Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [324]
WITH BRAHMS STILL ESTRANGED from Joachim and Bülow, in spring 1886 there was an interruption of his correspondence with Elisabet von Herzogenberg. This dissonance resulted from some malicious rumors about Brahms that Lisl had gotten wind of. She was even more shocked when Brahms appeared completely to ignore the unexplained interruption in her letters. At the end of the year, when she learned that the rumors had been false, she wrote him about the Second Cello Sonata he had sent her, with hardly a mention of the break, and they simply picked up where they left off.29 From long experience Lisl knew there was little point in belaboring Brahms for his obliviousness.
Soon after that he made a circuitous gesture of reconciliation to Hans von Bülow. He stopped by the conductor’s Vienna hotel and left a message, unsigned, consisting of a few notes from Mozart’s Magic Flute. Brahms knew the conductor would realize who left the note and remember the text for that line of music: “Dear one, shall I see thee no more?” In his fashion it was a touching, even sentimental gesture. Bülow hastened to Brahms’s house to make peace. They were a team again.
Then Clara unleashed a blast. It had much to do with her fears that she had been ejected from the inner circle of those whose opinions Brahms most valued. Her physical woes and hearing loss had made it harder for her to play through his work, and slower to respond to it. Some of his Viennese friends seem to have been hostile to her, and if so that would not have escaped her: she would be brooding on the laughter at her expense during meals in the back room of the Igel. Depression over her ills and jealousy of Elisabet von Herzogenberg’s hold on him contributed to Clara’s mood as well.
In the middle of all that Brahms wrote her the incredible accusation that she considered his sending her music a “nuisance.” His letters from the period have not survived, but they are reflected in hers: First, “Why are you sending me nothing more? Do you want to leave your old friend quite out in the cold?” Then, “Your last letter but one wounded me so deeply that all I could do was to send you a card telling you what was absolutely necessary.”30 Before long the two patched up these disharmonies, but as so many times before the scars lingered.
Clara was feeling eclipsed in other ways too. Franz Liszt had died in July 1886, during a visit to Bayreuth. He and Joachim had made peace by then, but her enmity was unshaken. In her journal Clara commemorated his passing this way:
He was a great piano virtuoso, but a dangerous model for the young to imitate. Almost all the rising pianists imitated him, but they lacked his mind, his genius, his delicacy of touch, so that now we have nothing but great masters of technique and a number of caricatures.… [His pieces] are trivial, wearisome, and they will soon disappear now that he has gone.… As a young man he was most fascinating but later he let so much coquetry blend with his really intellectual and charming disposition that I often found it disagreeable.31
When Clara edited her husband’s C Major Fantasy for the complete edition, she deleted from the title page Robert’s dedication to Liszt.32 She had said of her rival, “He has the decline of piano playing on his conscience.” But Liszt’s bravura style of pianism had triumphed, leaving Clara a relic of the past. Someone who saw one of her late performances of Robert’s concerto remembered only:
a dumpy old lady in a cap. She was greeted with long-continued applause. She seated herself at the piano, and after half a dozen elusive settlings of herself and shaking out of her gown, just as the conductor was about to begin, she popped