Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [116]
Despite the letter’s peremptory sermonizing, Clara did not turn away from him. She had heard that sort of thing from him before. Besides, she had never known intimately any other kind of man than those brilliant, erratic, manipulative, and sometimes cruel. In ways at once admirable and perverse, Clara and Johannes suited each other. Their lives together and apart would be mingled in a creative and spiritual communion of a high order, and at the same time in a continual swing between mutual affection and mutual torture.
Brahms’s sermon about “the ideal and genuine man,” of course, did Clara no good. Soon her inward distress over losing her husband and then Johannes turned outward. In November she had an attack of neuralgia she described “as if the bones were being torn out of my arms, neck, and breast with red-hot irons.”26 The doctor gave her opium, which did more than her friends could, or would, for the pain.
FOR HIS PART IN THOSE MONTHS, Brahms had a jolly time in his first season at the court of Detmold. There was an atavistic charm about these provincial courts, relics of medieval Germany when princes and barons of patchwork fiefdoms slaughtered one another for land and precedence. His duties were to conduct the Singverein (the mixed chorus), perform chamber and solo works for the court on piano, and give lessons to Princess Frederike and other aristocratic amateurs.
The old castle had a looming tower from its days as a fortress, and an expansive plaza in front. To his relief, Brahms did not have to stay in a dusty castle apartment or in the newer princely residence, but received cozy bourgeois lodgings opposite the castle gate at the Gasthof Zur Stadt Frankfurt. His room was equipped with an old grand piano courtesy of the Frau Hofmarschall. Nobody at court cared about his compositions, but that hardly bothered him. Another matter annoyed him more: even if now and then Kapellmeister Kiel allowed him to rehearse the orchestra, that experience and his duties with the Singverein did not satisfy Brahms’s new craving for the podium. F. W. Grund, long-time conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic, was getting on in years and Brahms had begun to imagine himself as head of his hometown orchestra.
Besides friend Karl von Meysenbug and his younger brother, Brahms fell in with orchestra concertmaster Karl Bargheer (a student of Joachim) and other congenial commoners. He had mornings for work and usually lunched with Bargheer at the Stadt Frankfurt, followed by a tramp in the arch-Romantic gloom of the Teutoburger Wald. Lessons with his titled students began in mid-afternoon. In the evenings came keyboard performances and weekly rehearsals with the Singverein. On Sundays there were day-long picnics; by scrimping on his daily wine allowance, Brahms was able to buy a bottle of Malvoisier, whose exemplary effects were amplified by sun and breeze in forest glades. A Detmold friend remembered, “He was happy as a king at these times, he loved nature so much.”27
In court concerts Brahms cast off his usual performance anxiety and enjoyed himself. Playing Mozart violin sonatas with Bargheer, he might launch into the piece in the wrong key, both as a practical joke and as a test of the violinist’s transposing skills. In the same way, Brahms enjoyed reading through local composers’ keyboard pieces, not only playing them at sight but transposing them to any requested key. Chamber-music soirees covered the repertoire from Bach, Mozart, and Haydn through Beethoven and Schubert to Schumann. To those names Brahms added his own, playing his B Major Trio and later the G Minor Piano Quartet, to scant applause. In December 1857, he joined