Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [72]
Clara discovered a depth of passion in herself that kept pace with Robert’s. She became the last and most profound of Schumann’s muses; he was the only man she ever wanted unreservedly. Already they felt like soul mates, not only in love but in music. Robert wrote her in 1839, “Each of your [musical] ideas comes from my own soul, just as I must thank you for all the music I write.” Finally, having created several piano works inspired by Clara and intended for her to play, just before her eighteenth birthday Schumann formally asked for her hand. Friedrich Wieck wrathfully forbade the marriage.
Desperate, Schumann filed a legal complaint, beginning a court case that dragged on for nine wretched and humiliating months. In depositions her father viciously libeled both Robert and his own daughter, demanding payment for Clara’s entire training even though she had been the main family breadwinner for years. During the grueling months while they waited for the court’s decision, Schumann in one of his creative transports wrote 128 lieder, some of them the finest since Schubert’s, including the cycles Myrthen, Dichterliebe (Poet’s Love, on Heine lyrics), the Liederkreis after Eichendorff, and his testament to Clara, Frauenliebe und -leben (A Woman’s Love and Life).
Finally, Wieck’s accusations were dismissed and Clara was free of him. She and Robert married in September 1840, the day before her twenty-first birthday. In her journal she called it “the fairest and most momentous day of my life.”
Yet despite everything Friedrich Wieck had done to keep her from her beloved, Clara Schumann never repudiated her father. Music was not only her greatest joy but her means of escaping his domination; yet nothing could shake her gratitude for his part in making her one of the towering pianists of her time, which was an extraordinary time for the piano. Between Friedrich Wieck and Robert Schumann, Clara came of age knowing how to cope with brilliant and difficult men, adapt to them while preserving herself, and love what was fine in them.
Every man in her life, including her own sons, would be damaged and damaging in some way, yet despite frightful emotional costs Clara remained loyal to them. She felt that in marrying Robert she was not only following her passion, but joining her life to history. Her devotion to him stretched long beyond his death to her own.
IF CLARA AND ROBERT did not live happily ever after, they still shared a tremendous love and a musical partnership unlike any before or since. Years after he died, a friend observed: “You can imagine Clara without Robert, but not Robert without Clara.” He might have preferred his wife to stay home and play and compose and take care of the family, but he did not seriously stand in the way of her performing career. For her part, Clara talked the conventional, submissive daughter and wife, but in practice she had a will of steel and did exactly what she wanted—though that included a responsibility to her family that circumscribed her performing.
Determined that Robert must find the kind of acclaim and income she had, Clara prodded him to look for conducting work and to write symphonies and concertos and oratorios instead of the miniatures he had excelled at. “It would be best if he composed for orchestra,” she wrote in her journal, “his imagination cannot find sufficient scope on the piano.… My highest wish is that he should compose for orchestra—that is his field! May I succeed in bringing him to it.”15 He gave in to her campaign and began to compose large works—with ambiguous success in comparison to