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meanwhile, were devastated, ailing, helpless. Grimly Brahms tried to calm his blustering father and two weeping women. Elise, long devoted to her mother and utterly dependent on her, broke completely with her father. Meanwhile Johann Jakob balked at providing any support. Fritz, “the wrong Brahms,” by then doing well as a piano teacher, had always promised to take care of their mother if their father left her. In the event Fritz did nothing, and Johannes never really forgave him for it. Now it would be mainly Johannes who kept his mother and sister afloat with regular infusions of cash. Amid the recriminations he declined to take sides, but still his old feeling for his father took precedence. Clara noted, with shock: “I should not be surprised at your standing by your father, but in this case, knowing as I have for years your preference for your mother, it is incredible to me.”58

When the crisis in his family had settled down enough for him to escape, Brahms made the long journey south to Lichtental, a village next to the Black Forest resort of Baden-Baden, to live for the summer in the Hotel Bären near Clara’s house. There began a sociable, brooding, and splendidly productive period.

BADEN-BADEN WAS THEN the most fashionable European watering place, with pleasure palaces and mansions full of royalty and Grossbürgertum making merry, taking the waters at the Kurhaus in hours away from gambling at the casino. It was said in midcentury, “When someone wants to know what is the principal city of Europe, one must answer him: in winter Paris, in summer Baden.”59 Artists found good pickings among the well-to-do French, English, Russian, and German vacationers blanketing the landscape in search of health, or at any rate entertainment. A number of musicians besides Clara had established summer houses around the resort. Concerts at the Kurhaus and in villas, by the local orchestra and prominent soloists, were a regular adornment of town life. That summer Brahms got to know Clara’s circle of Baden friends, and despite his own generally spartan style discovered he could find pleasure and profit in frequenting elegant spas.

The cottage Clara Schumann had bought for a retreat in adjoining Lichtental was so small and plain, in comparison to the great houses all over town, that her children, mortified, called it “the kennel.” Later they remembered their summers there with their mother as the happiest of their lives. In her memoirs, daughter Eugenie wrote of breakfast in an arbored garden, and watching the king and queen of Prussia, later Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany and his empress, promenade through town. As her father had done with her, Clara had the children’s days laid out like a military schedule: now time for piano practice (the older two girls taught by Clara, the younger ones by the older), now sewing, now exercise, and so on. Eldest daughter Marie ran the household, and in winter toured with Clara as her manager. Because of Marie, Eugenie wrote, their mother “could live entirely for her profession, untroubled by the onerous demands of everyday life.” Marie stayed at her post as long as Clara lived, packing the bags for tours, dressing her mother and arranging her hair before concerts, living in Clara’s shadow.60

Julie remained the darling of the family—blue-eyed and palely beautiful, vivacious, most of the time sick. Her sister Eugenie wrote of “her eyes, blue as the sky, beautifully set in her face … her hair, luminous as gold and fine as silk, framed her exquisitely white forehead … a face of such unusual charm that no one could look upon it without joy. Yet this would not convey the nobility which those features expressed, their radiance, the sweetness of disposition, the vivacity of her emotions and her mind.”61 Her sisters loved Julie as hopelessly as did Brahms and nearly everyone else.

In the relatively little time she could spend with them—mostly the Baden vacations—Clara was affectionate with the children. Eugenie remembered her mother’s shining smile whenever one of them entered the room while she was playing, and