Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [73]
After a joint Russian tour in 1844, Clara the main attraction as usual, Robert suffered one of his worst breakdowns, trembling and weeping for days, so weak he could barely walk.16 In search of peace and recovery, they moved from Leipzig to beautiful Dresden. There, despite the birth of four children in five years, the revolutions of 1848 across Europe, and steady emotional turmoil, Schumann completed a stack of works including his Second Symphony, the Piano Concerto, and the oratorio Paradise and the Peri. Clara also composed some of her best work in Dresden, notably the Piano Trio. In 1850, with her encouragement, Robert accepted the post of town music director in Düsseldorf, which entailed conducting an orchestra and chorus. Over his three years there, as his mind tilted toward crisis, he composed a third of his life’s work. But little of it counts among his most enduring music.
During their marriage, pregnant most of the time, with her children and fragile husband dependent on her, Clara gave around 150 public concerts between 1840 and 1854,17 sometimes playing days before or after giving birth or suffering a miscarriage.18 Always she pushed aside her fears about Robert’s health even as she kept him afloat, but she understood exactly how important an artist he was. Slowly, her efforts as a performer spread her husband’s work even as he himself became more and more brittle.
One would assume that Clara Schumann survived the tragedies of her life by means of an aloof and composed temper. In fact, she was the opposite. She was perpetually alive to everything and everybody, to every piece she played or heard. Brahms could retreat behind his wall of indifference and mockery. Clara was sober unto humorless, self-righteous, literalistic, a maker of meticulous lists, indifferent to nothing.19 Her feelings slid easily into floods of tears and from there into hysteria. That she survived the inexorable ordeals of her life and her own lacerated sensibility testifies to a phenomenal resilience and strength of will.
Her daughter Eugenie remembered her mother in company, emotions washing over her face from moment to moment like cloud shadows. The pervading look, that shows in all Clara’s photos, was the profound melancholy. But Clara also had a beautiful smile that transformed her solemn features. Her husband and her children would do a great deal to earn that smile. If over the years of her relationship with Brahms Clara was perennially baffled and outraged by his teasing, and if she always felt unattractive and uneducated alongside the extraordinary artists who were her friends, still Clara was part of every dialogue, and the dialogue usually brilliant in her house.
WHEN JOHANNES BRAHMS first swept into the Schumanns’ life in September 1853, he saw only the bright, hopeful, public side of the famous couple. It was intoxicating to be around people like that, who had imagination and presence far beyond anyone he had known. For a while, Young Kreisler seemed to rejuvenate both of them. Robert became voluble, Clara’s mournful eyes glowed.
But beneath the sociable veneer, madness gained on Robert. Most nights for some time Clara had escorted him to the door of a coffeehouse and picked him up at the end of the evening—she could not count on him to find his way home. He told her that after working at his desk his tongue felt so lame he could hardly speak.20 One day a visitor, trying to get information from him, could only rouse Schumann to ask, “Do you smoke?” three times, with long silences between. He seemed perpetually stunned, listening to things only he could hear, his mouth puckered in an endless silent whistle. Obsessively he turned to séances and table-turning, as if they could draw him closer to the unseen world that had always called to Romantics, and whose spirits now called to him by name.
Toward the middle of February 1854, insidious auditory hallucinations attacked him. For days on end Schumann heard the same note maddeningly repeated; the note became harmonies; then every noise he heard turned into