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By Root 1552 0

work—cropped up, and, sure enough, you treated us to the old story of [my brother] praising Heinrich’s quartet and … contemptuously dismissing yours (the B)—all this with a certain complacent irony, as if to say: Of course the man made a fool of himself once and for all. Now it was not a disinterested third person to whom you were speaking, but exactly the man whom you know to be the first to laugh at such an ignoramus … one who does not think himself worthy to unlace your boots, a seeker, a humble learner, who is a thousand times more upset by such over-rating than by the most withering criticism.… I cannot understand how you … could twice be guilty of such ungenerosity.… But let me tell you straight out that it was neither kind nor just in you, and therefore so unlike you that I can only hope it was a drop of alien blood.24

The little story that put Heinrich in his place had been, of course, quite like Brahms. Ethel Smyth heard of one bathetic scene in the house when Lisl tearfully chewed him out about Heinrich, and Brahms, near tears himself, could do nothing but kiss her hand. Lisl did not get over those episodes for a long time. A couple of them led to silences in the friendship.

All the same, there is nothing surprising about the persistence of the relations of Brahms and the Herzogenbergs. Whatever the frictions and disappointments among them, it was nothing on the order of what he was used to in dealing with Clara, Joachim, and any number of friends, not to mention his enemies. For over a decade, at least, the admiration outweighed the resentment. Heinrich after all had a distinguished career as composer and educator; only with Brahms was he the humble searcher. Each of them, even the earnest and hapless Heinz, received great gifts from the others, and each of them understood their value.

WHATEVER WAS ON BRAHMS’S MIND in the spring of 1877, something prodded him to compose a stack of lieder in April and May—the nine folk lyrics of Opus 69 (he subtitled them “Girls’ Songs,” then changed his mind), two for Opus 70, the five of Opus 71, two for Opus 72. At the end of April he mailed a batch to Clara, Lisl, and Billroth. In the accompanying note to Clara he observed, only half jokingly, “If possible write me a short comment on each. You need only give the opus or the number; for instance, Op. X, 5, bad; 6, outrageous; 7, ridiculous, and so on.”25 He warned her that the racy import of “Mädchenfluch” (“Girl’s Curse”) in Opus 69 would “horrify” her: “May God in the bright heavens grant that he should hang himself on a fatal tree—on my white neck!/May God in the bright heavens grant that he should be imprisoned deep in a dungeon—on my white breast!” (Was he thinking of Lisl’s white neck, which Ethel Smyth declared her chief beauty?)

“What a wonderful surprise!” Clara replied. “And how glorious the songs are!” She added a few qualms, with a suggestion “to publish the best of them in two books, and omit the few unimportant ones altogether.” (He published them all.) “Mädchenfluch,” she wrote, “is one of my favorites, the music is so full of swing and interesting from beginning to end, which makes me forget the ugliness of the words.”26

Once again the ongoing tragedies among Clara’s children were tormenting her. During his service with the Prussian army Ferdinand had come down with rheumatism and from the treatment acquired an addiction to morphine. At the same time Felix had upset Clara by proposing to publish his poems, which she feared might prove unworthy of the Schumann name. In despair, she turned to Brahms, who had already set two of Felix’s verses: “I wrote to him … that he must write under a pseudonym at first, in order to spare us any unpleasantness in case his attempts should prove unsuccessful.… This seems to have upset him very much.… Couldn’t you try to influence him a little regarding his aims in life … and try to revive his sense of duty toward his family?”27 Felix was then suffering from advanced tuberculosis. At least daughters Marie and Eugenie had never troubled Clara; both were unmarried and lived