Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [121]
It did not take many days for Johannes to succumb to the charm of the place and of the lovely girls, Agathe in particular. Maybe Ise and Pine Gur should have known better than to try to lead him in any direction, if matchmaking is what they had in mind. Maybe they had failed to absorb that their blond friend was almost constitutionally unable to bear any congenial situation for long before putting his foot in it.
Still, Brahms was in his most charming mood on that vacation, as were they all. Agathe had long dark hair and a lush figure, and she was endowed with a soprano voice whose sound Joachim compared to an Amati violin. Brahms drank in that voice, and Gathe with it. She was talented, intelligent, funny, creative, ready for a game or a practical joke. Though her face was plain, by no means did Agathe’s appeal lie purely in talent and intellect. “How delightful,” Joachim sighed, “to run your hands through such hair!”43
At that time Agathe was studying composition with Grimm, who one day berated her for some careless counterpoint exercises. When she complained to Brahms about it he sat down, chuckling, and wrote out her next assignment himself. The idea was to play a joke on Ise by her submitting an impeccably done exercise. Agathe duly went through the charade of presenting it to her teacher. He looked it over and exploded at the “swinish mess.” When Gathe stammered, “But what if Johannes did it?,” Grimm only replied heatedly, “So much the worse!” Then they realized the joke had been on both of them.44 Brahms had not done the proper exercises Agathe thought were intended to fool Grimm, but instead systematically fouled them up. Even if he had fallen for Agathe, Johannes had no intention of conforming to her girlish expectations, even in fun.
It was one of those luminous, enchanted summers. In the quiet old college town the friends felt merry and hopeful and secure in their talent and their prospects for a pleasant course of life. Drunk with summer and happiness, they played blindman’s buff and hide-and-seek and made grown-up music. When the friends headed home in the twilight, Johannes and Agathe would linger behind. Then he might whisper to her that he had better go walk with Clara or she would be jealous.45 What Clara probably felt was old and sad and unattractive in this laughing youthful company. Even when she joined in the games, her propensity for accidents set her apart. Discovered in an asparagus bed during hide-and-seek, Clara was sprinting for “home” when she sprawled headlong over a tree root, and the fun stopped as everyone gathered to help her.46
Grimm wrote Joachim, “Johannes has written glorious songs which Gathe sings to us, and we are all agreed that this is a wonderful time.”47 The new works may have included several of the Opus 14 songs and romances, two of the Opus 20 duets (for Agathe and fellow chorus member Bertha Wagner), and the Opus 19 solos. In the late-summer evenings the friends sat listening to Brahms’s sweetheart sing “Ein Sonett” in her Amati voice, while he accompanied her:
Oh, if I could only forget her,
her beautiful, loving nature,
her glance, her friendly mouth!
Perhaps I could then grow well!…
Much better never to grow well!
No one could miss the accents Brahms placed on “ihr schönes, liebes Wesen”—her beautiful, loving nature. In all the songs of Opus 19, romance unfolds in gentle, perennial, idealized images: lovers kiss in spring, they part, they rest beside a brook and dream. In these as in most of his song lyrics, Brahms looked not for the kind of poetic subtlety that inspired Schumann (notably Heine’s verses, with his broken idylls and oblique ironies), but rather for verse direct, uncomplicated, ingenuously evocative—poetry close to folk verse which welcomed music and offered no competition to it. (This lay in contrast to the lyrics for Brahms’s more ambitious choral works, where the texts are substantial, with a preference for Scripture and for Goethe.)
As in the aphorisms of “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein,