Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [91]
Here the story becomes obscure. There are letters destroyed, agonized private conversations, unspoken feelings. We do not know exactly, medically, what was wrong with Robert Schumann, or why he experienced an evil presentiment in the winter of 1855. But by the time of that letter to Clara he seems to have made a decision, or believed it had been made for him.
It appears that the voices were speaking to him again, more insistently than ever. They had sentenced him to death before and he had botched the execution. This time he must not fail. Now Schumann may have decided to make good his plunge into the Rhine by a surer means of killing himself: the slow but certain route of starvation.28
There was more to his despair now than the random attacks of madness he had suffered since his youth. It was what madness had done to him and his family. In the last decade, inspiration had given Schumann less than it had when he was younger. His energy had not declined—if anything he had worked himself into collapse—but the old boldness of thought had deserted him. Alfred Einstein wrote, “Had Schumann never passed his thirty-fifth birthday, he would have been the Shelley of music, the star of youth most resplendently gleaming.”29 In those words lies a certain regret that Schumann survived after his inspiration ran short. As of 1855, he was forty-five, and after decades of wrestling with his demons he felt sick and weary unto death. Doctors offered no explanation for his years of suffering, no assurance of relief. Beyond that, if he had outlived his inspiration and knew it, he had experienced one of the worst nightmares that can assail an artist still relatively young. Then, even if Clara his muse still lived, she would be no creative use to him any more, or he to her.
Another and more shadowy element might account for Schumann’s decision to starve, if decision it was. After Brahms’s December letter, Robert could see well enough what was happening in his house. From Johannes’s letter and visit, Robert must have suspected that this protégé loved his wife, and maybe he suspected Clara’s feelings for Johannes. She and Robert were soul mates; even at a distance he could feel what she was feeling—her anguish over him, her burgeoning love for a younger and healthier man. Perhaps Robert did not doubt Clara’s loyalty if he were alive and well. But what if he were not well, or not alive? Who would take care of her?
Who else but Johannes?30 On the face of it, Schumann still had reasons to fight off his demons and live—if not for his art, then for his family. But if he gave in to the weariness and the dark demands of his voices, there would still be Johannes to watch over Clara and the children. She could be muse to this young genius as she had been for Robert in his great years. The fact that Johannes had used Clara’s melody, as once Robert had, was a talisman of a new and equally beautiful partnership.
Which is to say: Robert Schumann may have decided to stop fighting the voices because he believed he was leaving his wife and children in stronger hands. Once Schumann had proclaimed Johannes the Fair his successor in music. Now perhaps he retired from the scene to let the younger man be successor in his home and his bed.
None of this can be said for certain. Schumann had been treated once for syphilis, and that illness could have claimed him. This can be said: In Schumann’s letters and actions there is no hint of jealousy regarding Johannes and his wife, but the opposite. As Schumann took his downward turn in the middle of 1855, he became even warmer toward the young eagle he had announced to the world. He wrote Joachim, “I am getting deeper into Johannes’s music. The First Sonata was quite without precedent for a first published piece.