Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [90]
Responding in kind to Schumann’s warm letter, Brahms reported that after their visit Joachim “talked to us the whole evening about you, and your wife wept silently. We were all filled with the joyful hope of seeing you again soon.” Of Clara, he added:
How long the separation from your wife seemed to me! I had grown so used to her uplifting presence and had spent such a magnificent summer with her. I had grown to admire and love her so much that everything else seemed empty to me and I could only long to see her again.… I have to thank you above all for the beautiful word in your last letter—for the affectionate “du.” Your kind wife has also gladdened my heart now by using this beautiful and intimate word to me.21
It may be that in this letter Johannes showed more innocence than was healthy, was more candid than he should have been. He wrote as if to a friend and confidant, as if to a well man, as if to someone other than the husband of the woman he wrote so rapturously about. They had all been sending restrained and guarded letters to Endenich during Robert’s convalescence, so as not to upset him. Maybe this unconstrained letter was less than helpful to Schumann.
The belated and cheerless christening ceremony for the baby Felix came on New Year’s Day 1855. Brahms stood in the church as one of three godparents, the others being family friends. Clara wanted Joachim as a godparent too, but the authorities proscribed that because he was Jewish. (He converted to Christianity later that year, with a fierce repudiation of the religion of his birth.) Soon after the christening, Clara and Johannes surprised Joachim by arranging a rehearsal in Hanover of his Henry IV Overture.22 The violinist still composed actively and Johannes encouraged him with steady praise, but that was not to last for either of them.
On January 8 a letter arrived for Clara from her husband. She had sent him one of Brahms’s sonatas and the Ballades, and Robert responded lucidly to them. He concluded, “Now on to overtures and symphonies!… A symphony or opera, which arouses enthusiasm and makes a great sensation, brings everything else more quickly forward. He must.”23 It was what Clara had once preached to Robert. Brahms wrote back to Schumann that he had indeed spent last summer “trying to write a symphony.”24 He did not mention that for the moment it had trickled out.
Then, with a welter of feelings, on January 11 Brahms made the journey to Endenich. There for the first time in nearly a year he sat face to face with the man to whom he owed his fame and his burden. Schumann was alert and sociable. The two chatted through the afternoon about times old and new. They tried some piano duets. Brahms played his Schumann Variations and Four Ballades for the smiling master. After a visit of several hours they walked to Bonn, where Schumann clung to Johannes nearly enough to make him miss his train.
Johannes returned to Clara with a hopeful report, just before she left for a tour of the Netherlands. In fact, he hid from her a feeling of foreboding over Schumann’s condition25; her husband had been calm but still vague and childlike. Brahms accompanied Clara and her companion, Fräulein Schönerstedt, as far as Emmerich and then turned back. Then in Düsseldorf he found he could not endure the separation. Two days later he surprised Clara in Rotterdam, having spent most of his money for the ticket. Finally tearing himself back to Düsseldorf, he wrote her with naked desperation, “I can do nothing but think of you and gaze constantly at your dear letter and portrait. What have you done to me? Can’t you remove the spell you have cast over me?”26
EVEN IF CLARA’S PLAYING found a good response in Holland, she felt ill and depressed and missed Johannes. Then came a devastating letter from Robert on January 26: “My Clara, I feel as if I were facing some terrible calamity. How dreadful if I should never see you and the children