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SO AFTER THE DEBACLE Brahms wrote his unruffled letters about it to Joachim and to Clara (“You have probably heard it was a complete frost.”66). There was another letter in the wake of the disaster, short and apparently flippant too, but terrible in its effect: the one to Agathe von Siebold.

Years later, Brahms spoke about this time to his friend George Henschel. Though he did not name an occasion, he was thinking of a particular face and voice, a particular betrayal:

At the time I should have liked to marry, my music was either hissed in the concert hall, or at least received with icy coldness. Now for myself, I could bear that quite well, because I knew its worth, and that some day the tables would be turned. And when, after such failures, I entered my lonely room I was not unhappy. On the contrary! But if, in such moments, I had had to meet the anxious, questioning eyes of a wife with the words “another failure”—I could not have borne that! For a woman may love an artist … ever so much … still she cannot have the perfect certainty of victory which is in his heart. And if she had wanted to comfort me—a wife to pity her husband for his lack of success—ach! I can’t stand to think what a hell that would have been.67

The fiasco in Leipzig showed Brahms in stark terms where he stood: only a musician, adrift, with talent to spare but no dependable income and few saleable pieces. He saw he was going to be a vagabond still, for who knew how long, living with his parents when he was not on the road. He could not imagine how he could support a family on his earnings without compromises that threatened his work. That he must not allow. And above that dreary ostinato of the quotidian, the siren call of freedom and independence sang in his mind.

After Leipzig, the balance tilted for him. Brahms wrote the letter to Agathe that nearly destroyed her. He may even have considered the way he did it gallant. In fact, it may have been the ugliest gesture of his life. The only echo that survives of it is this:

I love you! I must see you again! But I cannot wear fetters! Write to me, whether I am to come back, to take you in my arms, to kiss you and tell you that I love you.

That essentially says I will romance you, sleep with you, but will not marry you. Agathe was not the kind of woman you said that to. In his letter, if that was all there was to it, she found no trace of explanation, empathy, or regret.

Of course, both of them burned their letters. Near the end of her life Agathe wrote a small, sad, forgiving novel about their relationship, quoting those words to her. In the book, after she receives his letter “the girl fought a hard battle, the hardest of her life. Love would have held him at any price, come what would. Duty and honor counselled renunciation; and duty and honor won.” She wrote Johannes breaking it off, returned his ring, never saw him again.

Brahms appeared to skip away from the business unscathed, but he did not. Her letter woke him up to what he had done. He told a friend, “I’ve played the scoundrel toward Agathe.”68 Julius Grimm and his wife broke off relations, in disgust. None of them were ever quite the same again, quite as innocent. There were no more youthful summers like the one past. The Grimms’ first child had been christened Johannes; the first girl would be Agathe. After several empty and aimless years, Agathe von Siebold left Göttingen, to get away from the memories. Ten years after the break with Brahms she found a happy marriage as Frau Dr. Sanitation Commissioner Schütte. Her novel shows that the pain endured.

We see Brahms mourning in his songs, as earlier they had voiced his joy. The ones for Agathe were full of love and summer: in Opus 19, “You kiss me as we part, I press you to my breast!” In the next set of lieder, in no. 2 of Opus 32, we hear some of the bleakest pages he ever penned, G. F. Daumer’s lyrics set to a sinking, keening, gasping melodic line:

I decided not to go to you any more,

and I swore it,

and