Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [93]
At the beginning of 1855 he started a brooding piano quartet in the key of C# minor—the key cited by Kapellmeister Kreisler—and perhaps sketched a first movement for another symphony. Something was to come of both ideas, but only decades later. He wrote Clara, “There are frightfully many notes buzzing in my head and around the paper, if I only had tranquility! But everything stays at the beginning stage, I can’t finish anything.”37 Even though he worked steadily, after the previous year’s modest outpouring of the Four Ballades and the B Major Trio, a creative block of alarming magnitude had set in.
Much of his difficulty may have been that in the work of this period—the D Minor Concerto, the piano quartet, and possibly a symphony movement—Brahms was writing too close to his emotions. And, as he told Clara, he wanted to write more from the heart. The musical demands stumbled over the personal, the tumult of his feelings coming out in passionate but inchoate form. All that is familiar to artists mining their own experience for creative ore. The problem is never how to get the anguish on paper; that comes out amply on its own. The problem is how to sort it out, to find the distance to shape and control and judge the results.
When after years of struggle Brahms did find the balance of expression and form to contain the chaos of emotion, and finished the pieces he started in the middle 1850s, he would be candid about the intimate references. Twenty years later, when some of the C# minor material had become the C Minor Piano Quartet, Brahms wrote his publisher an apparently joking conceit that recalls an excruciatingly actual state of mind two decades before:
On the cover you must have a picture, namely a head with a pistol to it. Now you can form some conception of the music! I’ll send you my photograph for the purpose. Since you seem to like color printing, you can use blue coat, yellow breeches and top-boots.38
Anyone of his era would understand the reference to the man in the blue coat and yellow breeches and boots: Young Werther, who wore that costume when he killed himself over another man’s beloved. And in the opening of the Quartet, Brahms names the object of his despair by means of Robert Schumann’s Clara theme—C–B–A–G#–A—disguised in another key.
He would call these his Werther years. He floundered in a storm of unfamiliar and unwanted feelings. He wanted to get out of it all, to shoot himself, to find oblivion. The days empty of Clara he filled with his battle to discover his way as a composer, teaching a few students, reading, longing. The hyperbolic daydreams of lovesickness, the rankling hollowness in the pit of the stomach, accompanied his days.
He tried to keep himself occupied with reading and his old self-improvement projects, adding to “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein.” From March 1855 dates the notebook devoted to German proverbs: “Speak little, but true; too much talk is dangerous.” “Youth, waste not; poverty in old age is painful.” “He who stays on the plain will not fall far.” Beside the last he jotted, “Quite so.” For himself in a vehement time, Brahms craved the emotional plain, however flat and lonely that landscape. For the notebook he collected over a hundred proverbs, prefaced by an injunction to himself: “Good maxims, wise lessons one must practice, not just hear.”39
Clara came home for ten days in the middle of February, between tours again. Some of her upcoming programs would involve Joachim, some her old partner Jenny Lind. The new tour began with a visit to those performing partners in Hanover, where Lind resisted Clara’s attempts to beguile her with the Schumann Variations and waxed indignant over “mistaken tendencies” in Brahms’s music.40 Clara’s championing of Johannes came close to breaking up that friendship. She found