Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [74]
On the seventeenth of the month, Robert rose from bed and wrote down a theme he told Clara an angel had sung to him. That night he lay beside her, eyes wide, telling her that he was looking into heaven and angels were circling above them and singing. By the next morning the angels had turned to hideous choruses wailing that they would take him to hell. To friends he hinted that the voices were ordering him to do something frightful. In less frenzied moments he began composing a set of variations on the angels’ theme. Then, on February 26, he announced that he must go to an asylum, and carefully laid out his things. When Clara tried to comfort him, Robert shrank back, crying, “Ah, Clara, I am not worthy of your love!”21 The doctors had nothing to say. All Clara had was her tears.
The climax was dreadful, grotesque. Clara had been sitting with Robert around the clock for days as he alternately lost himself in mirages and worked on the variations. Finally, exhausted, she asked daughter Marie to watch him while she consulted with a doctor. Marie opened the door to find her father standing in the middle of the room, deathly pale in a long dressing gown. When he saw her he hid his face with his hands and groaned “Oh God!” and stumbled through the door. For a moment Marie was too shocked to follow. When she looked into the next room her father had slipped from the house.
Schumann fled through the streets of Düsseldorf, toward the river. He had written a note to his wife that she would not find until long after: “Dear Clara, I am going to throw my wedding-ring into the Rhine, do the same with yours, and then the two rings will be united.” There was a carnival in progress, the streets filled with costumed throngs and wild music. In dressing gown and slippers Schumann stumbled through the nightmare spectacle, a madman in the middle of a masquerade like something from one of Hoffmann’s tales. He came to a bridge over the river. When a guard demanded the toll, Schumann shoved a silk scarf into the man’s hand and pushed past. For so many years he had foreseen this moment. Masked revelers watched him run to the middle of the bridge, mount the railing, and throw himself into the water. As he floundered, some fishermen raced to pull him up, subduing him when he struggled to jump out of the boat. His wedding ring was missing. When they got to shore someone said, astonished: “This is Herr Musikdirektor Schumann.”22
Daughter Marie, sent by a frantic Clara to look for him at a neighbor’s, saw a crowd of people approaching on the street. In the middle was her father held up by two men, dripping wet and his hands over his face. Clara caught only a glimpse of him before the doctor ordered her away.23
TWO DAYS LATER Dietrich’s report reached Brahms and Joachim in Hanover.24 Now Johannes’s life intersected with Schumann’s madness and Clara’s prostration. The moment of Robert’s leap would resound through the rest of their lives. Brahms rushed to Düsseldorf, arriving on March 3; Joachim would follow in a few days. As Schumann had requested himself, he was to be taken to an asylum at Endenich near Bonn. The doctors would not allow Clara to see her husband, insisting it would agitate him. As she waited in agony at her neighbor Fräulein Leser’s, on March 4 Schumann was helped into a carriage with a doctor and two attendants. His children watched from an upper window. When he was seated in the carriage the doctor handed him a bouquet from his wife. Schumann did not seem to notice, then during the trip he smelled the flowers and smiled and presented one to each of his companions. The doctor gave his flower to Clara, who preserved it to the end of her life.25
Brahms took up residence on Schadowplatz, offering to console her with music, to stay with her until her child was born and her husband recovered, to devote himself to Schumann during his convalescence. As he tried to comfort the distraught Clara, Brahms also composed furiously, page after page of agitated