Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [79]
Still, their words in that period, in her journals and in their letters and avowals to friends, are passionate but not as unequivocal as they look to a later time. As a celebrated pianist, after all, Clara was used to devotion. It was an age of emotional extremes, when ardent words between friends, even a man and a woman, did not necessarily entail bed, an affair. And for a while their words were restrained, at least in the letters that escaped destruction. Surely there was growing gossip about Clara and Johannes. But still it was possible to speak passionately and be respectable, to protest innocence honestly. In any case, with them that summer the ardent words did not mean anything physical. It is possible they never did.
Yet there was an irresistible vibration between them. It was a matter of mutual admiration and shared creativity and joy and sorrow, but amorous too in some enigmatic way. Except for her smile and in the dark-blue depths of her eyes, Clara was not beautiful. Since her flirtatious teens her personality had settled into somberness and tenseness, even if she had a warmly sociable side. Likely, all that meant little to Johannes. As with many musicians his musical and sexual responses were part of the same impulse (though the musical was respectable, nominally innocent: safe). Clara was a great pianist and a great woman; by those means, he wrote Joachim, she revealed heaven to him.
To all three of them music was language and religion and emotion and intellect at their highest, and music the most profound consolation. With Clara and others to come in Brahms’s life, a gift for music made a woman beautiful. So no one would ever be as beautiful to him as Clara Schumann, because she was the greatest musician of any woman he ever knew. And despite the failings in their personalities and in their dealings with people, both had a noble and generous spirit and each recognized that in the other.
That summer of 1854 such understanding lay in the future. That summer Johannes seethed in his passion. His emotions had become like a harmonic suspension in music, when the composer allows a tone from a previous chord to linger piercingly into a new harmony, and the music cannot find rest until that dissonance is resolved. To Johannes, his love felt like an endless, unbearable suspension.
IN THE MIDDLE OF JULY came a vertiginous moment: a bouquet arrived at the house, sent to Clara by her husband. Robert still had not spoken her name, but he had picked the flowers himself and responded gaily to his attendant’s question of where to send them with, “Oh, you know quite well!” The bouquet was an ambiguous token, but Brahms watched Clara dance around the room for joy over it, happier than he had ever seen her. His own feelings, as he reported the news to Joachim, appear as elated as hers.
He waited. Certainly there was plenty to occupy him. Clara had asked Johannes to organize Robert’s library and papers, and he read and studied continually while he was doing it. He began reworking his D minor two-piano sonata into a symphony, the one Robert and Clara had pushed him to write. (All these efforts are lost.) As to the orchestration, he wrote Joachim, “I owe anything good there may be in it to Grimm, who helped me with sound advice.… I must just add that I want to let the low D predominate at the beginning, and that is why the F-B in the clarinets and bassoons is so weak.… Will you encourage me to go on with the other movements? I feel like such an imbecile.”49
He had already sketched out three movements of the sonata that now was becoming a symphony, and for all the misgivings he continued to labor doggedly over the orchestration of the first movement. When Joachim returned favorable comment on it Brahms only replied, “As usual you have regarded the movement of my Symphony through a rose-colored glass. I must alter and improve it all through. There is a good deal wrong even in the composition,