Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [69]
Still, the visit left a pleasant afterglow, especially from the last evening when for the assembled friends Clara played Johannes’s F# Minor Sonata and with Joachim the Schumann D Minor Violin Sonata. Next day, Brahms, Joachim, and Julius Grimm saw the Schumanns off at the train station.64 To Albert Dietrich in Düsseldorf Brahms wrote, “What festive times we have had, thanks to the Schumanns!… Since then everything here seems to me thoroughly alive.”65
Schumann soon wrote Joachim this letter dated February 6—understandably elated, unaccountably strange:
We have been gone a week, and we have not yet sent a word to you and your comrade! But I have often written to you with invisible ink, and there is a secret writing between these lines which will come to light later on.
And I have dreamed of you, dear Joachim … you had heron’s feathers in your hands from which flowed champagne—how prosaic! But how true!—
We have often thought of the days we spent with you; may there soon be more like them! The kindly royal family, the excellent orchestra, and the two young demons in the midst of it all—we shall never forget it.…
Music is silent at present—externally at any rate.…
I’m enjoying the cigars very much. They seem to have a Brahmsian tang, as usual very strong but good! Now I can see him smiling.
I’ll stop now. It’s getting dark.66
The young demons received no more such letters from Düsseldorf. Their next communication was from Albert Dietrich to Joachim, with the news that changed their lives. “Dear Friend,” it began, “I have terribly sad news for you and Johannes.”67
There had been other demons inhabiting Robert Schumann’s mind. They had been whispering and singing to him for a long time, a chorus of wailing and jubilant voices. They had sentenced him to make an end to the evil charade of his life. On February 27, Schumann eluded his watching family and jumped into the Rhine. He had been pulled alive from the water, but his mind seemed horribly, perhaps irretrievably, shattered.
CHAPTER FIVE
Waiting
BEFORE ROBERT SCHUMANN threw himself in the Rhine, Brahms knew him as an underappreciated composer, an important critic, part of an extraordinary husband-and-wife collaboration, a generous friend and mentor. Certainly Brahms had heard that Schumann could be erratic, and he knew firsthand of the older man’s inclination to extremes—one example of it was “Neue Bahnen.” But in the background of that suicide attempt lay a story Brahms could not have known, of an artist wasted by years of battle with demons at once creative and destructive. The satisfactions of a family and creative life had only kept at bay the ruinous visions that beset Robert Schumann for over twenty years. For the length of their marriage, Clara had been the main bulwark between her husband and the abyss.
On September 30, 1853, the same day Brahms first rang the Schumanns’ doorbell in Düsseldorf, Clara wrote in her journal: “My last good years are passing, my strength too.… I am more discouraged than I can possibly say.” She had discovered that she was pregnant for perhaps the tenth time since her marriage in 1840. One or two pregnancies had ended in miscarriage and one child died in infancy. Now, with another baby on the way, she had to give up an already long postponed concert tour to England.1 Despite her loyalty to Robert and her children, performing before an audience was woven too much into Clara’s identity to give up. Unlike her husband, she had heard ovations most of her life, and she thrived on them.
Beyond the immediate frustration, surely Clara felt more anxious than usual about Robert. With the Düsseldorf orchestra his conducting had gone from precarious to helpless; he was obsessed by spiritualism and séances2; he felt chronically weak, at times could barely talk, complained of tones ringing incessantly in his ears. Always a composer who depended on inspiration more than craft, he had been working at a manic pace in Düsseldorf, but Clara knew that the music was not as fresh and confident