Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [195]
In the coming year, after the birth of their second boy, Amalie would come down with acute rheumatism that left her hobbling painfully on a cane.29 At the same time she grew stout well beyond the already stout Germanic womanly ideal, and with her chronically weak health she could no longer tour with her impatient Jo. As Amalie’s letter to Clara that Christmas shows, her husband was critical of her as both housewife and artist. Less than two years after it began, the Joachims’ marriage was in trouble.
Brahms’s visit with them in Hanover was preparatory to a tour of Switzerland with Joachim, set for January 1866. Before that came the Brahms Week in Oldenberg that Albert Dietrich had organized; Brahms manned the keyboard in the D Minor Concerto, Horn Trio, A Major Piano Quartet, and works from his repertoire by Bach, Schubert, and Schumann. Then came the Swiss tour. One got a little crazed in a journey like that, the times onstage a blare of glory, otherwise hours and days of boredom in trains and hotels. During a post-concert banquet in Aarau, Brahms suddenly declared that he and Joachim must “divvy the swag” from their “crimes.” As the dinner guests cheered them on, the two began brigand-style to alternate grabbing from a pile of “doubloons” on the table until only one twenty-five-franc piece was left. Over that they fell into a brawl convincing enough that one guest fled the room and returned with change. Brahms and Joachim theatrically fell on the neck of their savior.30
After the tour, however, Brahms’s zest for performing waned and thoughts of Ein deutsches Requiem waxed. He visited Hamburg for three weeks, then headed for a stay with Julius Allgeyer in Karlsruhe to get back to work. This time he would keep at the piece until it was done.
While he was on tour, Clara had written him affectionately, “At last I am once again in my beloved Vienna, but you, dear Johannes, are not here; a thought that makes me sad, for Vienna seems to me almost like your home. Everybody asks me why you don’t come.”31 In Vienna as in most places, her concerts had caused a sensation; when Clara did not cause a sensation she might sink into depression. Meanwhile in getting onto a stage she had taken a bad fall and injured her foot.32
Vienna hurt Clara in other ways too. She had planned to do Johannes’s Horn Trio in a concert with Josef Hellmesberger, but “What a hornet’s nest of intrigue and pettiness I fell into!” After some gestures at rehearsing the Trio and the A Major Quartet, Hellmesberger finally refused to perform either one. Furious, but needing the violinist for her concerts, Clara bit her tongue and substituted another piece,33 but she did not forgive. “One cannot help thoroughly despising a fellow like Hellmesberger,” she wrote Johannes, trying to drive a wedge between him and a performer he needed even more than she did. “He plays me the dirtiest tricks and then proceeds to crawl before you.”34 None of that was news to Johannes. “He’s always lying,” he once said of the violinist, adding with a certain backhanded admiration, “Only when he plays does he stop lying.”
BRAHMS FINISHED the second and third movements of the Requiem in Karlsruhe and then took with him to Winterthur the growing pile of manuscript—of varying makes and sizes because at that point he could not afford music paper in bulk. This was a working visit with J. M. Rieter-Biedermann, whose firm would publish the piece. Then, continuing his wanderings with the Requiem as