Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [222]
If the Magelone Romances disappoint as a set, they also represent another Brahmsian experiment toward opera that did not quite pay off. Yet he continued to solicit opera librettos from every quarter, and seems to have spent nearly as much time mulling them over as he had in composing the Magelone Romances.
Besides finishing the Magelone songs with perhaps a looming sense of irrelevance and mere diligence, his final work of that summer and fall, torn vehemently from his life, began in a lightning stroke on May 11, 1869. That day Brahms visited Clara in Baden-Baden and she told him she had news that he must be the first to hear: Count Vittorio Radicati de Marmorito had proposed to Julie, and she had accepted. Clara was astonished to see Brahms choke out a response and run from the house.
So that was it. Suddenly everything became clear to her: the reason not only for his flight but for his moods going back years, his rudeness, his awkward kindness toward Julie, her confused withdrawal, his restiveness in the Schumann house. Surely somewhere in his mind he had known that sooner or later, for a reason hopeful or tragic, the moment of losing his fantasy was inevitable. But when it came, the moment was no less terrible for that.
Now he suddenly went limp. “Johannes is quite altered,” Clara wrote in her journal; “he seldom comes to the house, and speaks only in monosyllables when he does come. And he treats even Julie the same way, though he always used to be so specially nice to her. Did he really love her? But he has never thought of marrying, and Julie has never had any inclination towards him.”23 Hermann Levi confirmed it to Clara: Brahms had spilled his feelings to Levi and probably to others. Likely there had been late-night sessions with Brahms anguishing, entreating friends to tell him what to do about her, what to do. Rumors that Clara never heard had been going around. That spring in a Hamburg shop, somebody innocently observed to Elise Brahms that a Viennese gentleman with her name was engaged to Clara Schumann’s daughter.
Clara had responded to the news of Marmorito’s courtship with her usual brooding and anxiety. She would be losing her favorite child, and she was frightened, for good reason, that childbearing might kill the delicate Julie. Clara’s customary response to most unexpected or unwelcome things was some mixture of suffering, despair, physical breakdown, outrage, and scolding. And now, after all that had happened between her and Johannes through the years, and just after they had come to a shaky resolution of a long quarrel, one or more of those would be her expected response to the revelation.
Her response was the opposite. The magnificent side of Clara Schumann came forward when Johannes’s helpless infatuation revealed itself. If she had no great insight into human nature, Clara seems to have understood the irrational impetus of love and respected it. She had broken with her father for the sake of a passion she regarded as holy, and maybe she saw all love as no less holy, even if hopeless. She could have taken Johannes’s love for Julie as a betrayal of herself. Instead, she saw it for the sad spectacle it was, between two people whom she loved. The chances are that she and Johannes never spoke directly about it at all. But for a long time Clara would be very gentle with him.
For his part, Brahms at first treated Julie’s engagement as a betrayal of himself, as if despite his unspoken feelings, despite the impossibility of the connection, despite Julie’s persistently avoiding him, he somehow owned her. So the news broke over him and he fled to his hill in Lichtental and probably did his crying there, alone. He was quite capable of that; his tears flowed easily. In those tears began one of the most affecting works of his life, the Alto Rhapsody.