Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [86]
CHAPTER SIX
Words Spoken and Unspoken
IN OCTOBER 1854, Clara Schumann and Brahms traveled together from Düsseldorf to visit Josef Joachim, and so united once more the trio of friends who had consoled each other, and kept Clara alive, when madness overtook her husband. After giving a concert with Joachim in Hanover, she went on alone to Leipzig to resume her career as a full-time virtuoso after a hiatus of some fifteen years. Between October 16 and December 21, Clara gave twenty-two concerts in twelve North German cities.1
She started her tour with a pair of programs at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, where in 1832 she had made her solo debut at age eleven. Through her teens Clara Wieck had appeared regularly in the old hall, playing Beethoven and Schubert and Mendelssohn and other masters of the recent past. Now her repertoire featured her husband’s work, chipping away at the resistance his music had met all his life. Her Gewandhaus programs also included the andante and scherzo from Brahms’s F Minor Sonata. Here began her lifelong commitment to the music of the second genius who loved her.
Leipzig embraced Clara as if she were a long-lost daughter. But for her and Johannes the tour was an ordeal, the first long separation since he had come to live in Düsseldorf. Like Robert Schumann, Brahms felt torn about Clara’s touring—because she was a woman and mother, because he hated the separation, because he had little enthusiasm for performing himself so could not understand hers. He wrote Clara in August, “I think of you as going to the concert hall like a priestess to the altar. This, of course, is just as it should be. But I have never had that feeling, as I only know the public from a distance. I shun its proximity.”2
From Leipzig Clara continued on to Weimar, playing with Liszt’s orchestra there, then she had two engagements in Frankfurt where she again presented the Brahms sonata movements. In Weimar there had been the usual situation with Liszt, he friendly and flattering, she tight-lipped and hostile. Later that year he published an article on her in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. “A short time ago a charming playfellow of the Muses,” he wrote, now Clara is “a consecrated, faithful, stern priestess whose eyes look upon men with a sad, penetrating gaze.” Though the article was extravagantly laudatory, Clara never said a word to Liszt about it.3 The portrait he painted there came to be the way the world, including Brahms, saw Clara Schumann: the tragic high priestess of the piano.
Afraid it would upset Robert, Clara did not tell him about this first tour. For years she had played mainly for his ears and approval. Now she anguished in her journal that Robert’s “spirit does not go with me, when I go into a concert I do not feel that he is wishing me success. Then my heart sinks, and only one thing comforts and strengthens me when my courage threatens to give way, the thought that he, Johannes, dearest and best of friends, thinks of me and sends his good wishes.”4
Clara’s burdens accompanied her to every city and every hall. Stagehands would watch as she bowed decorously and swept off the platform in waves of applause, then sank into a chair backstage and burst into wracking sobs. Then she would dry her tears and arrange her gown and go out and play the next piece. It was a microcosm of her life—relentless determination, relentless misery.
As she toured, Brahms returned to his parents’ at Hamburg, from where he wrote her: “We enjoyed a few more pleasant days [in Hanover]. Joachim and Grimm used to lie on the sofa at twilight while I played to them in the next room.”5 At the same time Joachim wrote Gisela von Arnim: “As for Brahms,