Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [200]
Beyond all that lay the chronic, unspoken infatuation weighing on him: Julie Schumann, more beautiful year by year and seemingly sicker as well. Clara anguished in her diary in July 1867, “It makes one wretched to see Julie, she looks so miserably ill.”51 She wrote that note in Baden while her daughter was staying in Divonne. When Julie suffered a serious crisis there at the end of the year, Clara was about to begin a tour of Belgium, so in her stead she sent Marie to take care of Julie.52
From whatever causes, in summer of 1867 Brahms felt more ill at ease in the world than usual. He sent Clara new songs including “Herbstgefühl” (“Autumn Mood”), written that spring and the bleakest of the bleak songs of Opus 48: “Thus does a cold day, somber as night, send chills through my life. Why should you still tremble at death, my heart, with your eternal beating!” Brahms scholar Ira Braus calls “Herbstgefühl” a “pessimistic, disillusioned grandchild of Schubert’s ‘Der Lindenbaum.’ ” Its neighbors in the set are “Trost in Tränen” (“Consolation in Tears”) and “Vergangen ist mir Glück und Heil” (“My happiness and joy have fled”). Clara responded that she could not play “Herbstgefühl” without tears. She had no idea what was oppressing him, but she did her best to address it: “I should be pained indeed if I believed that you often felt like that [meaning “Herbstgefühl”]. No, dear Johannes, a man like you with all your gifts and in the prime of life, with his career still before him, ought not to harbor such gloomy thoughts. Make a home for yourself soon, find some well-to-do girl in Vienna … and you will become more cheerful.” Thus perennially doleful Clara gives advice she would be no likelier to accept than he would. (Her letter continues on a practical note: “Send as much money as you can to the new Government Stocks.”)53
If Clara’s platitudes could not get Brahms out of his funk, something else did—a banner event, a vacation with his father.
AT THE END OF JULY 1867, a young violinist called on Johann Jakob Brahms at Valentinskamp and found him packed and dressed for the trip. “My Hannes has invited me,” the old man announced gravely. “I am to travel with my Hannes.”54 (In Plattdeutsch: “Min Hannes het mi inladt; ick reis mit min Hannes.”) His son had extended the invitation a few days earlier, writing, “Don’t think about it too much, just consider that in your old age the trip will get harder and less enjoyable with every year.”
Johann Jakob had hardly been anywhere in his life outside the vicinity of Hamburg and Heide. And he had little idea of the torments his son planned for him. But he studied the railway schedules Hannes forwarded, said his first farewell to Karoline, and set out for Vienna. Just after he arrived, Josef Gänsbacher found the legendary forebear in his son’s flat and, on the son’s request, sang some Brahms for the occasion. Though Hannes’s music like his person was a closed book to him, Johann Jakob expressed something in the area of pleasure. In Vienna, Brahms got visible delight from showing off his father to friends, displaying the old man’s country Plattdeutsch and his yarns and his attempts at dignity. Brahms’s beaming face seemed to say: This is what I came from. One Frau von Bruch was so charmed with Johann Jakob that she traded letters with him for the rest of his life, mailing him reviews of Johannes’s music.55
During the next days father and son toured the Schönbrünn Palace, catching the splendiferous sight of Emperor Franz Josef holding court with the Pasha of Turkey. Then, in company with Gänsbacher for the first part of the trip, father and son headed for the Styrian Alps. The old man had never seen an actual Alp before and gawked to his son’s satisfaction. The Gründlesee Johann Jakob declared “just like the Alster back home in Hamburg.” Then he discovered that Hannes actually planned to drag him to the tops of the mountains. His father had to submit to the regime of everyone who traveled with Brahms: he did what he wanted, and you either went along or he was gone, usually