Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [61]
Thus to a modern reader another question lingers in the background of “Neue Bahnen”: To what degree was Schumann’s interest more than political and abstractly musical? Was the older man attracted to Brahms? Was he bisexual? Schumann’s teenaged diaries hint at “Greek” episodes with men.26 Throughout his life and his affairs with women and his passionate connection to Clara, he was still attracted to handsome and talented youths. Johannes the Fair was the last of them—perhaps the most beautiful, certainly the most gifted.
Did Johannes see the manic quality in Schumann’s response to him? Did he know about the enthusiasm for young men? Did he suspect darker currents in Robert’s mind, secrets he was not party to? Brahms was away from home for the first time in his life, and for all his struggles he remained new to adulthood and its sorrows. As he was to find in terrible days to come, the Schumanns had more than ordinary sorrows besetting them.
Among the hundreds of Europe’s leading musicians who read “Neue Bahnen” was Hans von Bülow, who testily wrote Liszt, “It doesn’t trouble my sleep in the least.… Fifteen years ago Schumann said exactly the same thing about the ‘genius’ of William Sterndale ‘Benêt’ ” (the pun meaning “blockhead”). Wagner and the New Germans began referring to Brahms sarcastically as “heiligen Johannes,” “Saint John.”27 All the same, if the revolutionaries resented Schumann’s calculated insult, conservatives in Leipzig were no happier. Schumann had also slighted the city’s god and savior, Mendelssohn.28 (That was unintended—Schumann and Mendelssohn had been close friends.) Conservative Leipzig’s contempt for Brahms as rival Messiah was to simmer through the coming years.
Brahms went to Hanover on November 4, for a visit with Joachim. There he read “Neue Bahnen” for the first time—surely with disbelief, and many times. Schumann’s prophecy broke over him like thunder. The tour with Reményi so casually arranged, the meeting with Joachim almost by chance, the encounters with influential musicians in Weimar and along the Rhine, the extraordinary reception the Schumanns had given him—all of it amounted to a stupendous run of good fortune, with its climax in Düsseldorf. Yet his luck this year had run to the point where luck becomes almost too much to bear.
Schumann had been struck with admiration for Brahms’s works, and in that he was like nearly everyone else. But Brahms had also rung other chords: Schumann’s attraction to beautiful youths, his frustrated desire to write confidently in large forms, his search for a Messiah for German music, which is to say: for all music. “Neue Bahnen” flowed from all these forces within Robert Schumann, all these seductions of the fair young genius.
When he walked through the Schumanns’ door in Düsseldorf, Brahms had stepped unknowingly into a whirlwind that caught him up and deposited him in a place he never expected, never asked for, could not have wanted. He had set out from Hamburg in the spring of 1853 utterly unknown. Six months later, before he had done anything before the public to earn it, his name was on music lovers’ lips all over Europe. Even at twenty, Brahms understood what a terrifying election it is, to be pronounced Messiah. He knew his scripture: Christ had gotten palms too, shortly before the Crucifixion.
But he would not pass the cup handed him. If he had been nominated for Messiah, he would give everything he had to fulfill the prophecy. He could not have known how much that would cost him, how almost monastic a withdrawal from the course of life would be required of him. Neither he nor anyone else could know if he had the talent, the intelligence, poise, wisdom, courage, and luck to survive it. He would require every one of those qualities,