Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [105]
IN APRIL 1856 came the penultimate blow. Schumann’s doctors pronounced him incurable. The conclusion was based on his declining strength, not on a real diagnosis—there had never been one. Clara got the news from Johannes soon after she reached London, where she had finally traveled for a tour after years of frustrated plans to go there. When she received the letter she wrote in her journal, “I could do nothing but weep aloud from morning till night, and then … I went to the concert. Heaven was gracious, it all went very well.” In her three months in England, Clara wept endlessly but never canceled a concert. Her repertoire included a Brahms sarabande and gavotte; these light and later suppressed exercises in atavism comprised his English debut.
After the doctors’ report that April, Brahms visited Endenich to see Schumann for himself. He found a shocking disintegration. Schumann blabbered on unintelligibly, one of the greatest minds of his time reduced to baby talk: bababa, dadada. Here and there Brahms could make out a few names—the children Marie and Julie, Berlin, Vienna, England. In Schumann’s music the letters of names had figured as cabalistic tokens; now some consuming inner agenda around letters and places possessed him. All day long he pored over atlases, covering sheets of paper with names of cities and rivers arranged in alphabetical order, as if to impose some rationality on the unbearable tumult of existence. There was a harrowing debility of body as well as mind, which probably included severe starvation. The doctors said there would be, at best, no improvement.36
With that specter hanging over him, Brahms returned to Düsseldorf and to his preludes and fugues and Spiritual Song. A month later, he celebrated his twenty-third birthday alone. Clara was away, his friend Julius Otto Grimm lived in Göttingen now and Albert Dietrich in Bonn. A birthday greeting arrived from his mother: “This morning I woke up at the exact hour when you saw the light of day for the first time.… Half an hour later I held you in my arms, against my heart.—And now you are so far away.… We drank the health of all of you, especially of the poor sick man.”37
At the Lower Rhine Festival a few days later, everyone was talking about Schumann. At the festival Brahms got to know Ditmarsh poet Klaus Groth, with his recollections of the Brahms family going back three generations. Another long-time association from this time was Theodor Kirchner, then a popular composer of Schumannesque piano miniatures, eventually a faithful Brahmsian in Switzerland, and a constant concern of Clara Schumann.
And Brahms made a connection with the superlative recital-and-oratorio baritone Julius Stockhausen. By the end of the month Brahms and Stockhausen had begun an important collaboration, presenting concerts in Cologne and Bonn. On those programs Brahms played Beethoven, Schubert, Bach, the A Minor Romance Clara had written for him, and nothing of his own. Together they performed lieder including Schubert’s cycle Die schöne Müllerin. During those years the full scope of Schubert’s songs was finally being revealed, mainly through the relatively new medium of the lieder recital. Brahms’s collaboration with Stockhausen contributed to that history. At the same time, it helped galvanize a lifelong passion for Schubert that would be a prime source of Brahms’s mature lyrical voice, not only in song but in instrumental music. Shortly before their first concert, Brahms had written Clara, “I am only very moderately interested in singing.” Stockhausen and Schubert changed that. After the concert Brahms wrote her, “I don’t think I have ever enjoyed singing as much as I