[Dixielandjazz] Jan Swafford: Was Brahms a wiseass?

[Norman Vickers]

To: DJML
Was Brahms a wiseass?

OKOM not yet invented when Brahms lived.  However, Brahms used the same
notes.
So, we can relate to him by means of these same notes and many of us, at one
time or another have been similarly accused.Some of Brahms practical jokes
would have be in same league with Joe Venuti-- see the one about the fake
Beethoven  manuscript.

 It's OK to skip this if you are only focused on OKOM. This piece is like a
joke ( or some music) if it sends you, OK.  If not, it will soon be over!

I hope this gets through the OKOM moderator ( I could have said "censor" but
that would have been a wiseass comment.)

Norman-my tastes are broader than my behind--Vickers
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Classic Put-Downs: Was Brahms a wiseass? ( from Slate Magazine-- note
dateline)

Posted Monday, Oct. 2, 2006, at 5:18 PM ET

Johannes Brahms. Johannes Brahms
Among those celebrated for their eloquence in the art of music,
especially instrumental music, it's worth noting how well they
wielded the foreign art of language. It's not surprising that the
prose efforts of some certified greats--see Beethoven's
letters--were clunky in expression and uncertain in grammar. But a
surprising number of composers have been in one way or another
handy with words. One of those was the master ironist Johannes
Brahms.

Cutting irony was a prime Brahmsian mode, and he wielded his wit
with special gusto when skewering friends. He was master of the
quick putdown. During a rehearsal of a quartet of his, the violist
asked if he liked their tempos. "Yes," said Brahms. "Especially
yours." When Max Bruch had played through his giant oratorio
Odysseus for Brahms and turned eagerly for a response, Brahms
observed only: "Hey, where do you get your music paper? First
rate!"

It was not easy to be a fan of Brahms. He hated effusive praise
from strangers. At parties mounted by friends, the guest of honor
would preside in the middle of the fray, downing ham rolls and mugs
of beer, and have at anyone foolish enough to approach him: "Did
the gracious lady have all those beautiful feelings thanks to my
poor quartets? And where did they lodge? Beneath the little blue
shawl? Or maybe under the bird on her hat?"
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Sometimes he went easy on his victims. When a lady gushed to him,
"How do you write such divine adagios?" he only shrugged, "My
publisher orders 'em that way." Once a singer asked which of his
songs he might recommend. With straight face, he advised her to try
his posthumous ones. "And which?" she asked politely. That was too
good; he had to spread it around. "Ask Kalbeck," he told her. "He
knows everything." So, she did go and ask his friend and future
biographer Max Kalbeck to recommend some of Brahms's posthumous
lieder, inspiring Kalbeck to collapse with laughter. When the lady
appeared afterward in a huff, Brahms was, for him, kindly: "Dear
lady, don't ask me such things. I'll usually just make some sort of
a joke--and if a good one doesn't occur to me, then a bad one."

One of the charming, also telling, things about Brahms' wit was
that he didn't spare himself. He had many friends but in company
remained the eternal loner; he enjoyed acclaim but anguished over
his inability to measure up to the giants of the past. At a dinner
in his honor, the host introduced a bottle with, "I call this the
Brahms of my wines!" "Well," said Brahms, "let's have a bottle of
Bach then." He wrote a glum note to Clara Schumann reflecting on
the neglect of the Mozart concertos: "The fact that the public in
general does not understand and appreciate the best things is the
reason people like me get famous."

Late in life, when Brahms had returned from one of his working
vacations, Kalbeck asked him what he'd produced over the summer.
Perhaps a new string quartet? "God forbid, nothing so grand as
that!" Brahms exclaimed. "Once again I've just thrown together a
bunch of polkas and waltzes." He was referring to the epically
gloomy Fourth Symphony. That crack reveals two significant things
about Brahms. One is that the pieces closest to his heart were the
ones he was most apt to put down. And a Brahms joke often had a
serious point buried in it: The Fourth Symphony is not a bunch of
polkas and waltzes but a tragic work expressed largely in solemn
and mournful dances.

Brahms' wounding irony, his obliqueness in all things, were part of
the armor of a relentlessly private man. So was the famous beard.
The whiskers he grew in his mid-40s changed his appearance so much
that he became almost unrecognizable. To get some mileage from
that, he took to introducing himself to acquaintances as
"Kapellmeister Müller from Braunschweig," and seeing how long they
took to catch on. His friend Gustav Nottebohm spent a whole evening
conversing innocently with "Kapellmeister Müller."

Nottebohm, a Beethoven scholar, was also the victim of one of
Brahms' most devious practical jokes. On a scrap of old music
paper, Brahms jotted down a current pop tune in an expert imitation
of Beethoven's handwriting, then bribed a street vendor to wrap the
manuscript around a sausage and sell it to Nottebohm. Brahms was
thrilled to see the old pedant unwrap the sausage, step under a
streetlight to examine the paper with eyes popping, and with a
furtive air slip it into his pocket, finishing the greasy sausage
barehanded.

Perhaps the masterpiece of Brahmsian irony in prose is a letter he
wrote to his friend and champion Eduard Hanslick, a famous
Wagner-bashing critic. Brahms had perused Hanslick's Beauty in
Music, a classic exposition of the doctrine of "pure music," of
which Brahms was considered the great exponent. He wrote Clara
Schumann of the book, "I found so much stupid stuff in it that I
gave it up." Yet he later wrote Hanslick:

   I must send you my sincere thanks for your book Beauty in Music,
   to which I owe many hours of enjoyment. ... Every page invites
   one to build further on what has been said. ... But for the
   person who understands his art in this manner, there are things
   to be done everywhere. ... I will wish we might soon be blessed
   with such excellent instruction on other subjects.

Hanslick proudly cited this letter in a memoir. Now, Brahms was a 
brutally honest man, with himself and others. He despised hypocrisy 
and lying. Was he being a hypocrite with Hanslick? Not as such, no. 
The letter is a marvelously subtle dismissal. "Every page invites one 
to build further," i.e. You don't go very far. He hopes for "excellent 
instruction on other subjects," i.e. Don't write this kind of thing 
anymore; you're not the man for it. Is Brahms' irony reflected in his 
music? Perhaps not, though sunlight turns up in his generally 
dark-hued work more often than one might think. First hearing the 
ebullient opening of the G Major String Quintet, Kalbeck exclaimed, 
"Brahms in the Prater!" meaning the famous Vienna amusement park. 
"You've got it!" Brahms replied, adding roguishly, "And all the pretty 
girls there, eh?" But Haydn and Mozart had been the masters of irony 
in music, and Beethoven had his distinctive rough jokes, and Brahms 
did not try to challenge them. On his deathbed, fading with cancer, 
bleary with morphine, Brahms did not lose his wit. When his 
housekeeper got him up for sessions at the washstand, he called it 
"bathing with police escort." Finally, he barked at her, "You want to 
give me my last bath? I'm not a baby!" In tears, she replied that she 
was just trying to save him trouble. Brahms relented and whispered, 
"You're a sensible woman. One can negotiate with you." Shortly after 
that last, gentle joke, he died.

Jan Swafford is a composer and writer living in Massachusetts. He is 
the author of Johannes Brahms: A Biography and Charles Ives: A Life 
with Music.
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