Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [152]
After the festival, Brahms stayed for a fortnight with Albert Dietrich in a large house under the Ebernburg, near Clara, who was taking the baths at Münster am Stein. In those weeks Brahms began the E Minor Cello Sonata and an F minor string quintet (with two cellos like Schubert’s quintet rather than Mozart’s two violas), and apparently drafted a symphonic movement from previous sketches. Dietrich remembered a jolly vacation—he and Johannes both composing in the house, hikes in the countryside, Clara playing in the evenings. The temper of their relations can be found in a Brahms letter to Joachim: “Now I am sitting in a tavern … under the Ebernburg.… Dietrich is in the next room belaboring his bride. The bride in question being a ballade for choir and orchestra.”46
Dietrich wrote his regrettably distant wife, “The longer I am with Brahms, the more my affection and esteem for him increase. His nature is equally lovable, cheerful, and deep.” He noted that with women Brahms had a habit of straight-faced teasing that was often misinterpreted—especially by Clara, who generally missed the joke and waxed indignant.47 Thus many scenes of sad-eyed, earnest and hypersensitive Clara bristling at Johannes, who surveyed her tears and reprimands with a mean twinkle in his blue eyes. Joachim had understood from the beginning that Johannes liked to goad people as a way of dominating them. Not even Clara would be spared that. In contrast to Dietrich, she wrote Joachim about that summer: “He made life with him almost unbearable.”48
At the end of June, Brahms went hiking in the Pfälzer Bergland with Dietrich and Heinrich von Sahr, visited Julius Allgeyer and other friends in Landau and Karlsruhe, and stopped off in the resort of Baden-Baden to see Anton Rubinstein. By mid-August he was back at work in Hamm.
Just after leaving the Ebernburg, Brahms sent a sheaf of manuscript to Clara. In shock, she wrote Joachim on July 1, “Johannes sent me the other day—imagine the surprise!—the first movement of a symphony.” For Joachim she jotted down the beginning, which she found “rather strong, but I have soon become used to it. The movement is full of wonderful beauties, and the themes are treated with a mastery which is becoming more and more characteristic of him.”49 It was the first movement of the C Minor Symphony, without the introduction added later. Sketches for it may have gone back to the middle 1850s, the Werther years.
News spread that Brahms had a symphony going, and that year he played over the movement on piano for friends. From London, Joachim wrote Clara, “Perhaps I shall be able to invite you to Hanover for Brahms’s symphony at the end of October.”50 Those hopes would not pan out, not by a long shot. He still felt uncertain about how to manage a symphonic finale—apparently another alla Zingarese did not appeal to him at that point. And he was moving toward discarding the whole idea of the symphonic scherzo. But if not a scherzo, what? There were to be twelve years, and much water under several bridges, before Brahms’s friends heard the First Symphony to the end.
As summer turned into autumn he continued composing at a furious pace, full of juice, the ideas almost tumbling over each other to be heard. If some pieces spent years in gestation, most often Brahms wrote extraordinarily fast, from ideas he had been putting in order in his mind with his remarkable memory for music. Clara received the first three movements of an F minor string quintet in Lucerne and gushed in response: “What an adagio! How rapturously it sings and rings from beginning to end!… Yesterday I played it to Kirchner and Stockhausen—they are as delighted with it as I am—and afterwards we drank your health in champagne.”51 But after a reading Joachim declared the string writing ineffectual—maybe in part because of the two cellos—and the piece went back into the oven. It would reemerge twice more before Brahms and Joachim decided it was done.
During all this creative moil and deliberation, the question