Read on to discover how an unfortunate napping incident triggered a long-running feud between two titans of the Romantic era, Brahms and Liszt...
Brahms and Liszt... engineering a meeting
On the morning of 12 June 1853, a young man with long blond hair entered an opulent reception room at the Altenburg mansion in Weimar, capital city of the grand duchy of Saxe-Weimar. His name was Johannes Brahms, he had just turned 20, and he looked decidedly nervous. And not without reason: Brahms was there to meet Franz Liszt, whose charismatic public image and blistering virtuosity at the piano had earned him an unparalleled reputation in the salons and concert halls of Europe.
Liszt was more than 20 years Brahms’s senior and already a fêted composer. Brahms was a virtual nobody and yet to publish a single note of music. What could he do to catch the legendary Hungarian’s attention?
Brahms the young composer... proclaimed a genius
Brahms’s pathway to an audience with Liszt had relied heavily on serendipitous meetings and happenstance. Three years earlier, in his native Hamburg, he had accompanied a recital by the émigré Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi, and when Reményi returned to Hamburg in December 1852 the pair hooked up again.
Reményi later recalled being smitten both by Brahms’s physical appearance and by his exceptional prowess as a pianist. ‘A sort of aureole seemed to linger around his face, it lighted up so beautifully,’ he rhapsodised. ‘And I distinctly remember soliloquising to myself: “There is a genius here. This is no ordinary pianist. Fate has laid her fingers on my friend.”’
In early 1853, the two set out together on a semi-improvised tour, ‘giving concerts in small villages and towns, writing and distributing the programmes ourselves’. It was far from glamorous, but they eventually achieved their goal of reaching Hanover, 100 miles away. There they met the eminent violinist Joseph Joachim, a friend of Reményi’s from their student days in Vienna. Joachim asked Brahms to play one of his own compositions for him, and the effect was instantaneous. ‘Never in the course of my artist’s life have I been more completely overwhelmed,’ Joachim commented later.
A momentous meeting... a nervous Brahms 'freezes' when asked to play for Liszt
Joachim had been concertmaster of the orchestra Liszt conducted in Weimar, and wrote Brahms and Reményi a letter of introduction to his former employer – a priceless entrée to the world of high culture, influence and celebrity that Liszt represented. The idea was that Brahms would play his compositions for Liszt too, as he had for Joachim.
But on the morning of 12 June, the unproved young composer froze: despite repeated promptings from Liszt and Reményi, Brahms was ‘evidently very nervous’, as one onlooker put it, and would play nothing. So Liszt himself sat down at the piano, and gave performances of Brahms’s Scherzo in E flat minor (whose manuscript was apparently near-illegible) and part of the Sonata in C major, which stunned those present by their brilliance. ‘Brahms was overpowered, and I wept,’ Reményi later reported. Liszt himself gave a running commentary on the music as he played, and particularly praised the fiery Scherzo.
The indignity! Brahms falls asleep as Liszt plays his B minor Sonata
Then came the incident which sealed the Brahms-Liszt meeting’s notoriety in musical history. Finishing with Brahms’s manuscripts, Liszt went on to play his own monumental Sonata in B minor for the select côterie of guests he had invited. At a particularly expressive point in the sonata, Liszt cast a sideways glance over the audience, checking the emotional effects of his music. And there, unfortunately, was Brahms, eyes shut and apparently fast asleep in his armchair. Liszt calmly completed the sonata, then left the room without further comment. He was, we can safely assume, far from happy with Brahms’s callow, disrespectful behaviour.
Nor were the other guests amused by the young composer’s slight to the revered master. ‘Everybody looked astonished and annoyed,’ Reményi reported. ‘I was thunderstruck.’ Brahms himself was quick to claim that he was suffering from fatigue, no doubt from all the travelling he and Reményi had been doing.
Brahms on Liszt's music: 'overwrought in emotion'
But his attack of somnolence was in some ways emblematic of his later aversion to Liszt’s music and his opposition (Wagner excepted) to the progressive ‘New German School’ Liszt represented. Brahms’s instincts were more conservative: he disliked Liszt’s opulent style of living and, according to one biographer, found his music ‘shaky in form, thin in substance and overwrought in emotion’. Liszt, for his part, never played or conducted a single note of Brahms in public concerts or recitals.
In time, the two would go on to achieve a different type of notoriety when Cockney rhyming slangers coined the expression ‘Brahms and Liszt’ to denote an advanced state of inebriation. This regular verbal coming-together is in contrast to the men themselves who, it seems, never met again after their Altenburg encounter. It’s likely Brahms’s impromptu napping was part of the reason.