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ängler said Brahms proclaimed “that there can be no development without man, beyond man. As a result he became the arch-enemy of all illusions.”24 In Dvořák’s terms, the terms of religion as he knew it, Brahms did not believe. But what Brahms expressed in this last song, setting Paul’s words to the Corinthians, was nonetheless a credo for himself and as best as he knew, for humanity, without illusions. For himself, however, it was a despairing testament.

It begins in E major with almost an ardent sweep, a little rhetorical like the gallant love songs in Magelone. But gradually that theme, and that sense of love, fall into tenderness and meditation: Youth becomes age, eros melts into agape.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels,

and have not love,

so I would be like sounding brass,

or a tinkling cymbal.

(Brahms says in that: without love, music is empty.)

And though I could prophesy

and understand all mysteries and all knowledge,

and have all faith,

even if I could move mountains,

and have not love,

so I am nothing …

We see now through a mirror in a dark word;

but then: face to face.

Now know I in part;

but then shall I know, as I am known.

For now, though, remain faith, hope, love, these three;

but love is the greatest of them.

With those words, set to a gently lilting three-beat, Brahms took his leave of music.

For himself it was a far more tragic leave-taking. Clara was dying: Clara whom he would not marry but could never let go. He had clutched his heart and cried out to Richard Heuberger: “Apart from Frau Schumann I’m not attached to anybody with my whole soul! And truly that is terrible and one should neither think such a thing nor say it! Is that not a lonely life! Yet we can’t believe in immortality.”

For Brahms, love had the face of Clara Schumann, his strange and eternal bride, his art and his life. When she died, love would die for him, and for him then music would be no more than sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. And so he would be nothing.

• • •

THE TELEGRAM came to Vienna on May 20, 1896, from Marie Schumann: “Our mother fell gently asleep today.” Clara had lingered since suffering a devastating second stroke on the night of the sixteenth. Earlier that afternoon, the last music she had heard was Robert’s, played by his grandson Ferdinand. Her last intelligible words, spoken to her daughter: “Poor Marie, you two must go to a beautiful place this summer.”25

The telegram set in motion a series of horrifying mistakes. Brahms’s housekeeper Frau Truxa, not realizing what the telegram contained, forwarded it to Ischl by mail. When he received it two days later, Brahms had only an hour to get on the train for Frankfurt, where he assumed the funeral service would be held. Exhausted, he decided to nap on the train and asked the conductor to wake him at Attnang, where he had to catch his connection. The conductor forgot and Brahms woke up to find himself speeding in the wrong direction. He was forced to wait all night in the Linz station for the next train. Finally after a full day’s travel he got to Frankfurt, only to find that the funeral was in Bonn, where Clara would be buried beside Robert. After a nightmare journey of over forty hours he arrived nearly prostrate in Bonn the next day. They had delayed the funeral, waiting for him, but when he arrived the procession to the grave was underway.26

Instead of joining the procession, Brahms stumbled behind some funeral wreaths, fell on the neck of his friend Rudolf von der Leyen, and sobbed.27 Finally he recovered enough to throw three handfuls of earth into Clara’s grave, next to her husband’s where Brahms had also thrown his handfuls, under the Schumann monument he had helped consecrate.

Afterward he visited von der Leyen and other friends for nearly a week, joining in an ongoing musical memorial for Clara. He said to Alwin von Beckerath, “Now I have nobody left to lose.”28 For a collection of friends, he played and sang though the Vier ernste Gesänge with tears streaming down his face. He could never bring himself