Richard Heuberger (1850–1914) was not only the choral conductor and composer he allows us to meet in this memoir: he was also an engineer and a journalist. In 1881 he secured a post as music critic for the Wiener Tagblatt, and then in 1896 for the Neue freie Presse, Vienna’s newspaper of record. He wrote many operas and, above all, operettas, the first of which became quite famous (Der Opernball). He must have had a good memory and a good ear for the spoken word, for in his two memoirs of Brahms one has the impression of hearing the voice of the composer.
Heuberger’s most extensive memoir of Brahms records his diary jottings from 1875 to 1897, during which time (especially after 1880) he regularly lunched with the composer. Heuberger apparently went directly home and set down the contents of their conversation. When Brahms discovered Heuberger’s intent to publish his diary he was, in Heuberger’s words, entrüstet (enraged), and he compelled the rueful journalist to forswear the project. Heuberger promised, and kept his word. The conversations were not published until 1971.1 A few biographers knew of his work, however, and were apparently granted some degree of access to it; the works of both Florence May and Max Kalbeck include information that could have come only from the diary.
The little memoir presented here falls outside the circumstances of Heuberger’s diary jottings, which must be the reason he felt free to contribute it to the Berlin journal Die Musik. It provides a personal and revealing glimpse of Brahms as a human being. It was published as “Aus der ersten Zeit meiner Bekanntschaft mit Brahms,” in Die Musik 5 (1902): 223–29. All punctuation marks, including the frequent ellipsis-style dots and the dashes (familiar to Germans as the Gedankenstrich) are Heuberger’s. All endnotes are editorial.
I saw Brahms for the first time in November 1867. He came to my home town of Graz, where on November 11 and 14 he gave concerts with Joachim (at the Saale der Ressource).2 I remember precisely the deep impression that the performance of Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violin in C Minor, op. 30, no. 2, made on me. The two Brahms compositions played by the Master—at that time a blond, lean, markedly professorial type—appeared to me as decidedly perplexing stuff… and yet, they were the E-flat-minor Scherzo (op. 4) and the Handel Variations [op. 24]! That is not remarkable! At that time Brahms was known almost exclusively as the arranger of In stiller Nacht.3 Apart from that only very few of his works were known to very few people. Here and there the B-flat Sextet [op. 18] and the B-Major Trio [op. 8, first version] were attempted with timid curiosity. Only a small circle felt a close connection with the new genius.
A few years later, at the end of April 1873, Brahms came again to Graz. He was looking for a summer place—in Gratwein, I think—and took the opportunity to spend a few days in the friendly town on the Mur.4 On April 27, 1873, he was also present at a concert of the Graz Singverein in the Evangelical Church as well as at the final rehearsal on the day before. If the concert found him in the nave of the church, he had, so to speak, also taken part in the rehearsal, albeit not in a musical capacity. The rehearsal took place in the choir, rather late in the afternoon. At the time I sang tenor in the Singverein and played the piano at rehearsals. L. Wegschaider, the conductor, had just begun Bach’s Trauerode when Brahms suddenly emerged, unnoticed by any of us singers, and placed himself to the left of the organist.5 He read along in the organ part, occasionally turning pages. Gradually it became dark… the organist, situated in the least favorable location, could barely see. Without a word, Brahms pulled the stub of a candle from the pocket of his overcoat, lit it, and for the rest of the rehearsal provided light for the organist, who was dumbfounded by this rare distinction…. In this way, as I recall, was I introduced to Brahms. But my timidity in the presence of famous people caused me to content myself with the fewest possible words. The possibility of personal contact during the summer fell by the wayside, because after a few days Brahms suddenly left Gratwein. As he told me many years later, “a couple of aesthetic females” had driven him away. He absolutely could not bear anyone making a cult of his person.6
After I had moved to Vienna in the mid-1870s as chorus master of the Wiener Academischer Gesangverein, to which Brahms had close connections, I soon came into contact with the Master.7 Before this happened he had had a powerful influence on me without knowing it. I had attended the sensational performance of the German Requiem in the Large Hall of the Musikverein (March 1875), which finally secured Brahms’s fame.8 It was all the more meaningful as a few days earlier, in the same place, Wagner had performed excerpts from the Ring des Nibelungen and was the center of musical interest. Brahms surely had not had in mind a counter demonstration against Wagner. The colossal success of his work was probably foreseen least of all by himself. On that day, however, Brahms had thoroughly converted me as well as so many others for whom there was nothing worth talking about besides Wagner. Now I knew that two great men existed.
