musician to profit by the fruits of his own ripe experience, he contributed in no small degree towards perfecting the technical education of an artist whose name will be remembered in musical history as amongst those of the great in his chosen branch of activity.
A gifted pupil of the Leipzig Conservatoire, Levi resolved, at an early age, to aim at achieving distinction as a conductor, and, on entering the service of the Grand-Duke of Baden in his twenty-sixth year, he had already laid the foundation of his future celebrity in successive posts at Saarbrück, Mannheim, and Rotterdam. He had a large and enthusiastic nature which caused him to reject the formal and stereotyped in art and to sympathize with what seemed to him genuinely progressive, and, becoming early in his career a great admirer of Schumann's music, he passed easily to a recognition of the genius of Brahms, with whom he had a slight acquaintance before settling at Carlsruhe.
The singer Hauser, the violoncellist Lindner, the hornist Segisser, the authoress Fräulein Anna Ettlinger—all resident in Carlsruhe—the learned Oberschulrath Gustav Wendt, called there in 1867, whose rooms were the scene of many distinguished gatherings, are to be included in our list; and of particular interest is the name of the violoncellist Bernhard Cossmann, of Weimar celebrity, who settled at Baden-Baden in 1870. Brahms was a willing and heartily welcome visitor at his house, and took part there in performances of his E minor Violoncello Sonata, and, with the hornist Steinbrügger, of the Horn Trio.