Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [216]
Presumably Brahms showed Clara Schumann that summer’s lieder as a matter of course, but she remained oblivious to their mingling of old lost love and yearning for an impossible new love, in the person of her daughter. Clara was still stewing about Johannes’s letter saying she must cut back on performing, with its implication that she should spend more time taking care of her children. Despite their quarrel, correspondence between Brahms and Clara had not slacked particularly, and she was still busily investing his money for him.4 The tone of the letters remained chilly and tense, with periodic eruptions that not only inflamed the current feud but reopened old wounds.
By then Brahms understood well enough how insensitive he could be. He also knew that he could not explain Julie’s part of the reason why he had behaved so offensively for so long in the Schumanns’ house. But Clara’s onslaught in her letters was relentless. Before long, he began to crack. He would let his offending letter stand for everything that festered between them.
I cannot get the matter out of my head, dear Clara. I should like to answer your letter, which certainly contained many hard things, without any anger.… But I cannot.… You refer to my moods in Baden … I too had reason to complain that I had not been as successful as usual in trying to win sympathy in your house.… But I cannot get my letter out of my mind. I see it as a great wall standing between us.… I acknowledge that I may have spoken those words of truth perhaps at the wrong time, and perhaps in the wrong way.… But so much of the good friend remains that you can surely forgive him what needs to be forgiven. The crux of the whole matter is his old besetting sin—that he cannot write letters and cannot write diplomatically either.
He hoped this concession, a rare quasi-apology from him, would settle her down. Soon he followed it with a more personal token. On September 12, from the Bernese Alps during another vacation with his father, Brahms sent Clara a gesture of reconciliation more meaningful than she could have understood until years later. On a postcard he offered a few measures of music underlined with a greeting to her, noting, “Thus blew the shepherd’s horn today”:
His text reads, “High on the mountain, deep in the valley, I greet you a thousandfold.”5 That melody of an alpine shepherd’s horn—real or imagined—was to become the horn call soaring over strings, like sun breaking through clouds, that transfigures the introduction of the First Symphony finale. His greeting to Clara was a sign that now Brahms was preparing to pick up the C minor symphony movement he had drafted years before, and go on with it. So a horn call sent as a peace offering, destined to part the clouds of his first symphonic finale, can also stand for a breakthrough of his own—out of his lingering uncertainties in the weights and balances of a symphony.
But Johannes’s clarion call did not resolve the issues between him and Clara. She was not ready to forgive him yet. He had to cajole her still more abjectly, and he had to understand something about her and her art. She was not apologizing anymore for her need to play, or claiming the need for money as a reason:
That letter of yours is not the wall that stands between us.… It is not a matter of destroying any wall between us, but only of showing a little more friendliness and a little more control of evil moods.… I confess that my children were often angry when they saw how I suffered from your unfriendliness.… But I cannot help thinking that your view of my concert tours is an odd one. You regard them merely as a means of making money. I don’t!… The practice of my art is an important part of my ego, it is the very breath of my