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By Root 1583 0

behind his work, of course, is part of Brahms’s biography. From early in life he found his identity in hiding. He read poetry as he played piano in brothels, assumed the masks of Young Kreisler and Werther, used his music to intimate songs and ballads without words, and stories and people he loved. Finally music itself became the veil Brahms drew across his life, even as his life resounded in his music. In that paradox he touched a deep stratum of German Romanticism, its sense of music in the abstract as a manifestation of an unseen world—the inexplicable powers that E. T. A. Hoffmann suggested in his Doppelgängers, his labyrinths of stories within stories, his games of identities, the cryptic sufferings and designs of Kapellmeister Kreisler. In Brahms, the line where autobiography shades into abstraction cannot be drawn. For most of his later and greatest music—including the symphonies and most of the chamber music—he left no hint of unseen implications.

Which, again, is not to say that after the G Major Sextet he drew nothing from life. Every great sorrow, perhaps every great joy, Brahms encountered found its echo in his work. One of the few advantages of being an artist in the first place is that unlike any other profession, your very sorrows and joys are stock in trade, grist for the mill—always the sorrows more than the joys. Brahms made use of his life at the same time as he patiently taught himself the craft to transcend it, to a degree his mentor in subjectivity, Robert Schumann, never entirely achieved.

Agathe, farewell. Brahms asked the G Major Sextet to be his farewell to love and the agitations of the heart. He wanted the story of his life to be finished, leaving only music and uncomplicated Gemütlichkeit with friends, which he pursued avidly but without promises. Much of the time, outside music, he lived like a boxer between rounds.

Yet a desire to escape life and its consequences could not work for one living as gregariously as Brahms did after the day’s work was done. His old dream of existing monklike, above the regrets and yearnings of the human comedy, could never be realized. He tried to hide behind sarcasm, peevishness, discipline, jokes, and fame. When one friend fell away he turned without apparent regret to others. But now and again the world and his feelings broke through every barrier he erected against them. He would have another consuming love to trouble and inspire him, in some ways the most lacerating of all, because the most hopeless.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

They That Mourn

CLARA SCHUMANN came to Hamburg on tour in December 1864 and visited the Brahms family, troubled before, broken now. She reported to Johannes in Vienna:

My heart was filled with anguish at your mother’s to see everybody scattered like that. Oh what misery! Your mother and Elise cried the whole time, and then there was your father who unburdened his heart to me. Each of them in turn said they could answer before God for every word they had uttered. I tell you, it has made me thoroughly ill.1

Clara’s sympathies lay unequivocally with mother and daughter. With dismay she had discovered that Johannes seemed more concerned for his father. He had sent the women of his family a hundred talers, but that had barely covered their dental bills and rent.2 Stepping into the crisis, Clara told Johann Jakob that he must contribute more to their upkeep; his son could not be expected to support mother and sister. Johann Jakob told Clara the women could damned well take him to court if they wanted to. Johannes began dispatching cash to Hamburg whenever he had enough, half of it to his father even though Johann Jakob still had his position with the Philharmonic and his freelance work. When his father complained about Clara’s meddling, Johannes replied heatedly, “I’m telling you, you don’t have to explain one word to Frau Schumann.”3

Through it all Johannes sustained a fantasy of coaxing his parents back together. In October he wrote his father, “That Mother and Elise have reserved a room for me would please me indeed if I could