Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [60]
There is in all times a secret union of kindred spirits. Bind closer the circle, ye who belong to it, that the truth of art may shine ever clearer, spreading joy and blessing through the world.24
As everyone understood, the figure Schumann here unveils, with graces and heroes at his cradle and a god for a father and a mystical order of spirits around him, is a Messiah destined to bring a new age of joy and blessing to the art of music. Never has a composer debuted on the world’s stage with an introduction like that.
Yet little of Schumann’s astonishing prophecy is what it seems. The metaphors of “Neue Bahnen” are incoherent, its prophecies flawed. Johannes had not appeared as a fully formed offspring of the gods but had a long struggle ahead of him to find his way. Schumann had told Johannes at the outset, “We understand each other,” but they did not. Schumann wanted his chosen one to stay with the early pieces’ subjective high-Romantic ardor, reined in by a solid grasp of form—in other words, to inhabit the same territory of poetic Romanticism Schumann had, but with more discipline in the larger genres. But in the end Brahms would not take the New Paths Schumann prophesied. He was constitutionally incapable of following any path but his own.
Certainly time proved Schumann correct in two of his predictions—the laurels and palms, and the wounds. He was also right to call the piano pieces “veiled symphonies,” straining toward orchestral expression. In the article and in person, Schumann urged Brahms to take up orchestral music, to write real symphonies and concertos—as Schumann had done himself, with prodding from his wife and with ambiguous success in comparison to his songs and piano miniatures. That call to compose grand works Brahms would obey, for a while, then abandon.
Besides the misconceptions, Schumann’s article has more on its agenda than the apparent one of hailing a young genius. “Neue Bahnen” was a calculated insult that probably raised editor Brendel’s hackles, and was intended to. It would have a similar effect all over musical Europe. Near the beginning, Schumann cites his list of “earnest artists of the present time.” All are friends and disciples of his own. Pointedly omitted from his “union of kindred spirits” are Berlioz, Liszt, and Wagner—onetime friends now in the enemy camp. The article aims, in other words, to position Brahms alongside Schumann as a Beethovener, in opposition to Liszt’s New German School and Wagner’s Artwork of the Future.
Which is all to say that “Neue Bahnen” reflected Schumann’s own purposes and patterns and fantasies more than it did the reality of twenty-year-old Johannes Brahms. For himself as a composer Schumann knew what he had accomplished, probably had a good idea both of his achievements and his limitations in shaping large-scale forms. Maybe he also suspected that his vein was nearly exhausted, despite the stacks of music he had composed in Düsseldorf.
In fact, for a long time Schumann had been waiting for a savior to carry his vision of music beyond what he could manage himself. Now he wanted Brahms to realize his own frustrated ambitions—to become the new, perfected Robert Schumann. Maybe in some unarticulated way Schumann had been awaiting a personal redeemer too. Brahms was not the first of his elect, his “secret union of kindred spirits.” In an 1834 issue of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Schumann published an article including this prophecy:
One winter night a year ago a young man joined our group.… Every eye was focused upon him. Some were reminded of a John the Baptist figure … the eyes aglow with enthusiasm … the luxuriant head of tumbling curls, and beneath it all a lithe, slim torso.… I heard a voice within me saying: “He it is whom you are seeking.”25
These words introduced composer Ludwig Schunke, Schumann’s beloved