Brahms in the Mountains

Romantic composers, true to their school, lived in the musical capitals of Europe: Berlin, Leipzig, Bonn, Vienna, London, Paris.

But they often composed during the summer, when they escaped the overheated musical circus of the cities for mountain lakes or alps. You can hear those mountains in their music. Sometimes it is obvious, as when Mahler wrote a program for his Third Symphony, calling the first movement, for instance, “What the Stony Mountains Tell Me.”

Strauss composed in a large villa at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, near Germany’s highest mountain, the Zugspitze. Nietzsche’s character Zarathustra retreats to the mountains for 10 years to meditate on the future of humanity.

Mahler had three composing huts, the first at Steinbach am Attersee, on Lake Atter outside Salzburg, under the cliffs of the Höllengebirge, whose surroundings he embedded in his symphonies. The other two were in Maiernigg (to the south, on the Wörthersee), and in Toblach (now Dobbiaco).

Grieg had his composing hut with its turf roof on Nordåsvannet, Nordås Lake, just down the lawn from his house, Troldhaugen, troll knoll. It is south of Bergen in Vestland on the west coast of Norway. Bergen is a maritime port set on the edge of an archipelago of hills, fjords, and lakes which filter out to the North Sea.

Or sometimes it was just the tundra itself, as with Rachmaninoff and Nabokov.

In 1932 Rachmaninoff built the Bauhaus-like Villa Senar near Hertenstein on the shores of Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. He lived there until 1939, just before World War II. Here he wrote the exotic Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, his last genuinely Russian piece, because Senar reminded him of Russia. Bunin and Horowitz visited. It is owned today by Vladimir Putin, and contains one of the composer’s pianos and many of his scores. Putin invites many of Russia’s notable pianists to play there.

Senar reminded Rachmaninoff of Ivanovka, the bucolic Russian estate which he inherited from his cousins, the Satins, and on which he lavished the proceeds from his concert career.

Rachmaninoff was taken in when he was 16 by the Satins, who provided the lively family he always longed for, and eventually left him, the great prodigy and hope for the future, their estate. He had become their heir. Sonya Satina, who was 10 at the time, wrote of the estate:

The small village of Ivanovka adjoined our estate. Endless fields stretched around us, merging on the horizon with the sky. In the distance, in the west, the belfry of our parish church, located five miles from Ivanovka, was visible. In the north is someone’s windmill, to the east is nothing but fields, and to the south is our aspen forest. For many miles around Ivanovka, these aspen trees and our garden near the house were the only trees among the fields, and therefore this aspen tree was a refuge for hares, foxes, and even wolves sometimes....

When Rachmaninoff abandoned Russia during the Revolution, he left a large fund behind for the serfs at Ivanovka. He always treated them generously and amicably. Nevertheless, they burnt it to the ground. Rachmaninoff was shocked. It was later rebuilt.

Vladimir Nabokov has written eloquently of his own idyllic childhood in the Russian countryside in Speak, Memory, the greatest autobiography in literature. Brilliantly reviewing it himself in 1950 (although The New Yorker didn’t publish it until December 21, 1998), Nabokov wrote:

The summers, spent by the author as a boy in the country, seem to have been especially responsible for shaping him. The region, with its scattered villages among great forests and marshes, was meagerly populated, but numerous ancient footpaths (the mysterious trails that webbed the whole Empire from immemorial times) kept the berry gatherer, the tramp, the squire’s pretty children from losing themselves in the woods. And because

most of those ways and the wastes they passed by or led to were nameless, landowning families, from generation to generation, designated them by the names that under the influence of French governesses and tutors had naturally come into being during the children’s daily promenades and frequent picnics—Chemin du Pendu, Pont des Vaches, Amérique, and so on.

Brahms was more subtly influenced by the time he spent every summer among the mountains, the great mountain lakes, and the high mountain alps. His pieces weren’t sententious, like Zarathustra’s trumpet calls. But the intermezzos were like nothing else written to that date. They weren’t dreaming night pieces, like Chopin’s Nocturnes, or horse rides like Liszt’s “Mazeppa.” They weren’t works of pure structure, like Bach or Beethoven. They weren’t program music, like Berlioz.

