Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [149]
In her early forties, Clara had fallen once more, and for the last time, into an old pattern. She could only cloak her need for love as a duty to inspire another troubled creator to great work, as she had already done with two first-rank artists. It appears that in Clara’s mind if Kirchner did not leave behind his melancholy and lack of discipline and under her attentions blossom as a composer, then she had betrayed her husband’s memory and her loyalty to Johannes, and given herself to a man for nothing. The trouble was that, though Theodor Kirchner was a superlative pianist and able composer, he was no Schumann and no Brahms. Clara’s sufferings for Robert and Johannes had been redeemed by glorious music. This affair was unredeemed; she failed as muse for lack of raw material, and that devastated her.
Since the time of Clara’s affair during the 1860s remains unclear, the connection to her frame of mind has to be speculative. But toward the end of 1860 she seemed unusually spirited in her letters to Johannes—say, in this one of October 1860: “You have been tempted to laugh at what I said about the choral motet, have you not?… You are a regular good-for-nothing; first one is to say all that one thinks, and then if one does, one gets a rap over the knuckles.” Through most of this period she was especially warm to him, without necessarily trying to draw closer to him. In other words, this may have marked the beginning of the affair with Kirchner, during which she wanted to reassure Johannes partly out of anxiety that he might find out. The depression that appeared around the summer of 1861 may mark Clara’s disenchantment, her guilt, her mounting fear of discovery. It may also be worth mentioning that her affair followed on the heels of the relationship of Brahms and Agathe von Siebold, which had driven Clara from Göttingen. For all her saintliness, revenge may have played a part in the story too.
Despite the unmentionable, almost unthinkable subtexts that lay between Clara and Johannes, the Hamburg performances of late 1861 thrilled both of them. “The joy of the [Piano Concerto] so overcame me,” Clara wrote, “and the fact that he was conducting, that nothing else, not even the stupidity of the audience, could annoy me—the public understood nothing and felt nothing.” Four days later, her performance of the Handel Variations was a triumph despite “agonies of nervousness.” She rarely felt comfortable playing in Johannes’s presence. Afterward, instead of congratulating her he felt obliged to declare his utter indifference to the piece. “I cannot help finding it hard,” she wrote in her journal, “when one has devoted all one’s powers to a work, and the composer himself has not a kind word for it.… Otherwise we had many a happy hour, and Johannes especially delighted me with the A Major Quartet.”40 No wonder she didn’t like playing around him.
Clara left Hamburg to perform the Handel Variations with great success in Leipzig. Brahms joined her and Joachim in Berlin for New Year’s, and growled and snapped for the duration.41 Maybe tension over the impending vacancy with the Philharmonic was wearing on him. He had conducted both Hamburg orchestras now, besides his solo appearances, and musicians there had a good idea of his skills. (That was part of the trouble; Brahms never really became a virtuoso conductor, and the Hamburg players had not been impressed.)
In March, as he worked and worried in Hamburg, Clara made her first visit to Paris. There she rounded up musicians and forced them to listen to Brahms—but in private “séances” as she put it, not in public soirees. For all the efforts of Clara and others, for many years the French did not take to Brahms, and his opinion of the French was no more charitable. Like many Germans, he recalled the atrocities during the Napoleonic invasion; his mother had filled him with those stories in childhood. (Of course, Brahms showed little enthusiasm for any culture at all other than his own.)
Brahms went to Hanover in early January 1861 for a two-month