Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [58]
Yet in those days Schumann seemed elated and full of energy. His output of music had been prodigious in Düsseldorf, but now amid other projects he omitted nothing in his efforts to spread the word about Johannes. On October 13, Schumann wrote Joachim, “I have begun to collect and arrange my ideas on the young eagle. Much as I should like to assist him in his first public flight, I fear that my personal attachment is too great to admit of an impartial consideration of the lights and shadows of his plumage.” Next day, Schumann finished an essay on Brahms20—one hardly impartial, in fact incredible. Schumann notified Breitkopf & Härtel to watch for the article, which he intended to publish in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik.
The day the article came out and before Brahms knew of it, Joachim made a surprise visit to the Schumanns’. The violinist had just performed in a festival in Karlsruhe and visited Liszt and his circle there, and afterward went with Liszt to meet Richard Wagner in Basel. Perhaps after those days among the revolutionaries, Joachim fled to the Schumanns and Brahms as an antidote. He felt painfully torn between his old mentors and his new. (Once Schumann and Liszt had been close, but in 1848 they broke over an incident when Liszt shrugged off Schumann’s Piano Quintet and slighted the late Mendelssohn, at which Schumann became enraged. They never reconciled, though Liszt remained openhanded toward both Schumanns.)21
After Joachim’s brief surprise visit, Robert proposed a surprise of his own: a sonata in the violinist’s honor to be composed jointly by himself, Albert Dietrich, and Brahms. They would present it as a gift on Joachim’s return for his appearance with Schumann’s orchestra. With his old taste for cabalistic codes in notes, Schumann proposed for the work’s title and idée fixe the notes F-A-E, Joachim’s “free-but-lonely” motto: frei aber einsam.
By the time Joachim reappeared in Düsseldorf at the end of October, the F A E Sonata was ready. The unveiling was set for the day after his performance with the orchestra. Among invited guests for the occasion were Gisela von Arnim, from whom Joachim had recently become free but lonely, and her celebrated mother, Bettina—writer, friend of Beethoven and Goethe, widow of Achim von Arnim the collector of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Dressed in peasant costume, Gisela began the evening by presenting the sonata to Joachim hidden in a basket of flowers. For him that must have been a wrenching moment. But he went through the ceremony, expressing delight when he found the piece amid the flowers. He was asked to play it through with Clara, to see if he could identify the composers. Joachim named them off easily: Dietrich the opening, Schumann the intermezzo and finale, and the driving and brilliant scherzo, Brahms.
During the previous days, Joachim’s rehearsals with Schumann and the orchestra had been an agony. The program consisted of his signature work, the Beethoven Violin Concerto, plus Schumann’s Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra, and Joachim’s own Hamlet Overture. Schumann, as municipal director of music in Düsseldorf and conductor of the orchestra and choral society, had never been comfortable on the podium and lately had fallen into bizarre behavior—constantly letting the baton go flying, sometimes becoming so engrossed in the music that he forgot to conduct. In rehearsal with Joachim, Schumann plowed straight through Joachim’s overture, let mistakes go by, never noticed that the horn player missed a solo. Finally, desperate, Joachim took the podium and ran through the piece himself, with good results. But when the orchestral committee begged him to conduct the performance, Joachim refused because of the insult it would represent to Schumann.
The concert was the expected fiasco. Immediately the committee tried, as gently as possible, to remove Schumann from the conductor-ship, though not from his post as town music director. Outraged, Clara insisted that he fight back against this “infamous intrigue.”22 Schumann was in no shape for fighting, but humiliating