Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [373]
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WHEN BRAHMS HEARD from Marie Schumman of Clara’s stroke he wrote, “What a fright your mother has given us. I must ask you, if you think the worst is to be expected, to be so good as to let me know, so that I may come while those dear eyes are still open; for when they close so much will end for me!”18
The prospect long dreaded was at hand. Clara the indestructible was sinking. A few days after her stroke Brahms heard from his old friend Julius Grimm that his wife, “Pine Gur,” of the days in Göttingen with Agathe von Siebold, had died. Brahms wrote a short, concise note to Grimm. He was getting very experienced with letters of consolation.
Yet at his sixty-third birthday celebration in the garden salon of Zum Hirschen he was jolly and tipsy among friends from the Tonkünstlerverein. Brahms said he enjoyed the “pathos-free, gay tone” of the occasion, and after the usual ironic encomiums and toasts he made a wry little speech himself, in honor of the Verein board and “the beautiful pianists who have played and not played, the singers who sang and the young composers who have brought their first works to performance” in the year’s concerts.19 In later life everyone there treasured the memory of that evening, because there were no more like it.
He received a muddled birthday greeting from bedridden Clara: “Heartiest good wishes from your affectionate and devoted Clara Schumann. I cannot very well do anything more yet, but or soon Your—.”20
In the middle of May, Brahms made his seasonal pilgrimage to Bad Ischl. When he arrived at the Attnang junction at lunchtime, the chef of the train station emerged to say, “Herr Doktor, we have reserved the Salzburger Knockerln for you!” Brahms was befuddled but pleased. Heuberger had arranged by letter the treat of a favorite dish, meringue with fruit jam inside.21
Brahms arrived in Ischl carrying the manuscript of four lieder he had drafted in the first week of May, just after the news of Clara’s stroke. He called them Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), for low voice and piano. The texts are scriptural meditations on death, but still he called them serious, not sacred. To friends, with his usual irony, he dubbed them his “godless Schnadahüpferln,” meaning pagan harvest revels, yodeling ditties. In public he always denied that he had written them about Clara, and he dedicated them to artist Max Klinger, who had lost his father.
But in reality they are about Clara, who was the main thing on Brahms’s mind in those weeks. Later he admitted it privately when he played through the songs with Heuberger in Ischl: “They have to do with [Frau] Schumann. I didn’t exactly compose them on the occasion of her death, but the whole time I’ve been thinking about death, on which I have very, very often had opportunity to reflect! I wrote the lieder in May. I wanted to give myself something for my birthday! Don’t tell anybody … that I wrote the songs on the occasion of her death. I also don’t like to hear that I wrote the Requiem for my mother!”22
With the Vier ernste Gesänge Brahms once more found words from Luther’s translation of Scripture to speak for him, this time out of the secret recesses of his heart. In public, shrouding his feelings was second nature to him. Rarely did any tragedy or terror stop the flow of his garrulousness, the lusty appetite for food and drink and laughs, the evenings in the brothels. The real feelings he saved for his music, and usually there he sank them deep. But not this time, even though he would still wrap his grief in the highest perfection his craft was capable of.
For the purpose he once more invented a new kind of piece, but an invention erected firmly on his and his culture’s past. Malcolm MacDonald says that the Vier ernste Gesänge “extend the Lied tradition to accommodate the searching