Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [248]
Elisabet assessed her old admirer and appreciated what she saw. “He was not like the same person,” she wrote their mutual friend Bertha Faber in Vienna. “So many people suffer shipwreck on that dangerous shoal called Fame; but we all felt that it had mellowed him, and made him kinder and more tolerant.”12 In future years she had reason to revise that estimate, as she pressed her husband’s music on their resistant hero.
BRAHMS WAS BACK rehearsing the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in February 1874. On the day he performed Schubert’s Mass in B and the Schumann Manfred music, Clara wrote him in the afterglow of Leipzig, “How eagerly I drank in your wonderful creations, like the most exquisite nectar of flowers, and how they revived me at a time when I was more depressed than you can imagine.… I feel more desolate that I ever have before in my life.” She was, as it turned out, in the beginning of an eighteen-month siege when arm troubles—probably tendonitis or bursitis—prevented her from performing. For Clara, being denied the stage was an agony worse than physical pain.
In a following letter from Clara came a bit of gossip: Julius Stockhausen had been appointed head of the Stern Gesangverein in Berlin and, Clara wrote, “Joachim has been imprudent enough … to forbid his wife to sing at Stockhausen’s next concert.… At a large party … Frau Joachim exhibited such passion … that I was quite angry. Meanwhile, of course, the so-called ‘good friends’ of whom Simrock was one, egged her on.… Just imagine how Joachim’s enemies … rejoiced that she could make Joachim look such a fool.”13 Clara did not suspect what lay behind all this: Joachim’s festering jealousy of the men around Amalie, and of Fritz Simrock—Johannes’s friend and publisher—in particular.
Besides the regular Gesellschaft concerts in Vienna, Brahms undertook a good deal of performing elsewhere during the winter. In mid-February he headed for Munich to play the D Minor Piano Concerto under Levi, reporting it to Clara as well received. Around that time his letter of consolation to her about the declining Felix, to whom he was very attached, showed a surge of warmth and affection—of a kind, in fact, that Clara may never have written to him: “I feel your pain and anxiety all much too deeply,” he wrote, “to be able to express it to you in words. For I am so thoroughly accustomed to endure even my own suffering in secret and without making a sign.… Let this deep love of mine be a comfort to you; for I love you more than myself, and more than anybody or anything on earth.”
That July, Clara informed him that he had been elected an honorary member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and Sciences in Berlin. Brahms got the news in his summer quarters at Rüschlikon on Lake Zürich. As usual he was making himself unavailable to Gesellschaft queries, to the annoyance of the Committee, who needed decisions from him. The gemütlich setting of Rüschlikon was epitomized in a letter from friend C. F. Pohl, stuck in the Gesellschaft library in sweltering Vienna. Pohl imagined Brahms sitting “far away beside Lake Zürich, admiring the view at Nydelbad; he drives to Küssnacht, eats freshwater fish and crayfish in the ‘Sun,’ drinks the excellent red wine at Erlenbach, or even better lakeside wine at Mariahalden … and saunters along to Horgen, which is one fragrant rose garden in June.”14
In Rüschlikon, Brahms completed the waltzes he called Neue Liebeslieder, written to capitalize on the tremendous popularity of the first set, and perhaps some of the Opus 61 and 63 lieder and Opus 64 vocal quartets. Then he picked up the symphony whose first movement, possibly begun in the mid-1850s, he had showed to Clara and Joachim and other friends in 1862, when they expected to hear the premiere at the end of that year. By that summer in Rüschlikon the alpenhorn theme Brahms had sent Clara on a postcard in