A Shared Birthday, A Shared Bottle: Tchaikovsky Met Brahms in Hamburg — and Reconsidered His Fifth Symphony

May 7th is a strange coincidence in the calendar of music. On this day in 1833, Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg. Seven years later, in 1840, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk. Two of the most beloved voices of the late nineteenth century — one the steward of German classicism, the other the lyrical Russian of unguarded emotion — share a birthday they almost certainly never celebrated together.

They did, however, share a few bottles of wine. More than once.

The Long-Distance Grievance, Before They Ever Met

Before he ever met Brahms, Tchaikovsky had a problem with him — though it is worth being precise about what kind of problem.

It was not, in 1872, the kind of furious personal hatred that came later. In his earliest published comment on Brahms, Tchaikovsky simply called him a "mediocre composer" who had not lived up to Schumann's prophecies — but even there, he allowed that parts of the String Sextet No. 1 had merit. The tone was disappointed, not enraged.

The heat came in the late 1870s, and it was less about Brahms himself than about what Brahms had come to represent in Germany. The conservative critics — Eduard Hanslick above all — had crowned Brahms the rightful heir to Beethoven, the bulwark against the "decadence" of Liszt and Wagner. Meanwhile, what little of Tchaikovsky's music reached Germany was being ignored or ridiculed. In September 1878, Bilse paired the first Berlin performance of Francesca da Rimini with Brahms's brand-new Second Symphony; the German press, predictably, divided into camps, with most of them praising Brahms's "idyllic" symphony to the skies and dismissing Francesca as "a hellish torture on the ears" (Ohrenschinderei) — or, alternatively, "a musical grimace." The man who would later premiere Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in Vienna in 1881 — Adolph Brodsky — would find Hanslick himself calling that work "stinking music." It was, again, the same Brahms-praising critic doing the demolishing.

In a letter to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck of March 1878, Tchaikovsky wrote a famous, slightly unhinged passage. He was explaining why he had no wish to seek out famous composers in the great cities of Europe to promote his works, and he constructed a hypothetical: imagine he wanted to make himself known in Vienna. Then he would have to call on Brahms. And then — if he were honest — he would have to say something like this:

Brahms is a celebrity; I'm a nobody. And yet, without false modesty, I tell you that I consider myself superior to Brahms.

— Tchaikovsky, letter to Nadezhda von Meck, March 1878

It is, strictly speaking, an imagined monologue inside an imagined visit that never took place. And it is not really a sentence about Brahms. It is a sentence about a Russian composer's wounded pride at being a "nobody" in the cities where reputations were made. The "Brahms" in it is half a real composer, half a stand-in for the whole German critical establishment that had put him on its pedestal.

The diary entries of 1886 went further still. After playing through a Brahms symphony at the piano in Maydanovo, Tchaikovsky wrote: "I have played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard!" — and worse besides. But it bears repeating that these were private notebooks, never intended for publication, and (Tchaikovsky himself would later admit) at least partly something he came to regret.

So: a long-distance grievance, a complicated tangle of aesthetic disagreement and bruised pride. He had not yet met the man.

Leipzig, New Year's Day 1888: The First Meeting

He met him at the home of the violinist Adolph Brodsky in Leipzig. Brahms was there to rehearse his new Piano Trio in C minor, Op. 101. Tchaikovsky, who had been steeling himself to encounter the "conceited celebrity" of his diary, hesitated to even enter the room. Brodsky had to coax him in.

What he found was something he had not prepared for. Anna Brodsky, the violinist's wife, watched the introduction:

Tchaikovsky, a nobleman by birth, had something elegant and refined in his whole bearing and the greatest courtesy of manner. Brahms with his short, rather square figure and powerful head, was an image of strength and energy; he was an avowed foe to all so-called 'good manners'.

— Anna Brodsky, Recollections of a Russian Home (1904)

Tchaikovsky, in his soft melodious voice: "Do I not disturb you?" Brahms, with his peculiar hoarseness: "Not in the least. But why are you going to hear this? It is not at all interesting."

That same evening, Tchaikovsky dashed off a letter to his brother Modest. Already the tone has changed entirely from the diary entries:

Brahms is a ruddy short man with a large paunch. He treated me very kindly... Brahms is a frightful tippler.

— Tchaikovsky, letter to Modest Tchaikovsky, January 1888

A few days later, to his publisher Jurgenson:

I went on the booze with Brahms — he's awfully fond of drinking, you know; he's a very nice person and not at all as proud as I had imagined.

— Tchaikovsky, letter to Jurgenson, January 1888

Note what is happening here. The music has not been re-evaluated. When Anna Brodsky asked Tchaikovsky after the rehearsal whether he had liked the trio, he answered with a kind of pained honesty: "Don't be angry with me, my dear friend, but I did not like it." He still did not like Brahms's music. He simply liked Brahms.

Anna Brodsky's other surviving image of that day is so charming it is hard to believe it is real:

I can see Brahms now taking hold of a dish of strawberry jam, and saying he would have it all for himself and no one else should get any. It was more like a children's party than a gathering of great composers.

— Anna Brodsky, Recollections of a Russian Home (1904)

This is the critical pivot. From this day forward, Tchaikovsky's writings about Brahms-the-music remain cool — sometimes scornful — but Brahms-the-man is permanently rehabilitated. Letters to the Grand Duke Konstantin in the autumn of 1888 still call Brahms's symphonies "a caricature of Beethoven," but in the same breath note Brahms's "noble purity" of artistic intent. Two judgments, held simultaneously, about two different things.

