Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [141]
With new pieces to fan interest, performances accelerated in 1861. Clara came to Hamburg for concerts in January that included the premiere of the Harp Songs with the Hamburg Frauenchor.14 “They are pearls,” Clara wrote in her journal. “How can one help loving such a man!”15 The last chorus, a setting from the pseudo-bard Ossian, seemed to be the favorite, and for good reason—like the “Edward” Ballade, it unfolds in the Brahmsian bardic tone, the music like the lyric seeming an echo in relentless dactyls of primeval blood-battles:
Weep on the rocks
in the blustering sea-wind,
weep you, O daughter of Inistore!…
Your love he has fallen,
now lies overmastered
pale as a ghost
under Cuthulin’s sword.
On the program with the Harp Songs, Clara played the Beethoven Op. 47 Sonata with Joachim, soloed in works of her husband and Chopin and Bach, and played Robert’s andante and variations with Johannes. In those weeks, as they shared other concerts, Johannes played Schubert hour after hour in the nights as Clara sat listening. Maybe she felt happiest in the times when she was making music with him, and he managing to be a little gracious.
THE CONCERTS AND GOOD FEELINGS of that January 1861 inaugurated one of the most serenely productive periods of Brahms’s life. At the same time, something of the old warmth kindled between him and Clara, even as the possibility of actual romance faded. He wrote her at the end of the month: “It was very dreary after you left.… I am beginning lots of new lessons. Whenever I go into a strange house and have to meet new people … everybody looks like everybody else … I sometimes wish to see [you] for the first time again, so that I might be able to fall in love with you all over again. But all the same things are well as they are. Don’t you feel the same?” She replied almost in a lover’s voice, “I by no means wish you to see me again for the first time in order that you may be able ‘to fall in love with me’ (if indeed that can ever have happened); rather love me dearly, truly, and for ever and ever—that is the best of all.”
On his urging she had gone to Detmold to hear two Mozart piano concertos which, as he hoped, fired her to take up that repertoire. He wrote her, “The fact that the public in general does not understand and appreciate the best things [such as the Mozart concertos] is … the reason people like me become famous. If they only knew that from us they get in dribbles what they could otherwise drink to their heart’s content!”16 In those years, Clara began the long project of editing and overseeing the complete edition of her husband’s music, with Brahms and Joachim much involved in the process. With so much personal feeling involved among three giant egos, their consultations were bound to come to grief eventually, but at this point there was an easy cooperation. In 1860, for one exchange, Brahms wrote her that, despite doubts from all of them, he and Joachim advised her to go ahead with publishing the Mass and the Requiem.
With Clara, however, good spirits and halcyon days never lasted long. By summer she had fallen into a brutal depression: “The loneliness is so dreadful that often I can hardly breathe,” she wrote a friend. “Dark thoughts crowd upon me, and I think of all the terrible experiences I have known, and live through them once more, and then my longing for Robert becomes so violent that often I hardly know how to control myself. My happiness went with him.”17
Nor could the harmony between her and Johannes endure. Picking up a theme that was eventually to bring on