Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [76]
Everything lay in the shadow of Schumann’s illness. His hospital at Endenich was progressive for the time; he had a suite of rooms with a piano, and constant supervision. Reports from the doctors seemed to alternate randomly, hopeful for a while and then discouraging, and no one could say how long it might go on. Already Clara had asked herself, What if he never returns? There was no bearable answer to that question.
By the spring Robert was taking long walks and appeared better.33 Then, at the end of April, Clara was alarmed by reports that he had been hearing voices again, seemed unable to remember things. The doctors said there was no immediate prospect for improvement.34 A visitor to the house in May found Clara looking gaunt and aged, sobbing, “If I didn’t have the firm hope that my husband would be better soon, I wouldn’t want to live any more. I cannot live without him. The worst is that I may not be with him and he has not yet asked for me, not even once.” Minutes later the visitor noticed that as they listened to Brahms play, she smiled and suddenly appeared younger.35
More and more she was taken by Johannes, his laughter and boyish energy, his blushing pleasure at her praise. Her burgeoning tenderness can be traced in journal entries, some of the few moments of pleasure in those mournful pages:
He played a great deal. I always listen to him with fresh admiration.… I like to watch him while he plays. His face always has a noble expression, but when he plays it becomes even more rapt … his movements are always beautiful, not like Liszt’s and others. He played Schubert’s A minor sonata, Weber’s rondo … and a movement of Clementi’s—all by heart. I am filled more and more with admiration for the great spirit which inhabits so small a body.… Brahms … played his F minor sonata. I do not quite clearly understand the last movement, but the other seems to me magnificent, except for a few roughnesses here and there.… Brahms and Grimm … can be merry as children.36
When Brahms first rushed to Düsseldorf his mother had been sympathetic: “That Schumann is so sick makes us endlessly sad. You did well to go there.” With that letter Christiane enclosed twenty-five marks.37 But as his stay stretched on with no indication of any plans, his parents worried that once again their son was drifting, living on air. At the end of April Christiane wrote, “You don’t have any money? Without it you’re a beggar in the world.… [If you come home] Herr Marxsen told Father that he could arrange concerts for you, with your compositions, and you could earn a lot.” Fritz had recently returned home after losing the job Johannes had got for him in Leipzig. “Poor Fritz can’t help it that he hasn’t learned anything,” Christiane moaned. “Father often said that I treated him as a stepmother would. Oh, what Fritz could learn from you if you really behaved like brothers!”38 With Fritz as another flashpoint, the friction between Christiane and Johann Jakob continued unrelenting.
Brahms found a few piano students in Düsseldorf and halfheartedly applied for Schumann’s position as town music director, but it came to nothing.39 Clara pressed him to tour as a soloist; he resisted that as long as he could. He got by mainly on money borrowed from Grimm and Joachim and maybe other new friends. In the spring, he formed a lifelong bond with tall, slow-speaking Julius Allgeyer, then studying engraving in Düsseldorf, later biographer of the painter Anselm Feuerbach. Allgeyer wrote to a friend of Brahms’s “bad manners of a frolicsome child and the understanding of a man.” Early in their relationship he got Brahms to read Herder’s Stimmen der Völker (Voices of the People); it included the Scottish ballad “Edward,” of which Brahms soon made use.
One day in May