Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [305]
Brahms surely enjoyed the earnest warmth of Clara’s response when he had finally sent it to her—even if she is shockingly, almost Lisztianly, tone-poetic in her imagery:
I have spent such happy hours with your wonderful creation. (I have played it over several times with Elise).… What a work! What a poem!… From start to finish one is wrapped about with the mysterious charm of the woods and forests.… The second is a pure idyll; I can see the worshippers kneeling about the little forest shrine, I hear the babbling brook and the buzz of the insects.… [In the finale] one’s beating heart is soon calmed down again for the final transfiguration which begins with such beauty in the development motif that words fail me!17
In fact, since Brahms regularly sent Clara critiques from Billroth and Elisabet von Herzogenberg, she had become anxious about her place in his life and music. Now others often saw new pieces before Clara did, and their eloquence in responding to them made her halting phrases seem inadequate. Some of her letters of this period apologize for that: “How wonderfully Billroth understands what to say to you.… His comments always make me feel ashamed—not because I think he feels or understands your things better than I do, but because his way of expressing himself makes mine appear so amateurish.”18 Maybe that is why she became more flowery in her prose, trying to match the literary responses of the other two. (Clara had always felt embarrassed about her education outside music.) Eventually, inevitably, that insecurity turned to anger. She suspected that Johannes might value Lisl’s opinion more than hers. In this period, he probably did.
For quite different reasons Joachim felt deserted by his friend, who had never sympathized with his accusations against Amalie. Joachim had finally sued for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Amalie challenged the suit, and in court produced in her defense Brahms’s 1880 letter: “with no word, with no thought have I ever acknowledged that your husband might be in the right.” Largely because of the letter, Amalie was vindicated and won the case. Joachim knew that Johannes had never intended the letter to be made public, but he considered it all the same an unforgivable betrayal. His friends would get many earfuls of his tirades against Johannes’s disloyalty. Then, probably many times, Joachim would pick up his violin and go out to give a magnificent performance of Brahms.
Toward the end of 1883 Brahms wrote forthrightly to Joachim: “In the sad affair of your wife I could never be on your side; I always had to deplore most profoundly the way you proceeded in this matter.… I can never regret having written that letter. For me, it was a good deed, a release, to be able to say to your troubled wife the same thing that I had often enough said to you.… But what a mess was brought out at the trial!”19 Surely he was thinking back to his old experiences with the violinist’s jealousy and insecurity, to the way Joachim used to sit on Johannes’s bed and plead endlessly for assurances of devotion.
Yet in this same letter Brahms held out his hand, asking Joachim if he wanted to give in Berlin the second performance of the Third Symphony. In reply Joachim brushed away everything but that gesture: “When I play your Concerto tonight I shall be taking your ‘proffered hand,’ and … I shall regard it as a great privilege if I can give the Symphony.” It would be years before their hands touched again in person, and the profound friendship