Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [354]
At the beginning of October, Brahms was back in Vienna with the prospect of something he had never expected to experience again—two autumn premieres. He had a letter from Clara saying she wanted to publish her old Mozart concerto cadenzas, but had forgotten that he had actually composed parts of them. What should she do? “Let the cadenzas go out into the world in your own name,” he replied. “Even the smallest of J. B.s [on some of them] would only look strange.… Besides, if you did that I ought by rights to put under my best melodies ‘Really by Clara Schumann,’ for with only myself to inspire me nothing profound or beautiful can possibly occur to me! I owe you more melodies than all the passages and so forth you could possibly take from me.”26
They had loved each other nearly forty years, and spent the same years periodically torturing each other. Brahms had known other muses than her, and now was happy to find a new one in a contraption of ebony and reed. But that letter was the most touching testament he ever gave Clara Schumann. And there is no doubt that he meant what he said. Besides, of late Brahms had been increasingly mindful of her, mostly on his best behavior.
Her response to his testament was pleased but distant. Clara was seventy-two, suffering and distracted and depressed, no longer able to perform in public and so denied the main thing that had kept her alive and alert. (When she was able, she still played for students and friends.) Her deteriorating hearing threatened even her ability to enjoy music. After years of ghastly decline from morphine addiction her last son, Ferdinand, had died in June. At the same time the failure of her favorite student, Leonard Borwick, to make a splash in Vienna, despite Brahms’s string-pulling, had brought her near a nervous collapse. In the wake of that she and Johannes fell into a furious argument during a visit. Then in October 1891, for a completely unexpected reason, he got a fusillade of her wrath in his face.
Several times Brahms had written Clara of his preference for the first version of Robert’s D Minor Symphony, the manuscript of which he owned. He felt the revised version, the one then in print, had reflected mainly the weakness of Robert’s Düsseldorf orchestra. Clara had never really responded to Johannes’s queries. Not wanting to bother her again, he went ahead and did what he thought best in the Schumann Edition, on which they had long worked together. (It was issued between 1887 and 1893.) He arranged for old friend Franz Wüllner to edit the D Minor Symphony for Breitkopf & Härtel, in an edition with the original and revised versions on facing pages.27 When Clara learned from the newspapers that it was coming out, she was beside herself with fury that she had not been consulted.
Her first letter to Brahms about it does not survive, but his response implies that he did not yet understand how serious a breach threatened. “I hope your annoyance is only connected with the business side of the matter,” he wrote. It certainly was not the business, she shot back, but maybe it was Wüllner’s fault. “I alone am responsible for the publication of the symphony,” he responded with a sigh. “All this may sound too arrogant to you, as in your letter you seem to regard W. and myself not as two upright men and musicians, who are in your opinion perhaps misguided, though in their own opinions they are carrying out a sacred and holy task … but as in every respect the opposite.” He ended, “For an honorable man your letter of today is too hard and forbids my saying more.”28 It sounds like things Clara was accustomed to say to him. They forcibly calmed the waters for the holidays, but Clara’s outrage over the symphony publication would flare up again and again during the next year. In a series of skirmishes through those months the two of them fought bitterly and hard like two old lovers, remembering old wounds as they inflicted