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Esteemed Fräulein … I have done so little to deserve it that I would be ashamed if I did not hope to compose a lot more music for you with it; and really more beautiful tones will resound about me when I see on my writing desk this lovely and beautiful gift. / Will you give my heartiest greetings and thanks to all those you are able to reach. / Seldom has a more pleasant joy come to me and, indeed, our gatherings will always be to me one of my favorite recollections. But not, I hope, till later years! (42)

To Clara he wrote more directly, “Oh, my dear girls, where are you now … On Monday in the church, what a touching farewell it was!… I am becoming something of a cult in Hamburg. But I don’t think that can do any harm. In any case I am writing with ever more zest, and there are signs in me which suggest that in time I may produce heavenly things.”15 The women had stirred him, he had fallen for several of them—and as if to illustrate a future psychological theory, he apparently had not seduced any of them. As Freud would have it, Brahms sublimated his libido into music, some of it indeed heavenly.

Certainly it is conceivable that Brahms had an affair with one or more of his Frauenchor singers, but if so, everyone concerned was remarkably discreet about it. In fact one finds no real record of Brahms ever having more than a Platonic connection to any “respectable” woman. An exception may be in March 1858, when Joachim wrote him teasingly from Hanover that a certain Fräulein, “an enthusiastic friend of your artistry, is here and greets you.” Brahms replied, for once, like a proper young rascal: “Don’t be seduced by the bosom of her dress; she herself hasn’t got one.”16 From the perspective of a later time it is hard to imagine that so famous and lusty a man as Brahms was never intimate with anyone but prostitutes, but in later years he said as much. He fell in love with virgins real or imagined, he bedded with whores. If there were exceptions to that, he managed to obliterate them from the record as effectively as his rejected pieces.

DURING THE 1859 SEASON AT DETMOLD, Brahms finished the A Major Serenade, the opening numbers of the Opus 42, Three Songs for Mixed Chorus, and the Opus 31, Three Quartets—the vocal pieces intended for the kind of sociable music-making that the Frauenchor and its smaller units exemplified. Meanwhile, he wrote Bertha Porubzsky charming and affectionate letters: “Shall I send songs? Gay, fresh little songs. I would like to give them directly to you, if you wish.” In the same letter he noted, almost in the tone he used with Clara and Joachim, his sorrow at the death of Ludwig Spohr. Now remembered as a minor and pedestrian composer, to Brahms Spohr appeared “probably the last of those who still belonged to an artistic period more satisfying than the one through which we now suffer.… At no time has any art been so mistreated as is now our beloved music. Let us hope that somewhere in obscurity something better is emerging, for otherwise our epoch would go down in the annals of art as a manure pit.17 (The ripest manure, of course, Liszt and his disciples.)

Bertha’s Hamburg auntie kept a close eye on these exchanges. To her niece she sternly quoted Goethe’s famous lines from “Trost in Thränen,” which the previous year Brahms had set so memorably: “One does not crave to own the stars, but loves their glorious light.” Soon Bertha Porubzsky returned to Vienna, another singing girl Brahms allowed to escape, stayed loyal to in his fashion, and commemorated in song.

Clara responded with extravagant praise and small caveats to the new choral pieces and the movements of the A Major Serenade. She sat with the adagio of the serenade, playing her favorite moments over and over. Perhaps hours like those alone with Johannes’s new works, lavishing her heart and craft on them for her own pleasure, were the most profound experiences Clara had with his music. She felt, on the whole justifiably