Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [239]
Brahms required his friend, in other words, to understand that even an apparent withdrawal might express a fervent desire. As he wrote to Clara in later years, “I always write only half-sentences, and the reader himself must supply the other half.”27
From that point ill will shuttled back and forth among a collection of highly prickly personalities. Clara had been put out over some recent words of Johannes as well, and showed them indignantly to Hermann Levi, who in turn wrote in an effort to placate Joachim, “I could not help giving Frau Schumann a lecture or two on her behavior towards Brahms.… She showed me a letter from [him] which I was expected to consider inconsiderate, cold, and unkind, which … I was not able to do.… He is just himself.… Will you not write to him now in a friendly, pleasant way, and just explain why you are not singing the Requiem?”28 Meanwhile, Clara wrote similarly to Joachim, trying to calm him down about Johannes’s letter: “I do not think the letter to you is so very bad, merely cold. I fancy he would really have liked to conduct, and was perhaps offended because he was not definitely invited to do so by the Committee, and I think he is justified in this.”29
Joachim would have none of these attempts to calm the waters. Now that his blood was up he dispatched a blast to Johannes that looks like one he had been saving up for a long time:
Let us be quite frank. For the last few years, whenever we have met, I have always felt that your manner towards me was not what it used to be.… No doubt I have disappointed many of the hopes you set on my development, and have been more indolent that you liked in many respects.… What more natural than for me to imagine that you regarded our old intimacy … as something embarrassing rather than desirable.… You wanted a reassuring answer. I wonder if this is one?30
It was of course not at all reassuring, but Brahms made no counterattack. (The “disappointed hopes” probably refers to Johannes’s old ambitions for Joachim as a composer.)
In the middle of all this bile and trouble, Clara discovered something that made her really apoplectic. She had been accepting a stipend from the Schumann Committee, but learned that some of it came from concerts other people had been advertising and presenting for her benefit. Nothing could have outraged Clara more than the idea of lesser musicians performing on her behalf. In an ecstasy of rage she spluttered to Johannes:
I am now to allow other artists to give concerts for me, and to this end to suffer the publication of such mendacious advertisements for the collection of more money! It is an indignity. I am so thoroughly infuriated, I do not know what to do.… I must be vindicated. The fact must be stated in the leading Vienna newspapers that the whole thing is a lie and that I knew nothing about the concerts.… Then steps must be taken to prevent so much as a farthing of the receipts from coming to me.31
After the tempests had run their course the main repercussions fell on relations between Joachim and Brahms. Their friendship had been deteriorating for years, and after the misunderstandings over the Requiem the decline only accelerated.
Everyone expected Brahms to boycott the Schumann Festival because of the imbroglio, but that August he turned up in Bonn. If studiously glum, he refrained from making a scene. Finally he was cheered by Clara’s performance of the Schumann Piano Concerto and its reception. There was an extraordinary demonstration as Clara appeared onstage, with trumpet fanfares from the orchestra, thousands of the audience standing and shouting and waving handkerchiefs. Eugenie Schumann described it to a friend:
At last Mama was allowed to seat herself at the piano. She looked so beautiful—like a young girl, a bride, a child. Her dress was lovely, and the effect was heightened by a rose in her hair.… Brahms himself said that he