Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [94]
AS CLARA CONCERTIZED with Joachim in Berlin, Brahms returned to Endenich for an afternoon’s visit. Schumann looked wan and vacant, but once again welcomed Johannes with an attempt at cheer. He asked after Clara’s tour, where she was staying, what she was performing. Johannes gave Robert a portrait of her for his room; the sick man looked at it for a long time, his eyes filling with tears. At moments Schumann seemed his old self. He told Johannes he had been composing fugues, though they were not ready to show yet. He laughed over stories of the children and Felix’s first tooth, reminisced about old times on the road with Clara, especially their last tour in Holland when he had heard ovations for his music like none before.
Other moments were distressing. An air of unreality pervaded everything. Brahms handed Schumann pen and paper and encouraged him to write a note to Clara. Schumann could only stare helplessly at the paper and finally said he was too excited; he would try again tomorrow. They sat down at the piano and played through a duet arrangement of Schumann’s Cäsar Overture, but its composer could not keep the time and his piano was badly out of tune. Finally they walked to Bonn, an attendant trailing them watchfully. As they took in the cathedral, Schumann kept up with Brahms’s bustling pace. Naturally they stopped at the Beethoven statue that Schumann had been visiting nearly every day; the monument was his church and his altar.41
When it came time for Johannes to go, they embraced and kissed. Then Brahms got on the train and sank into gloom as it pulled out of the station. It had been a visit with the disturbing sensation of a pleasant social call in the middle of a catastrophe. When he wrote Clara about it he filtered his impressions, as always. The only sour note he mentioned was that Robert seemed tired of the hospital. That became explicit when a letter came from Endenich: “I want to get out of here!… For more than a year, it’s been exactly the same way of living, and the same view of Bonn. Where else can I go?”42 Schumann meant what other hospital. There was no question of going home again, and the Endenich hospital was the best available. They ignored the plea.
In April Clara met Johannes in Hamburg, and this time stayed in the Brahms household. She had not come to perform but to hear the Philharmonic play Robert’s Bride of Messina Overture and his overture and incidental music to Byron’s Manfred. As she and Johannes listened to the music take wing in the hall, it seemed to them an overpowering token of Schumann’s genius, and his tragedy.
Clara felt comfortable staying in the tiny family flat, but noted her concerns: Johannes’s “mother and sister have some dim idea that there is something out of the ordinary in him, but his father and brother do not even go so far as this.” Eduard Marxsen disappointed her; she found Johannes’s teacher “looks upon an artist’s life only in material terms.”43 All of it reinforced her dominant impression of Hamburg and its citizens, the philistine trading city Johannes inexplicably loved.
Once more they returned together to Düsseldorf. Joachim had taken rooms in town for a long stay, and on May 7 joined them for Johannes’s twenty-second birthday. As a birthday gift Robert sent the manuscript of The Bride of Messina, with greetings for Johannes. From Brahms’s parents came a portrait of his mother and sister. Julius Otto Grimm, not able to be with them, sent a cake in his stead. Joachim contributed Liszt’s two-piano arrangement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; it would occupy Brahms and Clara for many hours at the keyboard. There were volumes of Dante and Ariosto, a photograph of Robert. Friends joined in with music and dancing and laughter, even catching up Clara in the spirit: “I too seemed to grow younger, for he whirled me along with him and I have not spent so cheerful