The German Genius

freethinker, from Protestant Hamburg, writing in Catholic Vienna. The text of the Requiem is in German (not Latin) and is taken from the Lutheran Bible but bears no relation to any known liturgy; it is his own language and there is nothing nationalistic or political about it. 8 There is no mention of Christ. Yet when it was performed in 1868, first in Dresden (incomplete), then in Leipzig—the full version—it was a great success, the right blend of reflection and stirring choral harmonies. Brahms all but gave up touring as a pianist as music poured from his pen.
    All composers in the nineteenth century were confronted—or felt they were confronted—with the monumental presence of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, “a vast wall of invention and sound.” (Even Wagner had been daunted.) Brahms’s Symphony no. 1 in 1876 was several years in the making, and the composer was all too aware that Beethoven, at the age of forty-three, which Brahms then was, had produced eight of his nine symphonies. Brahms, who some people in Vienna were calling Beethoven’s successor, had to be sure of his ground.
    Harold Schonberg says that the C Minor Symphony—and perhaps its reception—seemed to “unlock” something in Brahms. He now entered upon a period of great creativity, producing masterpiece after masterpiece—the Violin Concerto in 1879, the B-flat Piano Concerto in 1881, the Third Symphony in 1883, the Fourth Symphony in 1885, the Concerto for Violin and Cello in 1887. 9 Between 1891 and 1894 he produced a raft of remarkable works for the clarinet—the Clarinet Trio and Clarinet Quintet (both in 1891), and two clarinet sonatas (1894)—written for another of his friends, Richard Mühlfeld, the first clarinetist of the Meiningen Orchestra, which played an important role in Brahms’s career. Hans von Bülow, the conductor who had taken over in 1880, had turned it into “ the precision instrument of European orchestras” and he now used it to become the greatest interpreter of Brahms. 10
    Not that this adulation seems to have had much effect on the composer himself. Brahms aged badly, growing more irascible, more sarcastic, more cynical, falling out with his erstwhile friends, with both von Bülow and Joachim. Yet toward the end, Brahms’s music became very tender and relaxed. The D Minor Violin Sonata, the Clarinet Quintet, and his very last work, eleven choral preludes for organ, “have a kind of serenity unique in the work of any composer.” At a time when the formidable operas of Wagner and the alarming modernist dissonances of Richard Strauss were the talk of Europe, the music of Brahms, the sound of the old, premodern, pre–World War I era, serenely slipped away. 11
    T HE G REATEST L IEDER C OMPOSER OF A LL T IME?
     
    The year of Brahms’s death, 1897, was a year of tragedy for Hugo Wolf (1860–1903). In that year, the man who many think was the greatest song composer of all time, was consigned to a lunatic asylum. We shall never know whether the cause was the syphilis he had contracted as a teenager or whether he was in any case temperamentally and constitutionally weak. A slim, aristocratic-looking man, often photographed in an elegant velvet jacket and flamboyant artist’s tie, his dark eyes were always burning, always troubled. Yet within the space of a few years “this tortured creature left the world a legacy that carried the German art song to its highest point.” 12
    A bohemian and a malcontent, he was yet able for a short time to achieve an intensity of feeling in his music unmatched by any of his contemporaries. 13 He wrote nearly 250 songs that, although they show a great affinity for the poetry on which they are based and are more original and more advanced harmonically even than Schubert, have an equilibrium belied by Wolf’s own stormy life.
    He started writing songs when he was in his teens, but his best work was done about a decade later. In the four years between 1888 and 1891 he produced more than 200 songs, two or three a day at times, using a variety of (often comic) poems by Eduard Mörike, Joseph von Eichendorff, Goethe, of course, and Gottfried Keller. 14 In 1897 Wolf collapsed into insanity and the last four years of his short life were spent, on and off, in an asylum—his song-writing career lasted just seven years. 15
    Despite the speed of their composition, the quality of Wolf’s songs was immediately recognized. Leading singers took them up straightaway with Wolf, a good