Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [81]
Robert had sent Clara love and memories: “Oh, if I could have a sight of you, a word with you all! But the distance is too great.” He asked for news of family and friends, his books and publications, her performing: “How I wish I could listen to your beautiful playing again!… Was it all a dream—our tour in Holland last winter …? You played … in such glorious fashion.” The letter seemed straightforward, almost childlike, strange only in its tendency minutely to cite memories. Apparently he wanted to reassure Clara, and himself, that he was capable of remembering.57 As she read her husband’s letter Brahms watched Clara’s face transform into a radiant expression that reminded him of the music of unspeakable joy at the end of Beethoven’s Fidelio, when Leonore has saved Florestan from the dungeon and oblivion. Despite everything, it was an exalted moment for Brahms as well. He concluded his report to Joachim: “Rejoice with me, beloved, there can be no more doubts now?”58
Clara replied to Robert, only now telling him of the birth of their baby and other news. Another page came from Endenich: “What joyful news … that Brahms, to whom you will give my kind and admiring greetings, has come to live in Düsseldorf; what friendship! If you wish to consult with me in the matter of a name, you will easily guess my choice—the name of the unforgettable one!” He meant, as Clara realized with tears, that the baby should be named Felix, after Mendelssohn—the same name she had chosen. She wrote to Joachim:
A joy has come to me for which I hardly dared to hope a fortnight ago, and yet … I must control the mighty beating of my heart and suppress so much! He says nothing about my going to him at present.… My old friend, my piano, must help me in this! Oh, dear Joachim, I thought I knew what a splendid thing it is to be an artist, but I only realize it for the first time now that I can turn all my suffering and joy into divine music, so that I often feel quite happy!59
Of course Brahms celebrated with her. As yet his love for Clara was directionless; it was impossible to think around the barrier of Schumann, whom he loved as well. There was only the endless suspension, and surely fantasies taking now one tack, now another, fervent and unreal. He wrote Clara in October, “All my thoughts and dreams are of the glorious time when I shall be able to live with you two. I think of the present as the road which leads to the chosen land.” And in December, “I wish the doctor would install me as nurse and attendant at Christmas.… I would write to you about him every day, and all day long I would talk to him of you.”60
But what if Schumann could never hear those words of consolation? What if he could never find his way home?
DESPITE THE ELEVATED and suffocating emotions swirling in his mind, Brahms continued to pound away at the D minor music, once a sonata and now a symphony, and the piano Ballades. The symphony resisted pulling together, demanding a maturity with the orchestra and with large forms that he did not yet possess.
Alone and with Clara, Brahms continued to study the music in Schumann’s library: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and other contemporaries including Liszt, who had recently dedicated the B Minor Sonata to Schumann and sent it with other music to Clara. (Brahms played over Liszt’s offerings for her so they could revel in how much they detested it.)61 In Robert’s library he sought out music beyond Bach and Handel to masters of the early Baroque and Renaissance. He read prose as eagerly, now both in Schumann’s library and his own growing collection of volumes, recently richer by authors including Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Goethe, Hoffmann, and Robert Schumann.
From the library and his own acquisitions Brahms added to the quotes in his notebook “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein.” He copied down more aphorisms