Meanwhile he was earning a precarious living by giving concerts here and there, not always with success; and he had begun a relentlessly severe course of self-training in his art. Here Joachim and he were mutually helpful to each other. Every week each would send to the other exercises in music, fragments of compositions, expecting in return frank and merciless criticism. In the fall of 1859 he accepted a position at Detmold as pianist and leader of the chorus. A small orchestra was at his service, which offered him opportunity to study instrumental effects, especially wind instruments, and for which he wrote the two serenades in A and in D major. Likewise he profited by his association with the chorus, and laid at Detmold the foundation for his technique in writing for voices, which has very rarely been equalled. Duties in this new position occupied him only during the musical season, from September to December. At other times he played in concert or went back to his home in Hamburg. At one concert in Leipzig in 1859 he was actually hissed, either because his own concerto which he played or his manner of playing it was offensive. The critics were viciously hostile. Brahms took the defeat manfully, evidently ranked it as he did his days of playing for the Hamburg sailors, among the experiences which were in the long run stimulating. At Hamburg he organized a chorus of women’s voices for which many of his loveliest works were then and subsequently composed. In the chorus was a young Viennese lady from whom, according to Kalbeck, he first heard Viennese folk-music. With Vienna henceforth in mind he continued in his work at Detmold until 1862, when he broke away from North Germany and went to establish himself in the land of his desire. He came before the public first as a pianist, later as a composer. For a year he was conductor of the Singakademie. Afterward he never held an office except during the three years 1872-1875, when he was conductor of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde.

The death of his mother in 1867 aggravated his tendency to forbidding self-discipline. The result in music was the ‘German Requiem,’ which even those who cannot sympathize with his music in general have willingly granted to be one of the great masterpieces of music. As it was first performed at a concert of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna in April, 1867, it consisted of only three numbers. To these he later added four, and in this form it was performed on Good Friday, April 10, 1868, in Bremen. Clara Schumann, who was present, wrote in her diary that she had been more moved by it than by any other sacred music she had ever heard. It established Brahms’ reputation as a composer, a reputation which steadily grew among conservatives. A group of distinguished critics, musicians, and men of unusual intellectual gifts gathered about him in Vienna. Among them were Dr. Theodor Billroth, the famous surgeon, probably his most intimate friend; Eduard Hanslick and Max Kalbeck among the critics, K. Goldmark and Johann Strauss among the musicians. Joachim was a lifelong friend, Von Bülow and Fritz Simrock, the publisher, were staunch admirers, and in Dvořák he later took a deep interest. Journeys to Italy and to Switzerland took him from Vienna for some time every year, and he often spent a part of the summer with Clara Schumann at various German watering places.

A few works were inspired by unusual events, such as the ‘Song of Triumph’ to celebrate the victory of the German armies in the war against France, and the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ composed in gratitude to the university at Breslau which conferred upon him the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. A similar degree was offered by the University of Cambridge, which Brahms was forced to refuse because he was unwilling to undertake the voyage to England.

He was an omnivorous reader and an enthusiastic amateur of art. Regular in his habits, a stubborn and untiring worker, he composed almost unceasingly to the time of his last illness and death in April, 1897. The great works for the orchestra comprise ‘Variations on a Theme of Haydn’s,’ the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ and the ‘Tragic Overture,’ four great symphonies, the second concerto for piano and orchestra, the concerto for violin and orchestra, and a concerto for violin and violoncello. The great choral works are the ‘Requiem,’ ‘The Song of Triumph,’ and ‘The Song of Destiny,’ a cantata, ‘Rinaldo,’ and a great number of songs. Besides these there are many sets of works for the piano, all in short forms, generally called caprices or intermezzi, and several sets of variations, one on a theme of Paganini, one on a theme of Handel; sonatas for piano and violin, and piano and violoncello; the magnificent quintet in F-minor for piano and strings, sonatas for clarinet and piano, string quartets, piano quartets, and trios.

