Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [340]
Though in his cups Brahms had said the same thing himself, he was terribly hurt by that insult to his family from one of his closest friends. As usual, he refused to acknowledge his feelings. He wrote Hanslick, “You need not worry yourself in the slightest. I barely read the letter … and only shook my head quietly. I shouldn’t mention anything to him about it.… I am long since calm and take it as a matter of course.”27 Always he played Brahms the indifferent. At the same time his silence only made his pulling away from Billroth more painful and inexplicable for the ailing man. As with Joachim and others, reconciliation would come eventually, but it would be slow and incomplete.
THAT AUTUMN, Brahms sent Clara the completed Third Violin Sonata. She was suffering from neuralgia and could not touch the piano, so daughter Elise and a violinist played it through for her. Despite her hearing that distorted everything, Clara responded to the piece with youthful warmth: “I marvelled at the way everything is interwoven, like fragrant tendrils of the vine,” she wrote him. “I loved very much indeed … the third movement, which is like a beautiful girl sweetly frolicking with her lover—then suddenly in the middle of it all, a flash of deep passion, only to make way for sweet dalliance once more.”28
These are shockingly amorous words from Clara Schumann, especially in her fretful and unhappy age. They sound in fact like an old woman’s fond memories rather than a scene imagined. Later, Brahms responded in kind to another letter of hers: “It’s really too lovely and delightful to think of my D Minor Sonata flowing gently and dreamily beneath your fingers. As a matter of fact I laid it on my desk and in my thoughts wandered gently with you through the maze of organ-points, with you still beside me, and I know no greater pleasure than this, to sit at your side, or, as now, to walk beside you.”29 Here for once may be a clue, if no definitive one, to what relations Clara and Johannes had had thirty-five years before. Maybe after all there had been some sweet dalliance. We will never know.
More to the point, Brahms spent half the summer of 1888 at the difficult task of forcing 15,000 marks on Clara. He knew that taking over Ferdinand’s children stretched her resources at the same time that her health put her performing in abeyance, maybe for good. Ferociously independent as always, even if she had been bedridden much of the time, Clara put him off. Finally he simply sent the money and she convinced herself that she had to keep it, but only as a favor to him: “What ought I to do? Ought I to sent it back to so old a friend? I could not do that. I had to keep it and thank him for it; there was nothing else to do.”30
In those days the Herzogenbergs were staying in Nice, both of them better after a miserable siege of bad health. “Before, I could not carry a pound’s weight without gasping,” Lisl wrote Brahms in September. Now, with a little strength back, she returned to detailed critiques of his work. About one of his new songs she observed sarcastically, “Why don’t you indulge in a hideous harmony like this one at the end more often, so that our ears might grow accustomed to it!” That letter was largely made up of detailed complaints about most of the songs he had sent her, though she loved the Zigeunerlieder. After a following letter, in which she expressed jubilation over the Third Violin Sonata, Brahms responded warily, “If maybe you made the last letter too sugary from sheer kindness, send the pepperbox