Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [190]
Accident-prone Clara was then in Cologne for medical reasons, having injured her hand in one of her falls. She was taking the treatment, medieval and unbelievable but approved medical practice, of “animal baths,” which meant plunging her hand into the entrails of some freshly killed creature.11 As soon as her hand improved for whatever reason, she decided to head for London. Her news about going there again, she wrote Brahms, “will not please you,” but the money was too good to resist. “You will scold me, won’t you, dear Johannes? And yet if you were the father of seven children you would certainly do the same.”12 In fact, Brahms was about to start touring more extensively than he ever had or wanted to, for the money. No England or France for him, though, not now or ever.
It was in this period that he sent Clara new sketches for “a so-called Deutsches Requiem.” The work was to be a memorial for the dead—not the liturgical, Catholic requiem mass in Latin, but a personal testament in his own language. Brahms gleaned his text from Luther’s German Bible and the Apocrypha, shaping it to his own vision. Certainly the death of his mother was a catalyst, but the idea went back some time, maybe as far as the crisis of Robert Schumann. The basis of the second movement, “All flesh is grass,” came from the symphony Brahms had sketched—a somber sarabande standing in for a scherzo—just after Schumann jumped into the Rhine. For him the commemoration in the work would always be of both: Christiane Brahms, and his tragic mentor Schumann. Characteristically, Brahms never spoke of the connection with his mother, and growled when anyone asked him about it.
He probably started working on what he finally called Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) in Vienna shortly after his mother died. Its biblical atmosphere, and the joy he felt in conceiving the music, shines in a playful letter he wrote Clara from Vienna in April 1865, after she called off a visit to him. He begins with a musical notation for crescendo and diminuendo:
I send a sigh as big as that for starters!
I half expected it, though I have spent all these days cleaning up my room and trying to make everything nice. I had ordered new coffee cups, had the plates cleaned, and bought fireworks! preserves!…
I should be sincerely glad to hear that you had simply drawn a thick line through this winter in your book of receipts … and that you are thinking of bracing yourself with all sorts of edifying things, such as philosophy. The world is round and it must turn; what God does is well done; consider the lilies, etc.: or better still, don’t think at all, for things cannot be altered, and a wise man repents of nothing.13
He mailed her a draft for no. 4 of the Requiem, “How lovely is thy dwelling-place, O Lord of Hosts,” telling her not to show it to Joachim, who was with her in England. “It’s probably the least offensive part.… But since it may have vanished into thin air before you come to Baden, at least have a look at the beautiful words.… I hope to produce a sort of whole out of the thing and trust I shall retain enough courage and zest to carry it through.”14 The letter was prescient—the courage, the zest, and the “sort of whole.” Ein deutsches Requiem would be his abiding concern through the next year, interwoven with smaller but no less intimately felt projects.
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WORKING VACATIONS of four or more months were a reliable feature of his spring and summer now. In May 1865, Brahms returned to Lichtental near Baden-Baden, where he secured from a Widow Becker two quiet and gemütlich rooms on the top floor of a house on a hillside. “I came, saw and immediately took the first and best place,” he wrote Hermann Levi. There was a small bedroom, and for a study the “Blue Salon,” named for its blue-gold wallpaper.