III

Brahms is to be ranked among the romantic composers in that all his work is distinctly a reflection of his own personality, in that every emotion, mood, dream, or whatever may be the cause and inspiration of his music is invariably tinged with the nature through which it passed. The lovable, boisterous frankness which was characteristic of him as a young man was little by little curbed, subdued, levelled, so to speak. He cultivated an austere intellectual grasp of himself, tending to crush all sentimentality and often all sentiment. We may not hesitate to believe his own word that Clara Schumann was dearer to him than anyone else upon the earth, nor yet can we fail to read in her diary that she suffered more than anyone else from his uncompromising intellectuality. If she attempted to praise or encourage him she met with a heartless intellectual rebuke. Not long after Schumann died, he wrote a letter to reprimand her for taking his own cause too much to heart. ‘You demand too rapid and enthusiastic recognition of talent which you happen to like. Art is a republic. You should take that as a motto. You are far too aristocratic.... Do not place one artist in a higher rank and expect the others to regard him as their superior, as dictator. His gifts will make him a beloved and respected citizen of this republic, but will not make him consul or emperor.’ To which she replied: ‘It is true that I am often greatly struck by the richness of your genius, that you always seem to me one on whom heaven has poured out its best gifts, that I love and honor you for the sake of many glorious works. All this has fastened its roots deep down in my heart, so, dearest Johannes, do not trouble to kill it all by your cold philosophizing.’ Clara exerted herself to bring his compositions before the public. A short extract from her diary will show how Brahms rewarded her efforts. ‘I was in agonies of nervousness but I played them [variations on a theme of Schumann’s] well all the same, and they were much applauded. Johannes, however, 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 has not a kind word for it.’ The tenderness which would have meant much to her he failed to show. He made himself rough and harsh, stern and severe. That a man could write of him as ‘a steadfast, strong, manly nature, self-contained and independent, striving ever for the highest, an uncompromisingly true and unbending artistic conscience, strict even to harshness, rigidly exacting,’ wins the adherent, wins loyalty and admiration, hides but does not fill the lack.

Undoubtedly, as a son of a gloomy northern land, the tendency to self-restraint was a racial heritage. Outward facts of his life show that he was himself conscious of it and that he tried in a measure to escape from it. His love of gay Vienna, his journeys into Switzerland, his oft-repeated search for color and spontaneous emotion in Italy, are all signs of a man trying to be free from his own nature. ‘But that, in spite of Vienna,’ writes Walter Niemann, ‘he remained a true son of the sea-girt province, we know from all accounts of his life. Melancholy, deep, powerful and earnest feeling, uncommunicativeness, a noble restraint of emotion, meditativeness, even morbidness, the inclination to be alone with himself, the inability both as man and as artist to get away from himself, are characteristics which must be ever assigned to him.’[119]

There is something heroic in this, a grim strength, the chill of northern forests and northern seas, loneliness and the power to endure suffering in silence. It is an old ideal. The thane, were he wanderer or seafarer, never forgot it was his duty to lock his sorrow within his breast. That it might lead and has led to morbidness, to taciturnity, on the one hand, is no less evident than that, on the other, it may lead to splendid fortitude and nobility. This old ideal has found its first full expression in music through Brahms. We come upon a paradox, the man who would express nothing, who has in music expressed all.

It is striking how the man reveals himself in his music. The rigorous self-discipline and restraint find their counterpart in the absolute perfection of the structure, the polyphonic skill, the intellectual poise and certainty. There is a resultant lack of obvious color, a deliberate suppression of sensuousness, so marked that Rubinstein could call him, with Joachim, the high-priest of virtue, a remark which carries the antidote to its own sting, if one will be serious. And the music of Brahms is essentially serious. In general it lacks appealing charm and humor. Its beauties yield only to thoughtful study, but the harvest is rich, though often sombre. He belongs to the poets, not the painters, in that his short pieces are saturated with mood, even and rather monochrome. The mood, too, is prevailingly dark, not light. That he could at times rise out of it and give way to light-heartedness and frank humor no one can deny who will recall, for instance, the ‘Academic Festival Overture,’ where the mood is boisterous and full of fun, student fun. The Passacaglia in the Fourth Symphony hints at it as well, and some of the songs, and the last movement of the violin concerto. But these are in strong contrast to the general spirit of his music. His happier moods are ever touched with wistfulness or with sadness. In such vein he is often at his best, as, for example, in the allegretto of the first and of the second symphonies. Such a mischievous humor as Beethoven expressed in the scherzo of the Eroica Symphony, such peasant joviality as rollicks through the scherzo of the Pastoral, such wit as glances through the eighth symphony, were, if he had them at all within him, too oppressed to find utterance and excite laughter or even smiles. As a boy, it will be remembered, he was often overbrimming with good spirits, full of freakish sport. The first three sonatas reflect this. Then came the illness of Schumann, his adored friend, and, knowing what grief and suffering were, he fortified himself against them. He took a wound to heart and never after was off his guard.

It cannot be said that his music is wholly lacking in humor. Reckless, ‘unbuttoned’ humor is indeed rarely if ever evident; but the broader humor, the sense of balance and proportion, strengthens his works almost without exception. If it can be said that he was never able to free himself from a mood of twilight and the northern sea, it cannot be said that he was so sunk in this mood as to lose himself in unhealthy morbidness, to lose perspective and the power of wide vision. Above all else his music is broadly planned. It is wide and spacious, not to say vast. There is enormous force in it, vigor of mind and of spirit, too. Surcharged it may not be with heat and color, but great winds blow through it, it is expansive, it lifts the listener to towering heights, never drags him to ecstatic torture in the fiery lake of distressed passion and hysterical grief. For this reason Liszt could say of some of it that it was ‘sanitary,’ and here again we must be serious not to smart with the sting.