Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [142]
Her rationalizations, good and bad, were wasted on Brahms. He worried about the effects of touring and performing on her health and on her children, whom she parceled out to family and boarding schools, left in the care of servants, dragged along on concert tours that often took ten months of the year. She saw to the children’s education and united the family for summer vacations, but she was rarely home for birthdays, holidays, or even sometimes Christmas. It was not unusual in those days for children to spend periods in the care of other people than their parents, or to be sent off to school, but all Clara’s children were deprived of her for long periods. They got sick, got well, and sometimes died without her.18
The world saw Clara Schumann as a priestess, something like a saint. If there is such a thing as a secular saint, surely she was one. But saints are not so easy to live with. They tend to inflict on everyone the same kind of unforgiving discipline they do on themselves. Clara’s customary admonition to her children amounted to: Be perfect and cause me no trouble or expense, because I am killing myself for you. An 1866 letter to son Felix is characteristic: “Your report makes me very unhappy. What will be the result, if you are not more industrious?… I hope that you will take more pains in the future if only for my sake. Think how I exert myself all the winter in order to be able to give you a good education, and therefore how doubly wrong it is if you distress me by your want of industry and make me anxious about you.”19 The next year, when bright, imaginative Felix was thirteen, she tried to squelch his creative ambitions: “I would impress upon you that with your name you are justified in choosing a musical career only if you are a genius.… I am equally sure that your gifts are not such as will carry you to the summits of art.”20 (To her complaints about the boy Brahms told Clara, “I don’t know how I should contain myself with happiness if I had a son like Felix.”21)
If Clara’s seven children suffered for her career, and in some degree they did, certainly she endured more. Maybe she felt her suffering paid for her children’s. In any case, she was going to perform. “We would sometimes wonder,” Eugenie was to write, “whether our mother would miss us or music most if one of the two were taken from her, and we could never decide.”
Brahms observed these effects of her career with foreboding. At the same time, given his blinders with respect to women’s ambitions and intellect, he could never quite grasp that Clara was an artist like himself, as scornful of charity as he was, with ambitions like his own and his kind of ruthlessness in pursuing them.
IN APRIL 1861, Brahms conducted the Hamburg Philharmonic, once more accompanying Joachim in his Hungarian Concerto; on the program the two also contributed a Beethoven violin sonata. Now Brahms had determined to show himself as much as possible on the podium, to enhance his potential as F. W. Grund’s successor with the Philharmonic. At some point the idea of conducting his hometown orchestra had become a ruling ambition.
At the end of the same month in Altona, Brahms and Julius Stockhausen presented three programs (one including the A Major Serenade) in which they performed three lieder cycles—Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, Schubert’s Schöne Müllerin, and Schumann’s Dichterliebe. With Brahms’s help, Stockhausen had become a great favorite in Hamburg. Regular rehearsals with the Frauenchor ended that spring, though the women continued to meet on their own and appeared in a few performances. Brahms felt too busy with composing, teaching, and performing to keep