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By Root 1285 0

than reluctantly, hurriedly, and carelessly, but I am ashamed when an example like yours comes to my attention … no one can do me less of a favor than to print letters of mine.… It pleases me to save a letter from Beethoven as a memento; but I can only be horrified when I imagine all the things such a letter may be taken to mean and explain!” He felt similarly about minor works and manuscripts: leave them in libraries for scholars, don’t let them fall into the wrong hands (biographers, by definition, being the wrong hands).60 Still, in his response to the musicologist all that was preparatory to making an exception for one letter that he did allow her to print. If he specifically chose to let something out, then fine. More than a particular piece of his private life, it was the reins over his private life that he never wanted to give over to historians.

As Clara grappled with the letters and memories, her son Ferdinand had sunk so far into morphine addiction that she had to take over support of his children, and at the same time her daughter Elise’s four-year-old died. One of Julie’s children had died as well—her favorite. Still, while all that was going on Clara became ecstatic over the new C Minor Trio: “No previous work of Johannes has so completely carried me away.… How happy I was this evening—happier than I had been for a long time.”61 Taking a break from his labors in June, Brahms attended the Cologne Music Festival, then visited Clara in Frankfurt. She wrote, “Sorrowful feelings, as always, when he leaves.”62

The Cologne Festival was a function of the New German–dominated Allgemeinen Deutschen Musikverein. Brahms played in a performance of the C Minor Trio, premiered earlier in Vienna. His old friend Franz Wüllner was directing the festival, and with Liszt and Wagner both dead Brahms was ready for a gesture of reconciliation toward the opposition. He even endured a performance of Liszt’s Legend of Saint Elisabeth. At the end he reported to Clara: “Everything went off in the happiest and most delightful fashion. Wüllner did his work excellently.… The company about me, both young men and girls, were fair to look upon and jolly, and finally at Rüdesheim we sampled as much of the best wine as we possibly could.”63

After returning to Thun he also returned to his campaign about the letters. “I become abundantly convinced that it would be a crying shame to destroy them,” Clara pleaded, to which he replied mildly,

We are behaving in a remarkable manner about our letters! I have always secretly meditated an exchange but did not dare to utter the word. I then sent your letters, but didn’t have the courage to look into them and read them beforehand, because I took it for granted that if I did I would not be able to send them away. But you are a regular fraud. You start the whole ball rolling, send nothing, and go on reading.

Shortly afterward he gave her the rest of her letters to him, and with a flood of tears she handed over his.64 In reality, Clara appears to have lied about how much she destroyed. She kept back many copies, or perhaps originals. And after Brahms had torn up many of his own letters and consigned them to the nearest river, he also preserved some, perhaps planning to burn more eventually, never quite getting around to it.

In the above letter he also reported to Clara his main project for summer 1887:

As to myself, I can tell you something funny, for I have had the amusing idea of writing a concerto for violin and cello. If it is at all successful it might give us some fun. You can well imagine the sort of pranks one can play in such a case.… I ought to have handed on the idea to someone who knows the violin better than I do. (Joachim has unfortunately given up composing.) It is a very different matter writing for instruments whose nature and sound one only has a chance acquaintance with … from writing for an instrument that one knows as thoroughly as I know the piano. For in the latter case I know exactly what I write and why I write it as I do. But we’ll wait and see.65

There is great uneasiness