Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [138]
Clara chose an especially bad time to rub salt in his wounds. Nothing survives of what she thought of the Agathe business—nor much of what Brahms thought, for that matter. It is entirely possible that the two of them never really discussed it at all. But in February 1860, Clara wrote him, “I was very miserable in Cassel. I could not get poor Agathe, and many other things, out of my head. I kept on seeing the poor lonely girl.… Ah, dear Johannes, if only you had not allowed it to go so far!”31 In April, when Brahms repeated the Piano Concerto in Hamburg, audience response was so rancorous after the first movement that conductor Otten had to talk him out of bolting from the stage.32 By that point his self-confidence, his self-esteem, his entire career, should have been in ruins.
Of all the things that can be admired about Johannes Brahms, perhaps the most impressive is that he not only survived this string of catastrophes, but found in himself the courage and resources to sail out of them a composer of the highest rank. That year and the next two, among other works he completed the B Major String Sextet, the G Minor and A Major Piano Quartets, and the Handel and four-hand Schumann Variations, and drafted the first movement of the First Symphony. In 1860, at the lowest ebb of his career, his creative rebirth was at hand. Nothing and no one else mattered so much to him as that.
CHAPTER TEN
A Garden Full of Nightingales
EVEN AS HIS MATURE POWERS RIPENED, Brahms fell into a restless and dejected mood in the spring of 1860. Staying with his parents, he said, even at the larger place on Fuhlentwiete, was like living in the kitchen. He wrote Clara in Berlin, imploring her not only to visit him for the summer, but to consider moving to Hamburg.1 In lieu of that, she made a surprise visit for his twenty-seventh birthday on May 7, and stayed on for a couple of weeks. “I spent the time very pleasantly on the whole. I tried to teach myself to be indifferent to Johannes’s fits of ill-humor, and sometimes I succeeded.… We had a great deal of music together.2
The music-making included the Frauenchor rehearsing the Marienlieder and Volkslieder, and the Four Songs for Voice, Two Horns, and Harp, Opus 17, the finest of his women’s-choir pieces. Of the Harp Songs Clara wrote when he first sent them, in what was for her a remarkable burst of flippancy, “There must have been a very pretty girl in your choir who happened to play the harp and for whom you composed the piece.”3 She had begun to push Johannes toward other women. It was one of the few subjects on which she could be playful with him.
Clara’s signature appears on a jocose set of rules Brahms drew up for the Frauenchor that spring. In the grandly copied document he used the Latin- and French-laced macaronic of old learned works like Mattheson’s musical treatises. An English equivalent might read:
AVERTIMENTO
Whereas it is absolutely conducive to Plaisire that it should be set about in right orderly fashion, it is hereby declared and made known to such inquiring minds as may desire to become and to remain members of the most profitable and delightful Ladies’ Choir, that they must sign Partoute the articles and heads of the following document before they can enjoy the above-mentioned title and participate in the musical recreation and diversion …
Pro primo be it remarked that the members of the Ladies’ Choir must be there.
As one should say: They shall obligiren regularly to frequent the meetings and practices of the Society.
And if it so be that any one do not duly observe this Articul and (which God forbid!) it were to come to pass that someone were to be so lacking in all Decorum as to be entirely absent during a whole Exercitium:
She shall be punished with a fine of 8 shillings …
Pro Secundo it is to be observed that the members of the Ladies’ Choir are to be there.
As one should say: they shall be there praecise at the appointed time. [There follows