ONE Max Kalbeck: Excerpts from the Diary of 1897.(documenting the last days of Johannes Brahms)

The world at large first learned of the existence of Max Kalbeck's diary of 1897 in the feuilleton of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt of 3 and 4 April 1907, written in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Brahms's death. Here, introducing a number of quotations from this diary, Kalbeck described how, on awakening from one of many dreams in which he fancied that Brahms was still alive, he would console himself in his disappointment by taking from the drawer of his desk "an old book, already half yellowed. Some pages are marked with crosses: it is my diary of the year 1897. On the first page are the signatures: Josef Joachim, Johann Kruse, Emanuel Wirth, Robert Hausmann, Ignaz Brull, Ludwig Ganghofer, Wilhelm Singer; Johannes Brahms concludes the series."(1) The book still exists, along with a companion volume, the diary of 1895, in the private possession of Kalbeck's descendants. The two diaries are of similar design: leather-bound octavo volumes with gilt-edged pages, designed as day-to-page any-year diaries with the date decoratively printed at the top of each page. The pages are filled with small, reasonably neat writing in a characteristic German script that Kalbeck had streamlined and simplified from the elaborate Kurrentschrift that he had learned at school. The first page of the diary of 1897 is the endpaper, written on 31 December 1896. It bears all the signatures listed and also those of Marie Brull and Hermine Wallach. Within the diary, some pages do indeed have crosses marked on them. These are the pages on which Kalbeck records Brahms's last days.

The diary is not merely a collection of Brahms reminiscences, however. It is first and foremost a diary and as such tells us more about its author than about any of the topics that he chose to note down. Nevertheless, Kalbeck's powers of observation were considerable and the people he met of significant historical importance, with the result being that, when coupled with Kalbeck's published reviews of musical and dramatic events and his other feuilletons in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt of that year, the diary as a whole presents a lively account, from a cultivated, middle-class, liberal perspective, of artistic and general life in Vienna and elsewhere in 1897.

Born in Breslau in 1850, Kalbeck moved to Vienna in 1880, where he remained until his death in 1921. He earned his living as a music and drama critic and a translator (and sometimes a writer) of operatic librettos, bringing to these tasks a thorough musical training and a considerable poetic gift, which bore fruit in publications of anthologies of poems and short prose works known as sketches. By 1897, Kalbeck had risen to the position of principal music and drama critic of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, a major daily broadsheet (second only to the Neue Freie Presse). He was a feature on the Viennese cultural landscape and is on that account a fit object of historical inquiry in his own right.(2)

Nevertheless, Kalbeck's fame since his death has rested most heavily on his four-volume biography of Brahms, which occupied him, in the midst of his journalistic and translating activities, until 1913.(3) Exactly when he conceived the idea of writing a biography of Brahms is unclear. Ludwig Karpath recorded that Kalbeck first told him of his plans on the day of Brahms's funeral.(4) The irregularity with which Kalbeck kept diaries (only in 1895 and 1897 in his later years) and the fact that these do not deal exclusively with his experiences of Brahms suggest that this plan could well have been hatched quite late in Brahms's life. Indeed, that Kalbeck expressed dismay on discovering the day after Brahms's death that Richard Heuberger had assembled six volumes in which he had notated all his experiences of Brahms over the past two decades suggests that he had not at that stage done much to prepare for the task that would dominate his life over the next sixteen years.(5) Although it has been pointed out that Kalbeck has been wrongly presumed to be of Brahms's innermost circle of acquaintance, he still had the benefit of a considerable acquaintance with Brahms, especially from 1880 on, in what might be regarded as the second rank of friends.(6) Furthermore, Kalbeck possessed the requisite musical knowledge and literary ability as well as the youth, longevity, and devotion to his cause necessary to carry his biographical project through to its conclusion.

After Brahms's death, Kalbeck toured northern Germany in search of Brahms's old friends. His meetings with various of them, most notably Heinrich von Herzogenberg and Max Klinger, are recorded in his diary in scrupulous detail. Although there is little, if anything, new to be learned about Brahms from these accounts, most of them having found their way into the biography or been published separately in corroborating accounts in letters and memoirs of various of Brahms's acquaintances, still they bring the composer's friends to life and open a window onto the activity within his circle in the months following his death. They also demonstrate, on occasions, what Kalbeck knew but chose to suppress and show the biographer at work in the early stages of his mythmaking enterprise.

THE LAST DAYS OF BRAHMS

When, in the final volume of his biography (first published in 1913), Kalbeck recounted Brahms's last three months, he merely repeated, with only the most negligible differences, the diary excerpts as he had published them in the feuilleton from 1907.(7) More significant discrepancies occur between Kalbeck's original diary notations and the two published versions. Some show merely the exercise of good taste. For example, whereas the diary entry for 3 January 1897 reads "After dinner, [Brahms] drops off to sleep, as is his custom, over his black coffee, and snores loudly," the excerpt appearing in the biography tactfully omits the final three words.(8) Other omissions evidently were motivated by a desire to protect the feelings and images of the living and recently departed. Thus, neither published account contains the following entry, written on the top of the page (above the date) of 18 February, with its cutting reference to Eduard Hanslick: "To Busoni, to whom Hanslick had previously said that Brahms often played Bach to him, Brahms said: `I--play Bach to Hanslick? It never occurred to me.'"(9)