Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [53]
Before Brahms left Joachim said: you must introduce yourself to Robert and Clara Schumann in Düsseldorf, which after all is on the way. Brahms replied, not after that experience with the unopened parcel in Hamburg. Forget that, Joachim said: ring the doorbell. There the matter rested. As Brahms left they agreed to meet in Hanover in October, when Joachim had returned to work at court.
Brahms’s Rhine journey, intended only to explore that most Romantic of rivers, would be one more instance when serendipity shaped momentous things.
IN THE LAST DAYS OF AUGUST, Brahms hiked along the lower Rhine Valley, exulting in the medieval villages, the Lorelei cliffs, the hillsides covered in vineyards and watched from the heights by ruined castles. Excited by the scenery so long anticipated, electrified by the events of the past weeks, in a few days he covered over a hundred kilometers to Bonn. His family wrote regularly. On September 3 Fritz wrote to say that he wished he were going along. Christiane wrote telling Johannes not to put ideas in Fritz’s head. Elise wrote that they had shown the letters about Joachim to Uncle and Aunt Giesemann, who wept as they read them.31 Joachim also wrote to the Giesemanns.
In Bonn, Brahms presented one of Joachim’s greeting cards, signed on the back “Joh. Kreisler, Jun.,” to J. W. von Wasielewski. A violinist and composer serving as a town choir director, Wasielewski had recently been concertmaster of Robert Schumann’s orchestra in Düsseldorf. As was becoming the pattern now, this older musician was charmed by Johannes’s looks, his air of authority, his unaffected manner, but was impressed most of all when he sat down at the piano. Wasielewski recalled only one piece in particular, an arrangement of the popular Hungarian piece Rakóczy March that Brahms gave a bravura treatment. According to pattern too, Wasielewski insisted that Brahms must stop off in Düsseldorf and visit the Schumanns. Once more Brahms rehearsed the story of the returned manuscripts, but he was wavering. Wasielewski sent him on his way with a letter of introduction to Schumann and one to the Deichmann family, in Mehlem across the river.
Deichmann, a financier and arts patron, opened his house to the wandering musician. Brahms wrote Joachim about the “splendid people” and “heavenly visit.”32 He explored more of the Rhine and its tributaries with Deichmann’s three sons, and got to know musical friends of the family, including composer/conductor Franz Wüllner, who was to play a large role in the careers of both Brahms and Wagner. With Brahms, Wüllner later recalled, “We young musicians were immediately delighted and carried away.”33 Some of his teenage awkwardness and shyness had receded. Despite the distractions of the journey, Brahms started a piece in F minor, destined to be his last and finest piano sonata, and a new book of quotes he called “Schöne Gedanken über Musik” (“Beautiful Thoughts on Music.”)
Like nearly everyone else Brahms had met lately, the Deichmanns were Schumann devotees. During his visit he began going through their collection of the composer’s work, perhaps the first time he had seen any of it beyond the little Luise Japha had shown him. In Mehlem, playing through piece after piece of Schumann’s, he found himself overwhelmed by the poetic voice of a composer he had once deplored to Luise. There came the spine-tingling moment when Young Kreisler first opened Schumann’s rhapsodic set of piano pieces after E. T. A. Hoffmann, called Kreisleriana. Perhaps it was that moment when Brahms knew he must visit Schumann: once again fate seemed to be addressing him directly, through the agency of Hoffmann. So Brahms said his farewells to the Deichmanns and headed along the river toward Düsseldorf.
On the way he stopped off at Cologne, where he met composer/conductor Ferdinand Hiller