They were emotional explosions tightly controlled by structure, radiating folk music and Clara’s descending motif. They were unobtrusive explorations of harmony, but not the harmonies of childhood or descriptions of personalities, as Debussy’s would be.

They were intangibly colored by stillness, by ominous yet lightly tinged sunset clouds, by mountain streams, by expanding visions of growing clarity.

They didn’t come from Bach, or Chopin, or Beethoven. They were pure Brahms, refined from the symphonies and the concertos, always framing Clara’s theme, which never becomes tiresome or obvious.

They have a freshness, a subtle sense of the brisk mountain air. Nothing is exaggerated. Small nuances color the chords, but with the ripple of a clear stream. Not a blizzard, but flurries at sunset. The smell of wood fires burning quietly in an Austrian hut.

Before Brahms settled in Pörtschach am Wörthersee, a lakeside spa in Austria, where he would take long walks around the lake and on the wooded slopes, he would walk for weeks in the summer, exploring the enchanting mountain villages of Austria. He pinned a sign on his knapsack, Frei aber Einsam, free but lonely. It was the motto of Joseph Joachim, the great Hungarian violinist. Brahms and Schumann later wrote a sonata for him that they called the F-A-E Sonata.

Brahms trekked with his father through Styria and Carinthia in the Austrian Alps; he was excited to show his father the area and climb mountains, such as the Hochschwab, on the side. He would stay at houses on mountain lakes and compose there: Mürzzuschlag in Styria, Hofstetten on Lake Thun, Bad Ischl in the Salzkammergut region, a fashionable spa where the Kaiser kept a summer lodge and half of Vienna showed up in the summer. Johann Strauss also had a villa in Bad Ischl, which was known as the Austrian Baden-Baden.

There Brahms rented a farmhouse above a confluence of two rivers with an excellent view down the steep valley. Again, he would take long walks in the hills. He stayed in Bad Ischl for 16 summers.

In 1863 Clara had bought a small summer house (her children called it “the kennel”) in Lichtental, a suburb of the real Baden-Baden. Her garden backed on the river Oos. The following year Brahms visited Anton Rubinstein in his rented villa there. Baden-Baden was by then the most fashionable summer resort in Europe, filled with the mansions of royalty and the Großbürgertum, the newly emerging merchant class, who had more money than the aristocracy and smaller names in need of burnishing. The diva Pauline Viardot, whom Turgenev visited, lived there. Johann Strauss kept a grand villa there as well as at Ischl. Both Mahler and Alban Berg spent time there.

In 1865 Brahms rented his own summer sanctuary, which he called “the beautiful house on the hill.” He regarded the mountain view as “unsurpassable.”

After a feast in the local stube, he would stop under the window of his friends the Simrocs and whistle Don Giovanni’s serenade, which the Don sings to Zerlina, a maid he is trying to seduce with a typical impromptu balcony aria. Brahms was much amused by his running joke, and annoyed if no one came to the window to applaud or sing along.

But if all these wandering paths come to a mountainous point, it is that the strange storm light at high altitudes, the Brocken shadows which distend trees into giants, the primal moss and lichens of the agrarian alps themselves, meadows separated from time and culture by the Gothic chasms of Caspar David Friedrich, of Albert Bierstadt, of Thomas Moran, by the photos of Gaston Rébuffat, Joseph Tairraz, Lionel Terray, by Thomas Mann in The Magic

Mountain, G.W. Young’s On High Hills, Arnold Lunn’s The Swiss and Their Mountains, where new vocabularies had to be invented for the spectral phenomena of shape and light encountered for the first time by the Victorian explorers, by the Gothic fantasists of Austrian mountain passes and forgotten Nepalese valleys, phantasms that were real but needed fiction in order to be excused their excesses— these influences reflect the facets of the thin light, the purl of brooks through wildflower ravines, the discovery of new, alien worlds during Brahms’s time through whose paintings and librettos his intermezzos ripple like sun glinting off séracs, and without whose fresh murmurs the undulant descants of these exotic forms, these intermezzos, would be only shapeless reflections.