Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [205]
Moreover, the stain of Hamburg prostitutes continued to taint all his response to women. He feared their sexuality, and like many self-protective, solitary men, feared even more the sexual and emotional power women wielded over him. In his comments about his attraction to women like Elisabet von Stockhausen and Ottilie Hauer, he used terms like “much to fear” and “make a fool of myself”—jokes, but symptomatic ones. The women artists he respected—Clara above all but also Amalie Joachim and any number of others—he treated as exceptions. In his mind, a manifestly superb musician transcended her sex. It was exactly those women he tended to imagine as virginal, untouchable—Clara, Elisabet, the singers he fell for. (Which is not to say that he did not flirt zealously with any number of singers.) If one of the young sirens married somebody else, fine. He at least would not despoil them, or allow them to weaken him. Degradation in erotic life. Even Clara could not completely escape the taint of her womanhood, if sexuality came into the picture. If he had discovered Clara’s affair with Theodor Kirchner it might have shattered his idolization of her. Near the end of their lives Brahms would say of Madame Schumann, “she is as fresh and virginal as ever.”
That is the more obvious import of Brahms’s letter to Clara. Still, he had written and probably spoken similarly of her performing over the years, and she had never responded with this outrage. Clara reacted according to her own anxieties, within another wretched period in her life.
Her immediate reaction was to see Johannes’s letter as an attack on her playing. In her biography, Nancy Reich writes that for Clara, to love her playing was to love her completely, to reject her playing was not only to reject her but to threaten her sense of meaning, her existence. Besides, she had been angry with Johannes for a long time, even before his foul temper of the previous summer. In September 1868, in the long miserable point and counterpoint that followed his letter of February, Clara wrote him, “The fact that for the last two years—that is to say, long before your letter—I have held aloof was owing to your last visit here. You appeared to be so uncomfortable with us and were so disagreeable … day after day … and gave so little thought to cheering me or making your visit as a friend at all pleasant, that it really was a more uncomfortable not to say miserable time for all of us.”70 The children felt the same she informed him, grimly. Meanwhile, in another letter (destroyed, but she cites it with appropriate disbelief), he had managed to charge her with “hatred” of him and/or his music. With these kinds of accusations going back and forth, things were spinning out of control.
Given Clara Schumann’s determination in her art, it is surprising how attuned to others and concerned about them she was—more so than most artists of her caliber, far more so than Johannes. The solitary labor of becoming and staying a virtuoso always threatens to drag one away from the rest of the world and its struggles. Clara did live in the world and in her family and friends, whatever the pain they caused her. In her endless list of tribulations, the sorrows of the Brahms family counted too, and the same with the Joachims and others close to her. She was entirely genuine in those concerns. But the piano came before all of them. If among the people in her life her children were her greatest concern, the piano still came first. It was true that Clara had to provide for her children, but she also used that as an excuse to justify her own drive to go before the public. As Brahms knew, Clara could have supported her family in other ways closer to home—teaching in a music school, for example. (There is no record that he ever urged her to get married, as she did with him.)
In other words, the vehemence of her response to Johannes’s letter