Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [148]
Your letter has just reached me and I am certainly not at all satisfied.… In all things that concern me you have always treated me, and always will, as though I belonged to you, and yet in everything that concerns you I am allowed to do nothing. If I had not a farthing I should live with you. If I had a house you would certainly live with me. But now I have a purse full of superfluous pelf, which I shall scatter very shortly out of sheer wrath (the Treasury bonds) simply because it is of no earthly use to me as I am not allowed to spend it.… I assure you that I shall be really furious if you refuse to be my guest here with Julie. If you will not do it, I shall throw all my money out the window.36
He continues with no less than ten numbered and elaborate reasons, some serious and some joking, why Clara must come immediately to Hamburg.
She finally arrived a few weeks before her engagements, on October 21. Why was Brahms so insistent about her coming when he was extraordinarily busy with new work? To a degree it may have been concern over her persistent gloom. Another part of it, perhaps the major part, would be hard to believe if not for how it played out, somewhere between pathos and pathetic, over the next years. The clue lies in the phrase “be my guest here with Julie.” This was Clara’s third daughter, by all accounts an ethereal, magical beauty. Brahms had just dedicated the Opus 23 four-hand Schumann Variations to this Schumann daughter.
In fact, he had fallen in love with Julie, who was now sixteen and in full bloom. Though he was prepared to wait patiently for the right time to declare it—whatever inconceivable time he imagined that to be—he wanted to be around her, watch her, admire her from a decent distance.
Clara, sunk in her own concerns and troubles, remained oblivious to Johannes’s infatuation with her daughter. During her Hamburg performances in November 1861, she seemed on the verge of nervous collapse. She wrote daughter Marie, “I … am often terribly sad although Johannes gives me many hours of glorious pleasure. He does everything he can to please me, but I have had some dark days, when everything has been in deep shadow … Johannes has written some wonderfully beautiful things.”37
Yet another unmentionable matter lay between them, which Brahms might have suspected if he had not been as oblivious to the symptoms as she was in regard to his. Clara was having an affair, or about to enter into one, with composer Theodor Kirchner.38
The dates and duration of their intimacy are uncertain, but it had been building for a long time. Probably she lived in terror that Johannes would find out, or her children, or anybody. Thus, perhaps, her depression in 1861. In the end, she and Kirchner managed to keep their relationship extraordinarily discreet. He wanted to marry Clara, but year after year she held back, and finally turned him away. Apparently Brahms never suspected. It would have horrified him to find out: for him Clara existed in some crystalline never-never land. And he and Kirchner were not only colleagues but good friends.
Two decades later, Clara would write in her journal:
Today I succeeded in making myself read through the old letters from Kirchner.… If only I could wipe this old friendship entirely out of my life! for I gave my heart’s best to a man whom I hoped it might save.… I wished to make one so highly gifted into a worthy man and artist, to ennoble his character which had suffered so much from being spoiled, and through friendship to give him new joy in the happiness of life: in short, I dreamed of an ideal and never thought that I had a fully matured man before me. It was a sad experience. I suffered much, and found comfort only in the