Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [56]
The month that followed was as magical as living out a fairy tale. There were walks and evenings of music, Brahms and Clara alternating at the keyboard, playing his work along with Robert’s and older masters’. There were endless hours of high grand talk, Brahms dazzled by Schumann’s flights of imagination. Clara’s journal recalls those days: “Robert says there is nothing to wish except that heaven may preserve [Brahms’s] health.… In the afternoon Brahms came in, and played us some of his things, which made a deep impression on all of us (I invited some of my pupils and Fr. Leser).… After dinner Brahms played us several very curious Hungarian folksongs.”9
In hours away from the piano Robert taught his new friend chess and table-turning. (Schumann had become obsessed with the parlor game of séances.) Brahms also had a reunion with his Hamburg friends Luise and Minna Japha. Luise had been working nominally with both Schumanns, studying piano and composition, but had hardly set eyes on the taciturn, reclusive Robert.10 Johannes asked Luise what she thought Schumann had meant by “We understand each other.” She had no idea. Before long, the entire musical world would find out.
Schumann opened his extensive library to Johannes, who shared it with the Japha sisters. He spent evenings reading aloud to Luise, especially from Schumann’s volumes of E. T. A. Hoffmann. He showed her a letter from his mother, who had promised to write three pages a week and kept to it, even if she had to flesh out the pages with items copied from newspapers. “What’s she supposed to do when she has no more news?” Johannes told Luise with ironical affection. “She can’t write a philosophical treatise, but she always sends me three whole pages.11
For all the placid hours of reading and games and sharing music, events ripened fast. Robert contacted his publishers Breitkopf & Härtel and asked them to publish music by his discovery. Just over a week after their meeting, Schumann was already thinking of saying something in print about Brahms. He wrote Joachim in his most flowery mode:
If I were younger, I might write a few rhapsodies on the young eagle who swooped down so suddenly on Düsseldorf from the Alps, or, to use another metaphor, the magnificent torrent which is at its best when, like Niagara, it dashes down as a cascade from the heights … while its shores are haunted by the butterfly and nightingale. I believe Johannes is another John the Baptist, whose revelations will puzzle many of the Pharisees, and every one else, for centuries. Only the other apostles will understand his message, including possibly Judas Iscariot.… All this is for the Apostle Joseph alone.12
Schumann’s sense wanders in the letter, but he knew Joachim would understand whom he meant by Judas Iscariot: Liszt, the betrayer of music. Even though Joachim still nominally belonged to the Weimar circle, still exchanged friendly letters with his old mentor, he did not protest the word Judas. Schumann also wrote of Brahms: “This is he that should come,”13 implying that somehow Johannes was Messiah to his own John the Baptist. (Or more likely: Schumann was losing his way in thickets of metaphor.)
Brahms wrote Joachim asking for advice on what pieces he should show Breitkopf & Härtel, and in what order—Schumann had suggested a list, but Brahms wanted another opinion. Two of the pieces in these discussions, a fantasy for piano trio and a violin sonata, never saw light. To his friend’s query, Joachim replied with Romantic ardor: “You ask me to tell you in what order you should let your music cry out to the world the fact of which you have long been joyfully conscious: I am! I am unspeakably touched by this.” Joachim proposed an order close to what in fact appeared, but it was characteristic of Brahms to solicit opinions and then make his own decisions. It would be Opus 1, the C Major Sonata; Opus 2,