Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [83]
Mixed into all this were the agonies of the Werther years, 1854 and 1855, when Brahms and Kreisler wrestled for his soul.
AS THE END OF 1854 APPROACHED, Johannes felt uncertain of everything: his future, his burgeoning feelings for Clara, his music. He wrote Joachim, “I can’t understand how you can take any interest in my things, in little Variations and Sonatas like mine!” In an era of revolutionary tone poems by Liszt and Gesamtkunstwerke, “total works of art,” by Wagner, he felt the absurdity of writing old-fashioned pieces that verged on Hausmusik, music for the parlor.
“I always see you before me so vividly,” he continued to Joachim, “when I play your things, deeply moved and exalted.… Frau Schumann … plays with all her old power … yesterday she played me my F Minor Sonata, just as I had imagined it, but with more nobility, more tranquil enthusiasm and with such a pure, clear rendering and such a magnificent tone in the stronger passages.” He mentions the Schumann Quintet that he arranged; “I have been immersing myself in it deeper and deeper, as in a pair of dark blue eyes.” Those eyes had their effect on the Schumann Variations as well. He had made “two new additions, in one of which Clara speaks!”68
Brahms was talking, obliquely, about the end of the tenth variation, the first of the new ones he wrote in August.69 This is the most lyrical of the Schumann Variations, which are the first truly masterful set of his life. At the head of the manuscript of no. 10 stands (like something Schumann would write, therefore unlike Brahms) the Romantic subtitle “Fragrance of Rose and Heliotrope.” That heading disappeared in the published version. Poignantly at the end of that rose and heliotrope variation, veiled in a middle voice, Clara speaks by way of a theme she had originally written for her Romance, Opus 3, composed when she was eleven. Robert had picked it up as the basis of his Opus 5 Impromptus:
The personal references in this musical ménage go beyond a theme of Clara’s picked up in turn by her husband and Brahms. By that time Brahms probably understood that Robert Schumann’s plaintively poetic theme on which he based the variations, and on which Clara had written her own set the year before, had a symbolic significance:
This melody is a variant of what Eric Sams has called Schumann’s “Clara theme,” found in works including the C Minor Piano Quartet and the D Minor Symphony.70 Schumann used the notes C-B-A-G#-A (often transposed) to outline the musical letters of Clara’s name: C l A r A (B standing in for l, G# for r). For Brahms, Clara spoke in those notes too, even in his Schumann Variations where the C♮ is replaced by a C#. The Clara theme is repeated like a mantra throughout the piece, now in the treble, now in the bass, now in canonic form.
Such musical cabala was not invented by Schumann or Brahms or the Romantic century, but rather goes back to the early age of polyphonic music in the West. In the fifteenth century Josquin des Prés used the musical letters of his employer’s name in a work, to flatter the Duke of Ferrara. Three hundred years later J. S. Bach worked elaborate numerological and proportional symbolism into his music and, in his last fugue, introduced a countersubject on the letters of his own name: which in German notation spells B A C H. Before he met Schumann, Brahms certainly knew about these musical games; another example was his teacher Marxsen’s piece about his favorite drink, its main theme the notes C-A-F-F-E-E. And there was the F-A-E Sonata based on Joachim’s motto.
For Schumann as for Brahms, these connections in music, however private in import, were more