Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [122]
Still, he worked at a good deal more than love songs on this vacation, much of it things begun earlier in the year. They include a group of folk song arrangements dedicated to Clara’s children—the Deutsche Volks-Kinderlieder, following up on the Deutsche Volkslieder he had just sent Clara for comment.48 He completed the serenade for an octet or nonet of winds and strings; it had been inspired by the Haydn symphonies, the Mozart divertimenti and cassations and such he had heard and studied at Detmold. Grimm assembled players for a reading, which revealed trouble in the scoring. Clara advised Brahms that the serenade was really an orchestra piece and he agreed, probably with a groan after his struggles with the concerto. He would get to work on it back in Detmold—at first, apparently, in a small-orchestra version.
Besides the songs for Agathe that summer, Brahms drafted a Brautgesang (Bridal Song), and the beautiful, neo-Renaissance Ave Maria, both for women’s choir. He regaled the friends’ gatherings with his party favors, Hungarian dances of the sort he used to perform with Reményi. It was a forecast of how the rest of the world would receive these exotic melodies when he got around to writing them down. Clara began playing some of the dances in her recitals.
Then in his passion for Agathe, Brahms got careless. One day in the middle of September he stepped behind some bushes to embrace her, and Clara saw.49 One look was enough: He left me alone with words of love and devotion, and now he falls for this girl because she has a pretty voice. That night Clara packed up her family and fled Göttingen.
The friends did not spend much time on regrets. They felt sorry for Clara’s distress, but she was always upset about something. Besides, she had hardly fit into the spectacle of romantic youth the old town had been witnessing. None of this is to say that Brahms and Agathe had physically become lovers. She was too respectable for that, at least in the setting of a small town where everybody knew her proper, prominent, Catholic family. The friends all felt happy about how properly and respectably things were going, and how much fun it all was. Surely, they thought, Clara would understand too, once she calmed down.
As for Johannes, for the first time in his life he was part of a sociable group of close friends of both sexes and his own age, and he had found himself a sweetheart. The question was whether he would be able to bear all that Gemütlichkeit.
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AT THE END OF SEPTEMBER, Brahms dragged himself from Agathe and back to Detmold for three months of court duties and longing for the pleasures of Göttingen. He sent the new Brautgesang to Grimm, who played it over for the two women most connected with its inspiration, Gathe and Gur. Grimm confessed, though, that the piece did not seize him. Brahms conceded that the idea of a bridal song had failed to stimulate his imagination: “Thank you for your criticism.… The Brautlied is disgracefully ordinary and dull.… As it is, a poor composer sits sadly and alone in his room and conjures up thoughts which are none of his business. And a critic sets himself between two beautiful ladies—I don’t want to imagine it any further!”50 All Grimm’s letters to Johannes were about “we three”—Ise, Pine Gur, and Gathe. In return, Brahms called them the “beloved clover-leaf,” maybe picturing himself someday as the lucky fourth.51
Through his days of playing and teaching and composing, and exchanging letters with Agathe, his feelings mounted as the tension of separation grew. He sent her manuscripts of songs he was still writing for her and about her. One of his letters to Julius Grimm shows his style: “Greet Agathe from me. I’m enclosing a few lieder for her,