Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [247]
Clara wrote congratulations. She was living in Berlin now, woeful as usual. “There is nothing to hear except Joachim’s quartet!!!” she wrote him. “The theater is only so-so, the Singakademie is conventional, the symphony concerts are incredibly dull.”8 Her son Felix was slowly dying, an arm was tormenting her, and her hearing had been acting up—the first symptoms of a growing deafness that would worsen over the years. To her astonishment, Clara had recently received a large inheritance from her late father, Friedrich Wieck, who once had all but disowned her for marrying Robert Schumann.
The previous autumn she had sent Johannes some of Felix’s poems with the observation, “Tell me frankly what you think of them—do not imagine that, like a weak mother, I fancy him a genius, on the contrary I am so afraid of overpraising the talent of [Robert’s] children that I daresay I often demand too much of them.”9 In December, as his Christmas present for Clara, Brahms made a robust, passionate setting of one of Felix’s delicate, slight lyrics, “Meine Liebe ist grün.” Clara was hard on her children, but also capable of grandly affectionate gestures. She didn’t tell Felix about Brahms’s setting of the song but instead made it a surprise. One night he came in to find his mother and Joachim playing over a lied. As Clara reported in her journal, “Felix came over and asked what the words were, and when he saw that they were his own he turned quite pale. How beautiful the song is.”10 The next summer Brahms sent them his setting of Felix’s “Wenn um den Holunder.”
If he had finally charmed the Philharmonic with the Haydn Variations, there remained one venue where Brahms had been often and painfully unwelcome—the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, where the orchestra regarded playing any living composer as an act of condescension. Through the efforts of a band of partisans, Brahms’s name had been acquiring some luster in the city. At the end of January 1874 he went to Leipzig for a week of his music, in which he would participate as pianist and conductor.
This time Leipzig began to warm a little to him, the Gewandhaus echoing to polite applause all week. Concertgoers heard Brahms playing in the Horn Trio, the Handel Variations, the old piano Ballades, the new Liebeslieder Waltzes. The big concert by the Gewandhaus Orchestra included the Haydn Variations and his new orchestral arrangement of three Hungarian Dances. Amalie Joachim sang the Alto Rhapsody, a work she had made her own. Clara came for the concerts, staying in the hotel and breakfasting every morning with Brahms, the Simrocks, and Amalie. In her report to Hermann Levi, Clara described the audience as calm but receptive, the orchestra spirited. For herself, music had once again raised her above the miseries of her life:
The variations are too wonderful!… That is the Beethoven spirit from beginning to end. And then the rhapsody, that marvelous piece, which I’ve never heard like that. Such pain, such despair, lies in the introduction, and what heavenly joy at the end! Then came the Liebeslieder and the three Hungarians for orchestra, how well done under his direction!… My heart rejoiced through the whole evening.11
Besides the satisfying memory of applause in a hall that had once resounded with hisses for the D Minor Piano Concerto, Brahms took home with him a new friendship. He had gotten to know Heinrich and Elisabet von Herzogenberg in Bonn, at the Schumann Festival the previous August, and this Brahms Week had largely been their doing. Elisabet was a renewed acquaintance—the former Elisabet von Stockhausen, the brilliant teenage piano student from his first year in Vienna, whom he had handed back to Julius Epstein in fear of falling in love with her. Now she was safely married and exquisite as ever, thus an ideal object for Brahmsian yearning. He could not realize yet how important her judgment would be to him in the next years, this nominal housewife and helpmate to