Richard Heuberger
The first personal contact was arranged by Dr. H. Staniek, then President of the Wiener Akademischen Gesangverein. He persuaded me to accompany him to invite Brahms to a performance of the “Akademische.” When we called on him (in 1876), Brahms was already living at Carlsgasse 4 and received us very kindly. The visit was short, I do not recall details. Soon, though, an opportunity came for closer acquaintance. On January 5, 1877, Prof. Billroth organized at his home a grand musical evening at which choral works by Brahms and Goldmark were to be performed under the direction of both composers. At Brahms’s suggestion, I directed the preparations. The rehearsals took place in the private home of the Oser family.9 The day before the performance, Brahms and Goldmark came to the final rehearsal. Brahms, with a reputation for being testy, now conducted his Marienlieder, op. 22, Abendständchen, op. 42, and Von alten Liebesliedern, op. 62, with few changes to the nuances I had rehearsed. Goldmark, so thoroughly charming in private life but so generally feared at rehearsals, indefatigably practiced the same places over and over—…
The performances went splendidly—Brahms and Billroth thanked me warmly for my efforts; a mighty drinking party closed the evening.10 In the same year I was once more brought together with Brahms by an affair having to do with Billroth. On December 13, the “Akademische” gave a “Billroth Evening” to celebrate its famous honorary member. Brahms could not miss that! I invited him to participate in the festivities, which were thoroughly geared to students. Without a second thought he agreed to conduct a few choruses, namely Ich schell mein Horn [op. 43, no. 3] and Das Lied vom Herrn von Falkenstein [op. 43, no. 4], which I had arranged for male chorus.11 Brahms came to the last rehearsal on December 12 and was tumultuously greeted by the all-student chorus I had rehearsed. He immediately took over conducting and then asked if we would sing something else that we had prepared for performance. Engelberg’s merry “Dr. Heine” had been studied down to the last detail; we harbored no doubts about performing it for the Master. He appeared all the more delighted and surprised that not a single sheet of music was used. I had no score, the accompanist no piano part, and none of the well over 200 singers had a page of music in hand. Brahms gave the performance uncommon praise. —After the rehearsal he went with us to Zur schönen Laterne, the pub much beloved at the time by Viennese students. He had been a longtime regular there and was well known, probably initiated by Dr. Eyrich, my predecessor as director of the Wiener Akademische.12 That evening, the first lengthy talk between Brahms and myself took place. For the entire evening we sat next to each other, and I remember—I no longer know how we came to it—that Brahms spoke in detail about Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. He emphasized the exemplary way in which Mozart handled the enormous difficulties of the libretto. “Mozart composed no conventional libretto, but a complete, well organized comedy.”
He was untiring in his admiration of the brilliance and technical mastery.—The party broke up very late. The next day I picked Brahms up at his apartment to accompany him to the celebration. I entered just as he was trying to fasten the sash from the “Akademische.” He hadn’t put it on properly, I fixed it, and then we went together to the Sophiensaal.13 Billroth came soon after our arrival and the festivities began. Since his youth, Brahms had known and loved the student songs down to the last detail, and he sang along as powerfully as his totally broken and raw voice allowed. He told me that as a boy he had a very fine soprano voice but sang too much when his voice was changing, so that his vocal apparatus was virtually stunted.
After that I met Brahms repeatedly at Professor Gänsbacher’s, his longtime friend.14 Gänsbacher often invited him to the open rehearsals that regularly took place at the famous voice teacher’s home on Sundays at noon. When well disposed, Brahms accompanied one or another female student, but above all he spiced the conversation with his caustic wit.
Thin-skinned one must not be, for he gave his suggestions wrapped in the form of a razor-sharp joke. That he knew very well.—When I once sought to show him some of my own compositions—it was on May 10, 1879, at one of Gänsbacher’s matinees—he said, “Would interest me very much—but you mustn’t be sensitive!”
I had always labored under the delusion that I was not sensitive, that I tolerated and loved good advice…when I looked up the Master in his apartment two days later and played a number of my newest things for him—when Brahms then gave me his opinion about them—I noticed that I was vain, childish, and very thin-skinned. I left the well-meaning Master almost in tears. But here I would like to sketch what he said to me.
