Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [63]
After Brahms had played his works for Härtel in Leipzig, the publisher agreed to pay fifty gold pieces for the Sonatas in C Major (dedicated to Joachim) and F# Minor (dedicated to Clara Schumann), Six Songs (dedicated to Bettina von Arnim), and the E Minor Scherzo. None of these early opuses is dedicated to Robert Schumann; Brahms considered none of them worthy of it.
Despite the excitement and the new acquaintances in Leipzig, Brahms felt restless and anxious to work. He went to Hanover for a few days to consult with Joachim over last revisions for the publications, and pounded away at the F Minor Sonata. Already he had his lifelong habit of showing new pieces to trusted friends, soliciting critiques that he only occasionally accepted. Yet Brahms needed the feedback as a touchstone, a sign of his connection to musicians and to listeners. The process also had the useful effect of keeping influential people involved in his work, feeling almost party to its creation. At least Brahms allowed them to feel that, even though it would rarely be true—except in some of the earlier works, when he needed all the advice he could get from more experienced orchestral composers like Joachim and Grimm.
That November, Josef Joachim lingered in the aftershock of his failed romance with Gisela von Arnim, and brooded over his connection to Liszt. After years of friendship and collaboration, Liszt had recently asked Joachim to use the familiar du, “thou.” In a letter Liszt wrote, “Wagner had the most friendly feelings for you,” pointedly complimented Schumann’s new Violin Sonata, politely inquired after Brahms.37 Meanwhile, having heard a mistaken report that Joachim and Gisela were to be married, Schumann wrote Joachim playfully proposing to write a Wedding Symphony. He concluded, “I should like to write much more. But I have fallen into a merry mood and cannot get out of it. So good-bye, dear bridegroom.” Joachim replied gloomily, enclosing a new piece of his own with the notes F-A-E circled. The notes have, he wrote Schumann, “not only an artistic but a human significance for me: their meaning is ‘frei aber einsam.’ I am not engaged.”38
Yet Joachim and his lost love stayed close, and in letters to her the virtuoso poured out his feelings and frustrations. On November 27, he wrote Gisela as Brahms dozed on the sofa after a day of work:
Brahms has been here since Friday, when, on coming back from a late walk, I found the young green and gold tiger lying in wait for me, greener than ever by reason of his laurels and newly gilt by publishers who are printing all his things. He was in splendid spirits and talked far into the night of old friends in the town of booksellers [Leipzig]. You have really seen deep into his nature—he is egotistic and always on the lookout for something to his advantage—but at any rate he is sincere … with none of the false sentimentality with which others of his kind like to deceive themselves.39
It appears that Gisela von Arnim never liked Brahms. She saw the calculation, the egotism and solipsism. Joachim saw them too, but understood and tried to forgive. Yet Brahms’s self-absorption weighed on his best friend, as it sooner or later weighed on everyone who knew him. Brahms had made the first close friends of his life, but he was better at making friends than keeping them happy, or keeping them at all. His mind was closed to giving anything of himself beyond time and money—in those he was lavish. But no one must ask for anything deeper.
So there were struggles. Time and again Joachim would come and sit on Johannes’s bed and beg abjectly to be reassured that Johannes loved him. “Certainly I explained to him that we were just as before,” Brahms recalled, “but those kinds of questions were completely unbearable.”40 Despite the adulation of thousands, Joachim could never find enough affection, or at least not the kind he craved. And being made that way, he was thrown in with a man like Brahms for whom any expression of affection was rare and difficult. That crack in the foundation of their