Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [353]
The music so clearly looks back on lost love with a distillation of Brahmsian yearning, what MacDonald calls “every super-refined shade of silver-grey regret.”23 Yet it is also a song to new love. It is Fräulein Klarinette herself that seems to create the sweetness, and the staccato contrasts. The sighing quality of the music is made from nuances unique to the clarinet. When a flurry of notes sweeps from low to high, it sweeps through the colors of the instrument from the lush low tones to the delicate high ones. The urgent moments are the urgency of the high register when it is loud and piercing. The vertiginous gypsy melismas of the second movement arise from another mood of the instrument, and likewise, the third movement’s combination of a flowing andantino and a rhythmical presto with sharp-tongued staccatos. The finale’s variations are portraits of the clarinet in its nuances of timbre, articulation, and dynamics, ending on a dying series of chords, piercingly lonely.
As late as the Double Concerto, after writing hundreds of pages of string music, Brahms had still complained: “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.” Perhaps we can call these late clarinet works his reconciliation with instrumental color and technique, a dimension of music in which he had floundered while composing the First Piano Concerto and in some degree resisted ever since, even as his orchestral skill and imagination mounted. Perhaps the clarinet pieces are the only true love songs to an instrument Brahms ever wrote.
In the quintet even more than in other works, Brahms also demonstrates as well as any composer that some of the greatest art exists near the edge between sentiment and sentimentality, but has a fine sense of where that edge lies, and how to stay on the right side of it.
AS HE WORKED on the clarinet pieces in Ischl in the summer of 1891, once more in his rented rooms on Salzburgerstrasse, Clara wrote him a new report on Elisabet von Herzogenberg, sad in what it reveals both of their friend’s health and Clara’s jealousy: “Frau Herzogenberg is much better.… Her doctor, who is here now, declared that she was so bad for a while that she was at death’s door. I am not sure that the unbridled ambition of this good lady does not do her a lot of harm by keeping her in a constant state of agitation.”24 Clara Schumann impugning a woman’s ambition! Brahms made an abysmally dispassionate reply, saying he was glad to hear Lisl was better but:
I had no news of them, even indirectly for a long time, and I am growing accustomed to not hearing from them. Yes, ambition! It looks as though the same things were happening with them as has already happened with X—. In both cases intercourse with them has become impossible owing to their otherwise quite amiable wives.… One finds it impossible to discuss an artist’s work with him, and perhaps to criticize it, if his wife is listening, not to mention arguing with me. Alone with the men, I could come to some conclusion, and then how happy I should be to enjoy the company of the ladies afterward!
In her last letter Clara had described herself as “continually racked with pain now in one place and now in another.” For the moment she could not walk. Still, in his reply Brahms invited her to come to the premiere of the new clarinet pieces in Berlin: “To listen to the clarinet player would