Brahms had great pedagogical talent; that has become ever clearer to me in the course of time. Certainly not for teaching in the ordinary sense. In this respect he resembled his friend Billroth, who only shone his light as a marvelous teacher on those who were already skilled practitioners. Brahms could have achieved great things with talented young people who had already finished their studies. As far as I know, he would have been ready to hold a kind of master class at the Vienna Conservatory—even casually—something that had long existed at the Academy of Fine Arts. “The couple of notes I write in winter don’t matter,” he once said as I questioned him on this point, remarking that he would hardly want to sacrifice his time for that kind of work.*
Hellmesberger, director at the time, probably had no understanding of the good fortune it would have been for the institution and for many aspiring artists to receive instruction from someone like a Brahms, to be permitted to profit from his experience gained from on high.15
As I armed myself for the visit to Brahms mentioned above, I packed up the manuscripts of a number of finished songs and choral things. Brahms began reading the little volume, leaning at first on the piano; then he sat down at the piano and started again from the beginning. To avoid bursting out with his very justifiable view that the pieces were hardly mature, he praised the choice of texts, saying repeatedly, “Gebildeter junger Mann—” (Well-educated young man—). He meant, however, that I, like many youngsters, eagerly went after such exotic things that I fell into difficulties I was not yet equipped to handle. He turned immediately to a very metrically complicated place in a song and showed me that the musical material did not correctly respond to the rhythm of the poem. He dealt so firmly with the construction because earlier, with a few friendly words, he had said that the mood had been captured pretty well. He dwelt particularly on a juncture of meter and rhythm that had run askew. He said, “One can certainly produce such irregularities, but they must be well grounded in the material and stand on sure footing. If you compose a phrase of three or five measures you have to watch how you return to the right place in the duple rhythm [wiederum an richtiger Stelle in den geraden Rhythmus kommen]! And that sort of construction must always be fully clarified by the bass. The bass must be a kind of mirror image of the upper voice.” Then he took a blank sheet of music paper, and in the empty measures delineated only by vertical strokes, he began to write out the text I had composed so that each word stood there rhythmically correct. He thought that was a very good system for a beginner. One must always keep an exact account so that the rhythm of the word and music coincide. Then he improvised the entire song—at times quite wonderfully. That these were all merely technical things that had nothing in common with the actual poetic nature of musical creation was something he stressed repeatedly along the way.—Returning once more to the songs, he went into the construction of my melody in the greatest detail, honed and refined it until it had a different, fundamentally better aspect and in addition had acquired a markedly sounder harmonic underpinning. As I exclaimed, oddly enough, that it had occurred to me that way, he opined, “It shouldn’t occur to you that way!…Do you think that any one of my ‘few decent songs’ occurred to me ready-made? I went to a lot of trouble over them…you know, with a song—don’t take this literally—one must be able to whistle it… then it’s good.”—
Brahms also had much to criticize regarding the accompaniment. I had changed the figuration at a rhythmically unsuitable place … he stopped himself and showed me how, without damaging the character, indeed enhancing it, I could have moved the change of figuration to a rhythmically significant place. I’ll add here that at Brahms’s urging, I undertook a fundamental reworking of my Orchestral Variations on a Theme by Schubert after it had already been performed in a concert of the Vienna Philharmonic. The reworking had nothing to do with the orchestration—which Brahms had praised—but rather with a more satisfactory method of introducing new motives. He had given me hints from variation to variation as to the manner and methods I could use to change and improve them.
Continuing to correct the songs, Brahms did not keep only to the artistic, but also considered it worthwhile to discuss the mechanics of writing. He found that I had not written quarter note under quarter note, and I had thereby hampered legibility. He advised me to take care to write the slurs over groups of notes with precision; to draw the stems of notes above the middle line of the staff downward and below the middle line upward; to set the accidentals 
and 
precisely on the lines and spaces they were destined for—in short, to take more care over the outward appearance of the musical script. “Take a look at this,” he said. He brought from the next room the autograph score of Wagner’s Tannhäuser and opened the long B-major section of the second act: “On every line, on every page, Wagner has set five #s in their places with painful exactness, quickly and fluently written in spite of all that precision. If someone like that can write so nicely, you too must learn how!”16 He leafed through the entire movement and almost reproachfully pointed out just about every sharp. The more Brahms talked himself into a sort of didactic wrath, the more subdued I became. I fell utterly silent, however, when Brahms reacted as though stung by my remark “that Wagner above all should be held responsible for the confusion that reigns among us young people” … “Nonsense—misunderstood Wagner has done it to you all; those of you who may become confused by him understand nothing about the real Wagner. Wagner is one of the clearest heads that ever was in this world!”
