Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [115]
Joachim must have been in a vindictive mood himself. No doubt with Johannes’s encouragement, he had at last decided to finalize his break with Liszt. With his characteristic mixture of high-mindedness and venom, Joachim wrote his old mentor:
The continued goodness and confidence which you show me, great and courageous spirit … gives me a sense of shame for the lack of candor I have shown up to the present.… So I shall remain silent no longer on a subject which, I confess to you, your manly spirit had the right to demand to know long before. Your music is entirely antagonistic to me; it contradicts everything with which the spirits of our great ones have nourished my mind from my earliest youth. If it were thinkable that I could ever be deprived of … their creations, all that I feel music to be, your strains would not fill one corner of the vast waste of nothingness.22
The letter continues in this vein, acknowledging Joachim’s debt to Liszt while venting a barely veiled contempt. Liszt and his disciples declined to strike back. Before long, Brahms and Joachim would provide the New Germans with a bigger score to settle than Joachim’s letter, which only spelled out in chapter and verse what everyone already knew. Unlike his colleague Wagner, Liszt was not vindictive in print or in person. Nearly thirty years later, when he and Joachim finally met again and moved toward reconciliation, Liszt only said mildly, “As you do not like my music, dear Joachim, I feel that I must admire yours in double measure.”23
In September Clara moved from Düsseldorf to Berlin, mainly to be near family—her mother who was long since remarried to Adolf Bargiel, her half-brother Woldemar Bargiel, and half-sister Marie. Brahms, who had no affection for that city, visited her less there. Clara’s brooding only intensified after the move; to Joachim she wrote, “I arrived in Berlin shattered in body and soul.”24
The same week, Brahms wrote her an astonishing and eventually famous letter.
My dear Clara, you really must try hard to keep your melancholy within bounds and see that it does not last too long. Life is precious and moods like the one you are in consume us body and soul. Do not imagine that life has little more in store for you. It is not true.… Body and soul are ruined by persisting in melancholy.… The more you endeavor to go through times of sorrow calmly … the more you will enjoy the happier times that are sure to follow.… Passions are not natural to mankind, they are always exceptions or excrescences. The man in whom they overstep the limits should regard himself as an invalid and seek medicine for his life and for his health. The ideal and genuine man is calm both in his joy and in his sorrow. Passions must quickly pass or else they must be hunted out. Consider yourself for the moment, my dear Clara, as a serious invalid and without necessarily being anxious, but on the contrary, with calm and perseverance, try to look after yourself.25
These calm paternal words speak much, in several dimensions. To a degree they are practical advice to a friend with an inclination to gloom and hysteria and overwork. No doubt they express Brahms’s own convictions and practice; he had instituted a stern emotional censor over himself in order to get through the experiences of the last three years. He had copied down in his collection of German proverbs “He who stays on the plain will not fall far,” and in front of the collection wrote, “wise lessons one must practice.”
In these respects Johannes’s letter to Clara is judicious, well-meant, even kindly. But it is more than that. He counsels a kind of detachment that