Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [330]
Tell me if this rubbish is worth 1000 thalers apiece to you. Trio, quintet, Parzenlied. Speak right out! I shall certainly not complain that you have taken unfair advantage of my temporarily destitute condition. Actually you could have the whole bag of tricks for 1000 marks if you sent it right away. I don’t know what I shall have to live on in another week, to say nothing of rent and tailor.… In short, mull this over finely. I’m a man you can bargain with.
When Simrock tried, unsuccessfully of course, to buy Ein deutsches Requiem from Rieter-Biedermann, Brahms teased: “How were the stairs in Leipzig? Swathed in soft carpets? Fitted with comfortable banisters?” When he asked for money another time:
The so-often-praised goodness and charity of your Well-bornship give me the courage to approach with a great petition. My situation is terrible, a horrifying future stares me in the face; the abyss appears yawning before me, I fall therein—unless your saving hand draws me back. With the last one-mark note I must now proceed at once to the Igel restaurant—but with what feelings shall I eat, and indeed drink!56
Late in their long professional and personal relationship, Fritz Simrock became one of the last people Brahms honored with the intimate du.
At the end of May 1887, as Brahms prepared to leave on another Italian trip, he dined with Heuberger at the Café Czardas in the Prater. The day found him crowing with high spirits: “I tell you, the food is decent, goulash delightful, ham salad wonderful, good beer, good wine and a splendid Gypsy band!” Next day he headed for Innsbrück and thence to Italy with Fritz Simrock—and, in an experiment that did not turn out happily, Theodor Kirchner. As Brahms wrote Hans von Bülow, “Simrock’s happy thought of giving Kirchner a glimpse of the promised land delighted me, but now I feel it’s at least twenty years too late. At least, I suspect he only feels really at home when he sits down to dinner or supper, and can chat about the Gewandhaus and other splendors.” His and Clara’s old friend was sixty-four now, teaching at the Dresden Conservatory, settled in his gloom.57 In 1890, Kirchner retired to Hamburg to live out his last years.
WITH HIS UNVARYING SCHEDULE, Brahms returned from Italy and headed directly for his chosen summer retreat, once again Hofstetten near Thun, convenient to Josef Widmann. As he set to work on new pieces he began a new campaign with Clara: she had asked him to return her letters; now he demanded that she return his letters to her. The idea was to read them once more for old times’ sake, then destroy them while they had the chance. He was especially anxious because he did not have children to look after his legacy, to protect his privacy in history. “It is much more important that my letters should be sent back than that yours should,” he wrote Clara. “You can always have the latter, as can also your children.… But in case of my death, my letters have no one to go back to. That is why I most earnestly beg you to return them to me, and if I say send them quickly, please don’t think it’s because I’m in a hurry to send them to the bookbinders!”58
Clara agreed, then balked. When he sent some of her old letters she was both moved and horrified to read them: “I found them … one wail of sorrow,” she wrote in her journal, “and though this was justified by my hard fate, yet I should be sorry to think they would ever be made public.” She begged him to let her save some of his. Gently, he refused.59
Rarely is Brahms on record as being any more free with his writing. Once when musicologist La Mara asked to include something of his in a published collection of musicians’ letters, he replied to her, “I never write otherwise