The Life & Legacy of Johannes Brahms. Florence May
Schumann's house, I was utterly disappointed. After a good deal of pressing, he crossed over to the piano and gave the first movement of the G major Fantasia-Sonata and the first movement of the A minor Sonata, Op. 42, both of Schubert, but his playing was ineffective. It appeared to me to be forced and self-conscious, and he himself seemed to remain, as it were, outside the music. I missed the living throb and impulse of feeling by which I had been accustomed to be carried away when listening to Frau Schumann, and he left one of his audience, at all events, cold and unmoved. When I told this to Frau Schumann afterwards, she answered that I had not yet really heard him; that he had not wished to play, but had yielded to over-persuasion, and that I must wait for a better opportunity of judging before forming an opinion.
The opportunity came the very next evening, when the same friends were assembled and Brahms played again. The next day I wrote home as follows:
'... Then Brahms played. It was an entirely different thing from the day before. Two pieces were by some composer whose name I can't remember, and then he played a wild piece by Scarlatti as I never heard anyone play before. He really did give it as though he were inspired; it was so mad and wild and so beautiful. Afterwards he did a little thing of Gluck's. I hope I shall hear him often if he plays as he did last night. The Scarlatti was like nothing I ever heard before, and I never thought the piano capable of it.'
Such were the general impressions I formed of Brahms during the first seven or eight weeks of my stay at Lichtenthal. To say the truth, I thought but little about him at the time, my whole attention being absorbed in my studies and in the charm of my new experiences of life. To me he seemed a very unaffected, kind-hearted, rather shy man, who appeared quietly happy and content when under the influence of Frau Schumann's society. As yet I had had scant opportunity of testing my own capacity for appreciating his musical genius, and next to none of individual personal intercourse with him. Frequently, when my landlady's servant came to attend me to my lodgings after an evening spent at Frau Schumann's house, and Brahms and I took our leave at the same moment, he would say, 'I am coming, too,' and, our ways lying partly in the same direction, would walk the short distance by my side; but these occasions did not add much to my knowledge of him. He would make a few casual remarks, often playful, always kindly, on any topics of the hour, but did not touch on musical subjects. One evening, however, I asked him if he intended to visit England. 'I think not,' he immediately replied, as though his mind were definitely made up on this point. I ventured to pursue the subject, telling him he ought to come, in order to make his compositions known. 'It is for that they are printed,' he said rather decidedly, and with these words he certainly gave me some real insight into his character. The composer of a long series of works which included such masterpieces as the second serenade, the two string sextets, the first and second pianoforte quartets, the inspired German Requiem, and a host of others already before the world (but of which I then knew nothing), could, of course, do no otherwise than allow his compositions to rest quietly on their merits; and doubtless the intense pride which is equally inherent with intense modesty in the higher order of genius had its share in causing Brahms' reticence about all things concerning himself.
From his determination not to visit England I do not believe he ever seriously wavered. Only on one occasion—a few years before his death—did I ever hear him speak doubtfully on the subject, and I then felt sure that he was only playing with the idea of coming. Of when or why he formed his resolution I cannot speak with absolute certainty; it had become fixed before I made his acquaintance. His want of familiarity with our language may have had something to do with it; he could read English a little, but I never heard him attempt to speak it. He had a horror of being lionized and of involving himself in an entanglement of engagements; perhaps, also, he was possessed with an exaggerated notion of the inflexibility of English social laws, especially as to the wearing of dress-clothes and the restrictions with regard to smoking. Before and behind all such superficial considerations, however, I suspect that early in his career the idea had taken root in him, right or wrong as it may have been, that to visit England would not further his artistic development. Brahms had certainly formed the clearest conception not only of his purpose in life, but of the means by which he felt he could best pursue and achieve it, and from first to last he inflexibly adhered to the conclusions he had come to on these points. If his aim was to give the most complete possible expression in his musical creations to the very best that was in him, his method, while it satisfied an inner craving of his being, was yet, as I believe, deliberately adopted; and it was to lay himself open to every kind of influence which could healthily foster the ideal side of his nature, and more or less completely to eschew all others. It would be ridiculous, at the present time, to touch upon the completeness of his technical musical equipment, to dilate on his easy grasp of all the resources of counterpoint, on his mastery of form, of harmonic and rhythmic combinations, and the like. These things are matter of course. But Brahms knew that not alone his intellect, but his mind and spirit and fancy, must be constantly nurtured if they were to bring forth the highest of which they were capable, and he so arranged his life that they should be fed ever and always by poetry and literature and art, by solitary musing, by participation in so much of life as seemed to him to be real and true, and, above all and in the highest degree, by the companionship of Nature.
'How can I most quickly improve?' I asked him one day later on. 'You must walk constantly in the forest,' he answered; and he meant what he said to be taken literally. It was his own favourite prescription that he advised for my application. For such a man, with a name practically unknown in England, life in London, and especially during a concert season, would have been not only uncongenial, but impossible. It would only have been a hindrance to him for the time being. It was not his business to push his works before either conductors or the public, and, after early successes and failures in this direction, he had almost entirely given up planning for the future of his compositions, and had yielded himself wholly to his destiny, which was to create.
In adopting this attitude, there was nothing whatever of outward posing. He simply did faithfully what he found lying before him to do, and did not look beyond.
Life at Lichtenthal passed quickly onwards, and the time approached when Frau Schumann would pay her annual visit to Switzerland. At the close of one of my lessons she said to me:
'I have been thinking that perhaps you might like to have some lessons from Herr Brahms whilst I am away. It would be a very great advantage for you in every way, and he would be able to help you immensely with your technique. He has made a special study of it, and can do anything he likes with his fingers on the piano. He does not usually give lessons, but if you like I will ask him, and I think he would do it as a favour to me.'
I must here explain that my visit to Germany had been undertaken with the special object of correcting certain deficiencies in my mechanism which Frau Schumann had pointed out, she having advised me to study for a year with this aim particularly in view.
It need hardly be said that I now eagerly accepted her proffered kindness, and it was decided that she should sound Herr Brahms on the question of his willingness to give me lessons. If he should show himself favourable to the project, the arrangement was to be considered as decided, subject only to the approval of my father, who was on the point of starting from London to join me at Lichtenthal. The next morning Frau Schumann informed me that Brahms had consented to the plan, and a few days later, on my receiving my father's ready assent to my request, all preliminaries were settled, and it was arranged that I should have two lessons every week from Brahms.
'You must ask him to play to you,' Frau Schumann said; 'and if he will do it, it will give you a real opportunity to hear him. And now, now you will begin to know Brahms.'
Brahms as Teacher of the Pianoforte.
Brahms united in himself each and every quality that might be supposed to exist in an absolutely ideal teacher of the pianoforte, without having a single modifying drawback. I do not wish to rhapsodize; he would have been the first to object to this. Such lessons could only have come from such a man. I have never to this day got over the wonder of his giving them, or the wonder and the joy of its having fallen to my lot to receive them.
He was strict and absolute; he was gentle and patient and encouraging; he was not only clear, he was light itself; he knew exhaustively,