Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [103]
These imperatives came over him slowly, but inexorably. Aided by his ingrained drive to freedom and his temperamental solipsism, perversely abetted by his misogyny, Brahms gradually and reluctantly chose the path of denial. Everything and everybody, including his own desires, must be subordinated to perfecting his art. In practice, the heartlessness of that conviction would be tempered by a need for companionship and a fundamental decency of spirit. Yet through the decades to come and despite the accolades he earned in them, Brahms could never fully accept his path. He never stopped hearing the call to plain life and love, never felt happy in his isolation no matter how ruthlessly he enforced it.
By the end of 1856 the contention of Kreisler and Brahms would largely be decided. Brahms had won. As token of that, during 1856 he let go, for the time being, of the lovesick piano quartet in Kreisler’s key of C# minor. If the Brahms side was the bourgeois family man as well as the ruthless craftsman, he would have to live with that dissonance. Kreisler’s dreamy, lyrical Romanticism receded into the interior of his consciousness and his music, there to be shackled to the exigencies of craft and form that history calls Classical.
IN EARLY 1856, composing still seemed like a quagmire to him as he continued his campaign to make himself a “proper musician,” a Complete Kapellmeister. Still tinkering with the C# Minor Quartet and trying to gear up for the D Minor Piano Concerto, Brahms meanwhile studied the contrapuntal art of Palestrina and other Renaissance masters. (He may have drafted an A major piano trio in this period, but even if the surviving copyist’s score is authentic he suppressed the piece, probably after a tryout.)30
At the end of February he wrote Joachim, beginning like a good house-husband and continuing with his present preoccupation: “I am to remind you that tomorrow afternoon … the [Schumann] children are passing through Hanover. We are loading them up with bread and butter and oranges here; you are to see to the coffee. And then I want to remind you of what we have so often discussed … to send one another exercises in counterpoint.”31 Joachim agreed to Brahms’s proposal to trade exercises by mail and correct each other’s work.
The way Brahms phrased the proposal reveals an odd sidelight. In suggesting a fine for missed assignments, he echoes an old entry found in one of the Schumanns’ marriage diaries, where Robert and Clara agreed to trade the duty of keeping the diary and failure to do so adequately “shall receive some sort of punishment, which we will have to figure out.” (The “punishment” is amorous in implication.) Using terms close to the Schumanns’, Brahms suggests to Joachim that the fine for failure to do their weekly counterpoint exercise will be used for buying books.32 The words in which he expresses the terms suggest that Brahms had been reading Robert and Clara’s diaries, which among other things had a special sign for each occasion they made love (it approached daily at times, after more than a decade of marriage). Whether or not Clara knew Johannes was perusing the marriage diaries, she did not try to hide these intimate records from him.
Naturally the counterpoint exchange between Brahms and Joachim turned out less systematic than planned, starting up slowly and trickling out at the end of the summer, and sporadically revived until as late as 1861. It still produced a good deal of work from the two, the results momentous for Brahms both directly and indirectly.
In spring and summer of 1856 the friends traded canons and fugues by mail, critiquing each other’s work with due raillery and severity. The studies show that both of them had absorbed Schumann’s use of musical cabala. Among his efforts Joachim produced canonic studies based on two motives pregnant for him—his F-A-E / frei aber einsam motto, and the pattern G#-E-A. In German the latter figure is called Gis-E-La, thereby naming Joachim’s lost love, Gisela von Arnim. (The intervals of the