In the course of the interview, which certainly lasted close to two hours and by the end of which scarcely a single good shred remained of my wretched songs, I had finally fallen into an appropriately guilty mood. Brahms seemed finally to have noticed it as well, and after his fashion said a few words of encouragement. Above all, he advised me to write a great deal, to write fluently, and not to go looking for highbrow curiosities [geistreichen Wunderlichkeiten]. I have never published the songs dissected by him. According to Brahms, there was no prospect of success in reworking them. I soon understood that he was right.
In the fall of 1880—I’m skipping over several similar visits, even if they were not of such depressing content—Brahms said to me once that he had seen manuscripts of a number of my pretty songs at the home of the singer Fräulein Pauline Knee, an outstanding dilettante (at present married to Werthner in Vienna), and that he had accompanied the lady. “I suppose you will excuse me after the fact, that while playing, I changed a number of things.”…He was of the opinion that with a few strokes all sorts of things could be presented in a more concise, more pithy, and more witty form. After a few days I appeared at Carlsgasse 4 with the volume of songs. (The volume was later published by Kistner in Leipzig as my op. 13.) Brahms first took up the song “Bitt ihn, o Mutter.” He found the tone of it quite excellent but took exception to the passage “Ich sah zwei Augen am letzten Sonntag” (I saw two eyes last Sunday). At that time this phrase was about twice as drawn out as it is now. “Those must have been some eyes! —” said Brahms, grinning, “but for everyone else they are perhaps not interesting enough.” —He improvised a condensed version of the spot, almost exactly as it now appears in the printed edition. I wrote it down from memory after I reached home, and kept it. —In the song Sagt, seid Ihr es, feiner Herr, he insisted that several “piquant intervals” in the voice part would give more emphasis to the humor of the narrator. Going on to the ballad Die Wolke, Brahms found the ending eminently unsuccessful. At the time I had ended the piece almost rabidly. At the words beginning with “da schlug der Donner” (the thunder struck) Brahms was in favor of a mild, conciliatory ending which he immediately improvised and which I—with very few deviations—preserved. For many a harsh word—for which, by the way, I am today still infinitely thankful—he richly compensated me on other occasions.
There can scarcely be anyone who could censure more sharply than he, but also scarcely anyone who could praise more warmly. The one arose from his tremendous seriousness, the other from his equally great goodness. Most people have paid more attention to his seriousness than to his goodness. He was a diffident person, who hid from the world, almost apprehensively, every soft emotion. Those who knew him from his mild side, however, had to love him that much more dearly.
For the elucidation of several obscure identifications I am indebted to the very kind efforts of Mag. Thomas Maisel and Archivist Dr. Egon Bruckmann of the Archive of the University of Vienna, to Dr. Markus Urbanz, also at the University of Vienna, to Dr. Mag. Andrea Strutz at the University of Graz, and to Dr. Michael Lorenz, Vienna, all of whom went to some trouble on my behalf. My thanks to Josef Eisinger and Siegmund Levarie for reading and improving my translation, and to Prof. Levarie for his insights into Brahms’s musical comments.
1. Richard Heuberger, Erinnerungen an Johannes Brahms: Tagebuchnotizen aus den Jahren 1875 bis 1897, ed. Kurt Hofmann (Tutzing, 1971; rev. ed., 1976). To date, copyright issues have prevented its translation.
2. Die Ressource was Graz’s leading social club. It possessed a large room suitable for a variety of occasions including cultural events.
3. Presumably in the version dedicated to the Wiener Singakademie in 1863, WoO 34, no. 8. Heuberger’s comment is a striking example of his provincialism, of which more later. As a choral conductor in Graz, he apparently knew nothing of the already popular waltzes, op 39.