The Fifth Symphony, Finished and Then Doubted

That same year, in the summer of 1888, Tchaikovsky was also finishing a symphony of his own. The Fifth.

The completion of the work brought him real, almost physical relief. He wrote that the satisfaction of finishing it was so great it allowed him to "forget all physical ailments" — the language of someone who has been wrestling with a piece for months and finally surfaces.

The relief did not last. The symphony was premiered in Saint Petersburg on November 5/17, 1888, with Tchaikovsky himself conducting. The Philharmonic concert went well enough; the audience and the composer's friends judged it a success. But the press notices were unsatisfactory — César Cui, the critic who had been a thorn in Tchaikovsky's side for years, dismissed the work outright. A second performance on November 12/24 at the Russian Musical Society went well with the public, but Tchaikovsky himself was growing increasingly doubtful about the work. After a further performance in Prague at the end of November, he wrote to Nadezhda von Meck — the same patroness to whom, ten years earlier, he had unloaded all his Brahms grievances — and reached an unflinching verdict:

I have come to the conclusion that it is a failure.

— Tchaikovsky, letter to Nadezhda von Meck, December 1888

He went further. There was, he told her, "something repellent, something superfluous, patchy, and insincere" in the symphony, and he believed the public could sense it instinctively. He felt the ovations he received had really been for his earlier works. He compared the Fifth unfavourably with the Fourth — the Fourth was, he wrote, "immeasurably superior" — and asked himself whether he might be creatively exhausted, whether he was simply repeating his earlier idiom. Even the Second Theme, he confessed elsewhere, had failed.

Anton Rubinstein, the senior Russian master of the previous generation, took an even simpler view: he hated it. (Tchaikovsky, with bleak humour, would later note that Rubinstein's loathing of the Fifth was on par with his general loathing of Tchaikovsky's earliest student exercises.)

So when Tchaikovsky arrived in Hamburg in March 1889 to conduct the Fifth Symphony, it was a piece he himself was not particularly fond of.

Hamburg, March 12, 1889: The Second Meeting

Brahms had come to his native city on March 8th to conduct his Fourth Symphony at a memorial concert for Emperor Wilhelm I. Tchaikovsky arrived on March 11th. They turned out to be staying at the same hotel — and Brahms, who had been about to leave, postponed his departure by a day to attend the morning rehearsal.

After the rehearsal, the two composers went to lunch.

Brahms, over the meal, was completely candid: he had enjoyed the first three movements, but the Finale — no. He did not like the symphony, on the whole.

Tchaikovsky, by his own account, was not hurt. He wrote to Modest that very evening from the hotel:

Brahms stayed a whole extra day so as to hear the symphony and was very kind. After the rehearsal we went for lunch together and had a bit of a drinking-spree. He is very nice, and I like his frankness and simplicity.

— Tchaikovsky, letter to Modest Tchaikovsky, March 1889

A bit of a drinking-spree. Not a polite luncheon — an afternoon that ran long, with rather too many bottles of wine, between two composers who had spent a decade being held up against each other by partisan critics. Brahms had told him, to his face, that the symphony he had come to Hamburg to conduct was, in part, no good. And Tchaikovsky had liked him for it.

The friend Nikolay Kashkin, back in Russia, would later record Tchaikovsky reminiscing about the encounter: the criticism was delivered "so sincerely and simply" that he was not offended at all. If anything, he felt greater sympathy for this plainspoken artist. And Tchaikovsky himself, only a few months earlier, had been writing to von Meck about his own dissatisfactions with the Fifth — "a failure," "repellent," "insincere." Brahms's verdict was not so far from his own.

Tchaikovsky returned the favor, telling Brahms with equal frankness what he thought of his compositions. He invited Brahms — on behalf of the Russian Musical Society — to come and conduct in Moscow the following season. Brahms, who had never visited Russia and was not about to start, declined.

They never met again.

March 15: The Concert, and a Change of Mind

Three days later, on March 15th, Tchaikovsky conducted the actual concert. Brahms had already left the city. The Hamburg public — surprisingly, given they were Brahms's compatriots — received the symphony favourably. The performance went magnificently, and the evening was a success.

Tchaikovsky travelled on to Hanover and, from there, wrote to his nephew Vladimir Davydov (Letter 3814, dated March 5/17, 1889). The mood is unrecognisable from the letters of three months earlier:

As a result, I no longer have a bad opinion of the symphony, and like it once more. My earlier judgement was undeservedly harsh.

— Tchaikovsky, letter to Vladimir Davydov, March 5/17, 1889

The work he had spent the autumn dismissing as "repellent" and "insincere" was, once again, a piece he liked. And he was willing to put in writing that his earlier verdict had been unfairly harsh.

The symphony went on to become one of the most beloved in the repertoire.

Six Months Later

In September 1889, Brahms returned to Hamburg once more — this time to receive the freedom of his native city. While there, he ran into Daniel Rahter, Tchaikovsky's German publisher. According to the letter Rahter sent on to Russia, Brahms's first words were:

Where is Tchaikovsky and how is he?

— Brahms, reported in a letter from Daniel Rahter, September 1889

He asked Rahter to pass on his kind regards.

Tchaikovsky's view of Brahms's music never softened. To one Hamburg critic, late in life, he would describe Brahms as the "mathematician of sounds" — admirable in his thematic development, but wanting in inspiration and feeling.

His view of Brahms the man, though, did not change again after New Year's Day 1888.

Sources

• Modeste Tchaikovsky, The Life & Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (1906)
• Anna Brodsky, Recollections of a Russian Home (1904)
• Tchaikovsky Research, en.tchaikovsky-research.net