Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [78]
In July Brahms wrote Joachim a long letter of news and ideas musical and otherwise. He had gotten 200 louis d’or from Breitkopf & Härtel but owed a lot of it to Grimm, so he asked Joachim to wait for money owed him. Brahms enclosed for Joachim’s comment a series of little piano pieces he proposed to call “Pages from the Diary of a Musician/edited by the young Kreisler.” He explained about this collection, which included six neo-Baroque sarabandes, gigues, and gavottes, “The things should not carry the anonymous title in order to be permitted to be worse than my earlier stuff, but only for the sake of a joke, and because they’re occasional pieces.” These studies in archaic genres were hardly a diary of emotional matters, but rather the diary of a young musician steeped in study of the past, in Robert Schumann’s library.
With the letter to Joachim Brahms also enclosed the Schumann Variations with the observation that they are “perhaps indeed too little and insignificant? One hardly needs more of such juvenilia.”46 Characteristically, he belittled the piece exactly because it meant a great deal to him. Eduard Marxsen, to whom Brahms had sent the new pieces, responded with detailed suggestions for the B Major Trio. Joachim replied enthusiastically about the variations but coolly to the Kreisler pieces and to the pseudonym. That would be the end of any idea of publishing “Pages from the Diary of a Musician,” and the last to be seen of most of the pieces—though eventually Brahms would make use of some of the material. It was also the end of the name Kreisler appearing on manuscripts. In the letter to Joachim, Brahms mentioned that he was leaving aside the D minor sonata for the moment: “Actually I’ve never been satisfied with two pianos.”47
Amid these workmanly queries and comments Brahms made a stunning aside to Joachim, maybe more of a confession than he intended, maybe more than his friend could understand or accept. It was about Clara.
I believe that I do not have more concern and admiration for her than I love her and am under her spell. I often have to restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting my arms around her and even—I don’t know, it seems to me so natural that she could not misunderstand. I think I can no longer love an unmarried girl—at least, I have quite forgotten about them. They only promise heaven while Clara shows it revealed to us.48
The relatively calm tone of these words does not reflect what Brahms felt. Something great and terrible had happened to him in the months since Schumann’s collapse. Johannes felt like Goethe’s Young Werther, living in an agony of frustrated desire. He wanted Schumann to get well; he wanted him to die. He wanted to soar in clouds and he wanted to put a gun to his head. He had fallen helplessly in love with Clara Schumann.
Though Johannes had not spoken his feelings, surely Clara knew and did not want to know. In the uncertainties of what was happening and likely to happen to her husband, Clara could not contemplate the reality that Johannes had fallen in love with her, or she with him. She could not wrestle with the implications of that now, only rationalize them. Anyway, to both of them a romance could only have seemed an outrage, a betrayal in a time when she had just borne her husband’s child, when it still seemed possible that Robert could recover, when it was inconceivable for both of them not to hope for his recovery. And Clara was thirty-four, Johannes recently twenty-one.
But for Johannes there it was, resounding like a great bell in his mind: love, gnawing and inescapable, unlike anything he had experienced. When to Joachim he imagined embracing her, he pictured it a sign of his sympathy: “I often have to restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting