Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [92]
Just in that period, as Robert’s decline encouraged their unspoken connection, Clara and Johannes had their first touch of friction. In a letter Brahms tried cavalierly to brush away the seriousness of Robert’s words about the “calamity.” Clara knew enough to be terrified by them. Her response to Brahms’s letter does not survive, but on receiving it he wrote her with brusque irony:
Fair and Haughty Dame! What crime can I have committed to deserve so distressing a letter as your last? As far as I can remember all I did was to write curtly, but my intention was not disrespectful. If only, my dear Frau Clara, you would never be angry with me about my writing! Have I not often told you how seldom I succeed in getting my thoughts out of my heart and onto paper? It is exactly the same with my composing.… It simply won’t flow from my heart.
He ends, “I can make canons in all possible artistic forms. I am wondering how I shall be able to get on with fugues.”33 Clara responded affectionately to his letter, he reciprocated, the tension receded. The next doctor’s report said Robert was hearing music in his head again.34
They went on waiting. It was altogether strange, the Schumann household, in that year. The husband was ill and far away, no one knew for how long. When visitors came they found a noisy collection of seven children, ages two to twelve, seen after mostly by servants. Much of the time their mother, who existed in some limbo between wife and widow, was away on tour. Supposedly sleeping in a room upstairs but spending his time downstairs was the handsome blond youth, his name known to everybody but his music unknown. He would always be there in the house, working at the piano or reading in the library or playing with the children. He had no position or apparent income at all. He was athletic and boyish but revealed nothing. Surely rumors about his relations with the famous woman hovered around Düsseldorf, and probably the whole German musical community. No one can know what Robert Schumann thought.
EVEN THOUGH ROBERT’S SALARY as town music director continued to the end of 1855, Clara had been anxious to start touring for reasons not only financial but personal: she needed to play, it was her consolation and joy. For much of her career from now on, the need for money was as much excuse as explanation. For the first time since her teens, Clara settled into the virtuoso life, traveling city to city with a maid or a companion (women did not travel alone in that time), alternating hours of musical exhilaration and audience adulation with days of loneliness and anxiety and exhaustion. Recital earnings were slim. It took many soirees to feed and clothe seven children.
As Clara traveled, Johannes kept her posted on the household and himself.
Eugenie has evidently caught a cold, she has no appetite, her face is flushed.… The boys are very well, even Felix. The alphabet doesn’t seem to make much progress, in spite of large quantities of sugar loaf.
Last Sunday I went with Bertha [the maid] and Marie and Elise to the Grafenberg.… We were all very lively, galloped about, and tore through the thickest bushes.… Last night—what do you think?—Ludwig slept in my bed; I put him to bed and showed him your picture to give him pleasant dreams. I didn’t get much sleep, but did my dreaming awake. The little one woke up very early indeed, and then we had a good tussle together.35
In a letter of early February, Brahms told Clara that in a dream he had found himself performing his “unfortunate symphony” as a piano concerto, and as both soloist and audience he was “completely enraptured” by it.36 Inspired by the dream, he decided to rework the D minor two-piano sonata/symphony into a concerto. In the process he would keep only the first movement, retooling it as necessary,