Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [288]
Adding to the distractions of the weather and his health was the final collapse of Joachim’s marriage to Amalie. Brahms wrote the violinist in July, “It has made me very sad and is constantly in my thoughts. You had so much in common, which gave promise of a long and happy life together. And now!—I find it hard to believe there is any really serious cause for it.”17 That implies he may not have known yet the reason Joachim was repudiating his wife: his conviction that Amalie was having a liaison with Fritz Simrock. Though others joined in Joachim’s suspicions, Brahms felt sure the idea was the product of his friend’s chronic brooding and jealousy. From the beginning, Joachim had resented his wife’s performing career; even though Amalie gave up the operatic stage for him, she still concertized. Meanwhile, he was often away on tour and Amalie had suffered long periods of illness.
In that lacerating moment Joachim fell back on his old friend for support and sympathy. But he found none—instead, the worst break of their historic collaboration and their long love/hate relations. For once, it would not be Brahms’s callousness and self-protectiveness that forced the break, but rather his decency and honesty. He made a special trip to Joachim’s summer place in Salzburg, and there amid the usual playing tried to talk sense to his friend. Joachim listened, appreciated the concern, but could not be shaken out of his chimeras. He wrote Johannes in December with a weary, clinging self-pity:
You know, dear friend, what great weight I attach to your judgment in matters of common humanity, that I reckon you as shrewd and upright, but in my experiences with the Simrock person I can go only on what I have found myself to be true.… He has acted toward me like the most crafty scoundrel; through him, my life is night. I must learn to bear my fate like a man; but the poor, poor children!—that grieves me unutterably.18
Indeed, Brahms was too shrewd and upright to share his friend’s delusions. He knew all about Joachim’s suspiciousness and his relentless demands for affection, all exacerbated by years of unrelenting work. (Even Clara found Joachim’s schedule appalling; day after day in their English tours he had dashed nonstop from concerts to rehearsals and back.) Brahms admired Amalie, her person as well as her voice, too much not to accept her protests of innocence. At the end of the year he sent her a long reassurance, which said in part:
Let me say first and foremost: with no word, with no thought have I ever acknowledged that your husband might be in the right.… Despite a thirty-year friendship, despite all my love and admiration for Joachim, despite all our artistic interests … I am very careful in my association with him … and would never think of wishing to live in the same city joined with him in collaborative endeavors. At this point I perhaps hardly need to say that, even earlier than you did, I became aware of the unfortunate character-trait with which Joachim so inexcusably tortures himself and others.… The simplest matter is so exaggerated, so complicated, that one scarcely knows where to begin with it and how to bring it to an end.… His passionate imagination is playing a sinful and inexcusable game with the best and most holy thing fate has granted him.19
After dispatching the letter to Amalie, Brahms wrote Simrock, “I am freed from a burden, that I could finally say