Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [80]
He waited, and his life turned around Clara. On August 10, she went to Ostend for a cure of sea-bathing, with a few concerts on the side. She was about to start touring again, ostensibly because her family needed the money. She refused to dip into Robert’s investments that had helped keep them going, and rejected every offer of help from friends and admirers.51
While she was at Ostend, Johannes and friend Julius Grimm set out on a tour of Swabia, a vacation Clara had suggested. As soon as they left, Johannes discovered that for the moment nature had turned pale in his eyes. Within three days, after seeing the old university town of Heidelberg and making it as far south as Heilbron, he wrote Clara, “Honored Lady! Not once on my whole journey have I been as light-hearted and cheerful as is necessary on a walking tour, and as I usually am in any case.… The exhilarating and uplifting experience of being with you and having music together … how can I do without these things?”
He was at once lovesick and alarmed: “I often have struggles with myself, that is to say, Kreisler and Brahms struggle together.… This time … they were both quite confused, neither knew what he wanted and it was most comical to watch them. Incidentally tears almost stood in my eyes … I often have to lay down my pen because my thoughts overcome me.”52 Perhaps Clara did not perceive the obsession and fear in Johannes’s words, did not ask questions about the tears, or what he meant by “Brahms” and “Kreisler.” For the former, say: Brahms the son of Hamburg, the North German bourgeois, the scholar, the craftsman, the classicist. For Kreisler, say: the dreamer, the lyrical and passionate youth, the Romantic, the lover: Werther. And as they had in his Schumann Variations, both of them sang in his music from then on.
Next day he wrote Clara from Ulm, “I can’t stand it any longer; I’m coming back today … so dull and colorless does everything seem to me.” Now being by her side meant more to Johannes than nature, more even than freedom.
From Ulm, just before going back to Düsseldorf, he wrote his old Winsen friend Amsvogt Blume a poetic diagnosis of Schumann: “I consider the best description of him is to be found in some of the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann (… especially the splendid Kreisler, etc.). He has only stripped off his body too soon.”53 On the way to Düsseldorf, Brahms stopped off at Endenich. The doctors allowed him to conceal himself behind a window and observe the patient. Brahms trembled as he watched: Schumann came into the garden to enjoy the sunny weather, he smoked his pipe and smiled, he walked and talked and looked at the flowers like a sensible man. Nearly every day Schumann had been going to Bonn with an attendant, to visit the Beethoven memorial. Even though he had recently experienced some aural mirages, his condition allowed hope.54 Maybe he could be brought back from whatever wilderness his mind had retreated to. And then what?
Brahms arrived back at the Schumann house before Clara returned from Ostend. He wrote her, “Will you be away much longer? I have a terrible longing to see you again, dearest lady.”55 Cutting short her cure, Clara returned home in time for her fourteenth wedding anniversary on September 12, and her thirty-fifth birthday the next day. Johannes reported to her what he had seen at Endenich. To her delight, for a birthday present he gave her a keyboard arrangement of Robert’s Piano Quintet, and he had taught daughters Marie and Elise to play some of Robert’s Pictures from the East.56 Clara listened with tears as her girls dutifully threaded their way through their father’s music.
Suddenly word came that Robert had spoken her name, even if in a foreboding way: he declared to the doctors that his wife must be dead, since he had