Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [109]
He came as a true friend, to share with me all my sorrow; he strengthened my heart as it was about to break, he lifted my thoughts, lightened, when it was possible, my spirits. In short, he was my friend in the fullest sense of the word.
I can truly say, my children, that I have never loved a friend as I loved him; it is the most beautiful mutual understanding of two souls. I do not love him for his youthfulness, nor probably for any reason of flattered vanity. It is rather his elasticity of spirit, his fine gifted nature, his noble heart that I love.… Joachim, too, as you know, was a true friend to me, but … it was really Johannes who bore me up.… Believe all that I, your mother, have told you, and do not heed those small and envious souls who make light of my love and friendship, trying to bring up for question our beautiful relationship, which they neither fully understand nor ever could.52
Clara’s feelings at the time of the break may have been closer to a terse entry she made just after the trip to Switzerland: “I am very worried to know how I ought to provide for the boys’ future, for on the journey I saw clearly that they must have a man’s hand over them or they will never turn out well.”53 A week later she noted, “Johannes has composed an excellent first movement for a concerto. I am delighted with its greatness of conception and the tenderness of its melodies.”54
As it had been with her brilliant, obdurate father and with her husband, Clara Schumann sustained her loyalty to people who hurt her, if they had also inspired and loved her. It was that simple, though the suffering it caused her was not. Neither then nor in her rancorous quarrels with Brahms over the coming years did she waver in her faith in his music or in his essential goodness. A year after they parted, Clara wrote Joachim, “I suffer indescribably in being separated from Johannes.… And yet is it not most natural that I should love and esteem Johannes so much, after such a long and intimate relationship with him, during which I have learned to know fully the riches of his heart and mind?”55
Once when Eugenie took his part in a quarrel, Clara told her daughter wearily, “You don’t know what he was like before, so full of tender and delicate feeling, an ideal person.”56 That was how she saw Johannes in his Young Kreisler years. But when they parted in 1856, he was no longer the same boy who had first knocked on their door. He had become harder, more ruthless, no less loving but more the master of his feelings. Now he left Düsseldorf for good, arriving home in Hamburg on October 21, 1856. Clara put him on the train. “I felt as if I were returning from a funeral,”57 she wrote of the walk home. It felt to her like the second funeral in three months, and losing both the men she loved.
Brahms of course never wrote of his feelings like that—not in words, at least. Before long he would fall in love again and come close to marriage, maybe even closer than with Clara, and with a woman of his own age. But in turning away from Clara he committed a betrayal and a kind of suicide. If Kreisler had absorbed Romantic yearning from books, now Brahms knew the rankling misery and guilt of the real thing. The impetuous and moonstruck personality that Clara and others loved had been beaten out of him. At length it was replaced by Brahms the gruff and indifferent—though there would always be the touch of boyishness. If he loved his freedom, that did not erase what he had lost, or what he had done to Clara. As he came to understand with agonizing clarity, freedom was his curse and his blessing, his disease and his cure.
Yet if Brahms denied Clara as a wife, in his heart he could never desert her. To the end of his life he loved Clara Schumann to the extent of his crippled capacity to love. But always he placed that in some other time, some other world. She was the virginal priestess, going to the stage