Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [57]
With October’s furor of activity and excitement, musical ideas came to Brahms so fast and strong that he did not have time to write them down. He worked out the first, third, and fifth movements of the F Minor Sonata during the month, to add to the two movements composed earlier. During a day of sociable music-making on the twelfth, he played, mostly from his head, a provisional version of the new sonata for the Schumanns. As Opus 5, the F Minor would be the crown of his early keyboard music. It was the only work of Brahms on which Robert Schumann commented in progress.
At the same time, Brahms began to practice the piano intensively, with coaching from Clara.15 She had taken to calling him “Robert’s Johannes.”16 For all her own enthusiasm, neither then nor later did Clara turn off her critical intelligence. After he had played the trio fantasia and the E Minor Scherzo she noted in her journal, “Here and there the sound of the instruments was not suitable to their characters, but these are trifles in comparison with his rich imagination and feeling.” Once she came indoors thinking someone was playing four-hand duets and discovered Brahms alone at the piano, his hands flashing all over the keyboard. He loved drawing great handfuls of sound from the instrument.
Naturally, Schumann broadcast the news around his circle in Düsseldorf. At a rehearsal of the town choral society he introduced Brahms to composer Albert Dietrich, and they immediately struck up a friendship, once more owing to Brahms’s person and personality as much as his music. Brahms and Dietrich took to breakfasting together in the Hofgarten, and Dietrich sent out word to acquaintances. Kreisler—so Dietrich and others called him—radiated a talent and boyish impetuousness that seemed to intensify under the adulation of the Schumanns. In those days, you could almost see the halo around his head. Dietrich wrote, “I was particularly struck by the characteristic energy of the mouth, and the serious depths in his blue eyes.” He cherished Kreisler’s athleticism, his boyish pranks, his ability to drop off to sleep in a second, the way he would dash upstairs and drum on your door with both fists and burst into the room. In private moments over a glass of beer, Brahms whispered to Dietrich about the shadows in his life—the poverty, the Animierlokale.17 He also made the acquaintance of painters in Düsseldorf; the beauty of the city full of gardens had drawn many visual artists there.18 Always scouting for ideas and stimulation, Brahms added painting to literature as a catalyst for his work.
Friendship itself was a discovery for him, a new inspiration. Other than his teachers, in Hamburg it had been mostly Luise Japha and Eduard Reményi who were interested in him, and in fact neither ended up liking him particularly. Eduard Marxsen had kept Brahms so wrapped up in his studies that it had been as if the teacher were reserving this student for himself. Then Brahms had gone out into the world and immediately gained the attention and affection of musicians numbered among the finest in Europe. He fell into that new life as if born to it, born to be a genius among geniuses—or failing that, a misfit.
In October Robert Schumann had a visit from an admirer, painter Jean-Joseph Laurens. The Frenchman made portraits of Schumann and his protégé. Laurens’s two drawings of Brahms—delicate profile and long curling hair, lost in thought—are the images that best evoke him in those years: dreaming Kreisler of the maidenly features. That force of insight carries over into Laurens’s portrait of Schumann, which shows a face weary and haunted. Laurens told Clara that the pupils of Schumann’s eyes were oddly dilated. She admitted that her husband had not been