Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [204]
If only you could be a listener on Good Friday [in Bremen] I should be more happy than I can say. It would be as good as half the performance for me.… I am resigning myself to the thought that this time, as in Vienna, it will go … too fast and too sketchily. But do come!!
I never thought that you had spent your Christmas without Julie. How sad for you that the poor girl (of whom one cannot think without a certain emotion) was so far away and ill into the bargain. For when one sees Julie one thinks of all illness as being far away, although she is so delicate. But I still hope that she will eventually grow out of it. It is true that she is now grown up, but if I were in your place I should still have this comforting hope. Only I can’t very well talk to you about it.…
I’m now feeling sorely tempted to find an unfurnished apartment for myself in Vienna.… How much it would help me to know whether you might be thinking of moving there sooner or later.… I should like to implore you to bear in mind that someday your unsettled way of life must come to an end. There is only one thing you have to consider, and it applies … to me too, and that is, whether it is necessary for you to earn money this way.67
He rambled mildly on. Clara had given him Robert’s old Graf piano and it was kept by Frau Rösing in Hamm, but she was moving, so what should he do with it? He had gotten too stout for his fur coat. He railed about his sister Elise’s accepting a proposal from a Hamburg watchmaker. About this “unsuitable” marriage Brahms wrote, “Surely it is enough that I should have refrained from putting this sweet draught to my own lips [i.e., getting married] on her account!” One can hardly believe Brahms would pass up marriage in deference to his sister.
No amount of changing the subject would save him now. Surely Brahms did not suspect how hugely his words about Clara’s “unsettled way of life” would blow up in his face, or how long she would make him pay for them. Was it a carefully planned campaign of his, or another offhanded remark that hit the wrong note? And what lay behind it?
Given her fury, Clara’s response, written from London, was measured:
You really seem to be living under the illusion that I have enough and am touring for my own entertainment. But surely one would not make all these exertions merely for pleasure! But apart from this, the present moment when my powers and success are at their zenith is hardly the time to retire from public life, as you advise me to do. The whole of the past year I have been received so enthusiastically everywhere, all my concerts have been so packed … and with but few exceptions I have played so well, that I can hardly understand why I should stop precisely now.… But I will think the matter over, for I cannot weigh it properly until I know what reasons you could have had to say all these things to me, and why you should have done it at a time when they might make such an impression upon me as to paralyze all my powers.… It was inconsiderate of you, I shall say no more.68
Behind what was to become one of the most painful episodes in their over four decades of relation lay a morass of feelings, prejudices, habits, old frictions, resentments, and guilt. Some of what underlay the quarrel is obvious, some of it perhaps so secret as never to be spoken between them or even admitted to themselves.
Despite his boundless respect for her, Brahms never took Clara’s performing career as seriously as she did. She knew that and resented it. Partly it was because he did not take piano-playing seriously for himself, so had trouble conceiving why anyone else would—motivations outside his own were perennially incomprehensible to Brahms. Besides that, his letter resonates with the misogyny that made him suspicious of all women. His letters and conversations were peppered