Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [75]
Joachim arrived in Düsseldorf along with Clara’s mother, Julius Grimm, and Albert Dietrich. Newspaper reports of the disaster brought floods of letters and further visits.26 But most friends could stay only so long, their kind words go only so far. Now the old melancholy in Clara’s eyes deepened to the anguished and haunted cast that resided in them from then on. She wrote in her journal, “Either I cannot sleep at all, or else I lie half-asleep and horrible pictures hover before my eyes—I constantly see and hear him.”27 It was as if Robert’s sleeplessness, his madness, had invaded her. She was five months pregnant. Music and work would be her only solace—and her only income, with Robert gone. Two days after her husband was taken away, Clara began seeing piano students again.28
The friends who had gathered around her made music together, going over Johannes’s and Joachim’s work and Robert’s. Everyone speculated about treatments for the sick man, fashionable ones of the time: the magnetic powers of a Parisian count, a water cure. The house and its contents remained open to friends and neighbors. Reading in the couple’s diaries, Joachim found a chilling observation Robert had written years before: “The artist should beware of losing touch with society; otherwise he will be wrecked, as I am.”29 Clara wrote in her journal of playing her husband’s music in the weeks after his collapse: “I lose myself in it; it moves my whole heart.… But when I finish playing my anguish is redoubled.”
There were long evenings in the candlelit parlor with Clara and Brahms alternating at the piano before a quiet circle of listeners. He played the draft of his new B Major Trio, which struck her as fine if at times puzzling. Whatever her misery, her critical intelligence persisted: “I cannot quite get used to the constant change of tempo in his works, and he plays them so entirely according to his own fancy that today … I could not follow him, and it was very difficult for his fellow-players to keep their places.… Brahms was not very polite; it seems to me that he will be spoiled by the tremendous idolatry with which he is treated by the younger generation.”30 (Probably she meant Grimm and Dietrich.) Later in her journal Clara groused again, “It is not easy to play with Brahms; he plays too arbitrarily, and cares nothing for a beat more or less.”31
Yet of the circle of friends surrounding her in her sorrow, it was Johannes who reached Clara most, as the rankling uncertainty stretched on and her pregnancy came to term. “That good Brahms always shows himself a most sympathetic friend. He does not say much, but one can see in his face, in his speaking eye, how he grieves with me.… Besides, he is so kind in seizing every opportunity of cheering me by means of anything musical.”32 Brahms could not speak his feelings, not yet at least, and never easily, but he could let music speak.
One day in mid-April, when news from Endenich seemed hopeful, Clara played over the trio twice with Joachim and Grimm. “Now everything in it is clear to me,” she told her journal. She saw the digressiveness of the long opening movement and the other structural uncertainties (though the scherzo is another of Brahms’s confident and vivacious ones), but she also saw much that was superb. In the first measures comes a fresh kind of singing melody: the lyrical Young Kreisler voice that would be always with him, growing in subtlety but holding a melting Romantic sweetness and yearning. She wrote her and Robert’s publisher Breitkopf & Härtel, asking them to take the trio. They would publish it that year as Opus 8.
Despite the distress and distraction of those weeks, Brahms worked away. Perhaps that spring he composed the piano miniatures that became the Opus 10 Ballades. More ambitious, though it never appeared publicly in its original form, was a sonata in D minor for two pianos, whose catastrophic opening seemed to emerge from the nightmare