4. That is, Graz, which lies on both sides of the river Mur. Gratwein is a small town about ten miles northwest of Graz.
5. Leopold Wegschaider (1838–1916) was active as a choral director in Graz into the twentieth century and held a number of important posts in Styria. The Trauer-Ode for the funeral of Christiane Eberhardine, Queen of Poland and Electress of Saxony, Laß Fürstin, laß noch einen Strahl (BWV 198), is one of Bach’s grandest choral works.
6. “Ein paar ästhetische Frauenzimmer.” Frauenzimmer is a slightly derogatory word.
7. The choral society of the University of Vienna was founded in 1858 and is still in existence as the Universitäts-Sängerschaft Barden zu Wien. In 1869 Brahms was made an honorary member after conducting the chorus in the premiere of his Rinaldo, op. 50, on February 28 of that year. Among other famous honorary members were Richard Wagner and Dr. Theodor Billroth, both named in 1872.
8. Recte: February 28, 1875. Heuberger’s comment is another, more striking example of his curious provincialism. The fame of the German Requiem spread rapidly after the war of 1871, when it was played all over Germany. Moreover, by 1875 Brahms had already published the Hungarian Dances, the op. 39 waltzes, the first book of Liebeslieder Waltzes, and the Lullaby—music that made his name and fortune even at the time. He had been awarded the Maximilian Medal in 1872, concurrently with Wagner. But it is an interesting sidelight on the reception history of Brahms that an Austrian as much involved with music as Heuberger knew so little at that date about his music or career.
9. Josefine Wittgenstein Oser and her husband, Nepomuk Oser. Brahms was on very friendly terms with two generations of many Viennese Wittgensteins.
10. For “drinking party,” Heuberger writes “Symposion,” an archaic usage harking back to the original meaning of the word.
11. Solo songs from his own high-spirited days in Detmold, Göttingen, and Hamburg. No. 4 dates from 1858 at the latest, no. 3 from 1859 or earlier. Published in 1867 as op. 41, no. 1, and with a slight change of title to Ich schwing mein Horn, Brahms himself had arranged Ich schell mein Horn for four-part male chorus. A version of it for four-part women’s voices was in the repertory of the Hamburg Frauenchor by 1859. Brahms must have liked Heuberger’s arrangement, which was published for men’s chorus and orchestra in 1879, since a copy of it was in his possession when he died.
12. Franz Eyrich (1839–73), Doctor of Law, was the conductor of the Wiener Akademischer Gesangverein from 1866 to 1870, then honorary conductor from 1872 until his untimely death in 1873.
13. A famous gathering place and dance hall-cum-concert hall, where Strauss conducted his ballroom orchestra. In more recent times, many great recordings were made in its spacious room before the building burned down in 2001.
14. Josef Gänsbacher (1829–1911), one of the first to befriend Brahms when he arrived in Vienna. Brahms owed his appointment as director of the Vienna Singakademie in 1863 in large part to him, and they remained in amicable contact for life. A jurist by training, Gänsbacher became a member of the voice faculty at the Vienna Conservatory.
15. The violinist Joseph Hellmesberger Sr. (1828–93) was director of the Vienna Conservatory from 1851 to 1893 as well as the leader of the Hellmesberger Quartet, which he founded. For decades, he played a decisive role in Vienna’s musical life.
16. It is not clear what autograph this could be. For a time, Brahms did possess Wagner’s autograph of the Paris version of the Venusberg music from Tannhäuser, which is the first scene of the first act. It was given to him as a gift by Karl Tausig. It is also true that Act 2 scene 4 is in five sharps, but Brahms did not own this portion of the manuscript. Further deepening the puzzle, by the date Heuberger gives for his visit to Brahms (May 10, 1879), Brahms no longer had the manuscript. At Wagner’s insistence it had been returned to him in June 1875 (for his trouble, Brahms received in exchange a gold-stamped first edition of Das Rheingold). The only way Heuberger could have seen a Tannhäuser manuscript in Brahms’s flat was by visiting him before the latter’s departure from Vienna at the end of April 1875—an impossibility, given that Heuberger says his first personal contact was in 1876. We are left to ponder the vagaries of the human memory, and to wonder just what it was Brahms did show him.
*Brahms loved to find related occupations that apparently interfered with his work. He always told me “You should find work that is congenial to you, so to speak, that benefits your own work. I have always noticed that those who only ‘live for art’ accomplish little.”