Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [102]
THE REST OF THAT WINTER and spring, as Clara traveled and Johannes languished between playing jobs, he stayed on with his family in Hamburg, taught the occasional student, and contemplated his creative impasse. The effects of “Neue Bahnen” had sunk in; the paralysis afflicting him was becoming clearer. In February 1856, he wrote Clara one of the most revealing letters of his life.
It always saddens me to think that after all I am not yet a proper musician; but I have more aptitude for the calling than probably many of the younger generation have as a rule. It gets knocked out of you. Boys should be allowed to indulge themselves in jolly music; the serious kind comes of its own accord, although the lovesick does not. How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating.
He concluded jokingly, “What a Man!” and crushed his quill pen onto the page.29 In fact, he was fighting despair.
It appears that Brahms had begun to discern the road he felt compelled to take. It was not one of Schumann’s new paths, and the journey was not a cheering prospect. Schumann’s article had inflicted on Brahms an unforgiving responsibility, crushing any hope of a natural, youthful development. Brahms had immense talent, enough in itself to achieve a great deal, but he was not to be allowed, or allow himself, to rest on that gift. Beyond the burden of Schumann’s article, his and his time’s fixation with the past and its pedestaled masters made the situation of a composer unprecedentedly difficult. It was no longer possible just to compose, unself-consciously, as Mozart and his generation had done. Mozart’s lightness of spirit came in part from not being burdened with the past, or with the future. In Brahms’s more ambitious works, at least, lightness was no longer possible, in his music or in his spirit.
After the ingenuous brilliance of his early piano music “Neue Bahnen” had stopped him in his tracks with no notion of where he was headed. At the same time as he worried over his technical uncertainties, he wrote Clara that he felt unable to connect his music to his heart, maybe to a degree because his heart was too wrought up in feelings he could neither understand nor control. In any case, heart-on-sleeve music was not his style. Given his temperament, he had to master his feelings in order to go on.
He began to discern, and hint to Clara, the implications of that for his external life. Mozart could live while he was creating, go to the tavern and write jolly music if he felt like it, collect his pay and go on to the next job, which might be something light or serious, inspired or not. For Brahms, composing in a spotlight, the signs at the crossroad said: life in one direction, music in another. He would not be permitted to embrace both. Robert Schumann and the burden of history had denied that to him.
The dilemmas multiplied. To earn his keep Brahms saw as yet no way around the life of an itinerant musician, but he also knew that he would never be a world-class pianist. It appeared that he had no reliable way to support a family at all, unless he could find some sort of position as a Kapellmeister—and for that he needed experience as a conductor. At the same time, if he were going to compose as he felt he had to, with absolute seriousness, he could not uncomplicatedly enjoy himself and laugh with friends in the tavern and go home to wife and children like Mozart or a good North German Bürger. To accomplish anything, he had to scrape together some kind of living and save himself for his work. He must write what he wanted, as he wanted—once he figured out what he wanted. (In fact Brahms never accepted a musical commission in his adult life, something that would have been incomprehensible to Mozart’s generation.)
In short, he faced the frightening prospect that in order to fulfill Schumann’s prophecy he would have to become in earnest what his teacher Marxsen would call “a priest of art,” to live something like a monastic