Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [217]
Devotion like that Brahms could understand. Maybe now he did respect something about her more than before. Whether he did or not, he was prepared to make a full capitulation. From his point of view it was a straightforward if thorny matter: he loved Clara, he needed her, he could not imagine living without her. And their estrangement kept him from Julie. So he made a careful reply, in the affectionate and forthright terms he used with no one else, but this time with perhaps more secret motivation than usual:
I wanted a very quiet hour, dearest Clara, in which to put into words my heartfelt thanks for your letter.… There is so much that is true in your letter—if not all—and I must confess that with remorse and regret; but with pleasure and satisfaction I realise how kind it is—only an angel like you could have written so kindly.… Life is a wild polyphony, but often a good woman like you can bring about some exquisite resolution of its discords.
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AT THE END OF OCTOBER 1868 they got together in Oldenburg and reclaimed their old closeness. Clara reported in her journal, “He is as nice to me as he can possibly be.”7 They performed in several concerts in the area, the repertoire including Brahms’s four-hand waltzes of Opus 39. At a party they read through some new Hungarian dances that thrilled her. Probably they mulled over this month’s surprise: out of the blue Theodor Kirchner—-Johannes’s old friend and champion, Clara’s still-secret ex-lover—had married a singer.8
Perhaps Brahms showed Clara other things he was working on, another collection of Hausmusik designed to sell like the four-hand waltzes. He called this set the Liebeslieder (Love Song) Waltzes. They are confectionery tunes with a large helping of Viennese Schlagobers (whipped cream), for four-hand piano and vocal quartet. Daumer had translated their amorous texts from Slavic dances. The music testifies to Brahms’s love of both Strauss and Schubert waltzes, but like most such testaments of his they hardly resemble their inspiration; this is the Viennese waltz à la Brahms.
If he did show the Liebeslieder to Clara in Oldenburg, certainly he did not tell her that they were mainly inspired by Julie—written about her or to her, or to his dreams of her. Nor did Clara tell Johannes her news: in Divonne, a nobleman was courting Julie.
Happily unknowing, on into the new year Brahms added one lilting Liebeslied to another, and dreamed whatever dreams he allowed himself. The poems he chose for these waltzes suggest some of them:
Tell me, maiden dearest, who has with your glances roused these wild ardors in this cool breast of mine, will you not soften your heart?
When your eyes rest on me so kindly and lovingly, every last trouble that besets me flees.… No one will ever love you as truly as I.
Love is a dark pit, an all too dangerous well; woe is me, I fell in, and now can neither hear nor see.
These are typical Brahms song texts—evocative, slight, and by Daumer. There may well have been more Daumer songs composed that summer, on poems whose forthright eroticism would scandalize some of Brahms’s friends when he published them as Opus 57, in 1871. If 1868 is their date, they show the kind of fantasies occupying him near the denouement of an infatuation that seemed to possess him even as he recognized its unreality:
I dreamt I was dear to you; but I scarcely needed to awaken, for while still dreaming, I already felt that it was a dream.
In the yearnings of my nights, so utterly alone, with a thousand, thousand tears, I think of you.… Ah, the man who has looked upon your face … who has ever lost all his senses for joy upon your bosom.
The string on which pearl after pearl is arrayed about your throat—how happily it rocks to and fro on your beautiful breast!… What, then, must we feel … whenever we are permitted to intimately press such a breast!
In my mind burning desire swells, but in my veins life is flowing and longs for life.… Come, oh come, so that we can give each other heavenly satisfaction!9
TOWARD THE END of November 1868, Brahms left