• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Most touching of Brahms’s birthday gifts that year was the A Minor Romance that Clara had composed for him. “Its tone is sad,” she told her journal, “but I was sad when I wrote it.” The piece marks nearly the end of her composing.45 It shows her state of mind that the Romance was dedicated “to my dear friend Johannes” on the first copy. When she re-copied it for Robert’s forty-fifth birthday, she inscribed it “to my beloved husband.”46

Then she received a frightful note from Robert: “I sent you a spring message on May 1st. The following days were very unquiet; you will learn more from the letter which you will receive the day after tomorrow. A shadow flickers across it, but the rest of its contents will please you, my darling.”47 The second letter never arrived. If he wrote it, perhaps the doctors intercepted it. Those were the last words she ever received from her husband. Did he deliberately pick for his foreboding announcement the day of Johannes’s birthday?

Now Robert’s return, the return of their old life, was no longer a viable dream. When that had sunk in, the question remained: What did it mean for her and Johannes?

THE LOWER RHINE MUSIC FESTIVAL came around again in Düsseldorf at the end of May 1855. As a forum for large orchestral and choral works the event had seen much excitement in the last years, including Joachim’s performances and some of the Schumanns’ greatest triumphs. This year the luminaries included Liszt and Jenny Lind. Even if there was bad blood between them over Johannes’s music, Clara was transported by Lind’s performance in the title role of Robert’s oratorio Paradise and the Peri.48

At the festival Lind and her husband, Otto Goldschmidt, met Johannes for the first time. His discomfort with them and with the situation joined with his gracelessness to make a wretched impression. The couple did not laugh at the jokes he cracked in his high voice. He struck them as impertinent and offensive. Clara went through the festival with her accustomed mixture of elation and revulsion. At a gathering in her house during the festival, Liszt insisted on playing the overture to Robert’s Genoveva four hands with her. She snarled in her journal, “It was so dreadful that I could only find relief in tears. How he banged the piano.… I was beside myself at hearing His work so desecrated.”49

During the festivities Brahms first made the acquaintance of the eminent Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick. The older man recalled his first sight of Brahms as “a young ideal hero of Jean Paul, with his forget-me-not eyes and his long fair hair.”50 Other new acquaintances included musicologist Otto Jahn, soon to begin the epochal biography of Mozart that absorbed Brahms and his time.

Also during the festival three princesses from Lippe-Detmold visited Clara and invited her to their court. Johannes was to receive considerable benefit from that connection. After the festival Clara went on to Detmold to spend several weeks giving lessons to Princess Friederike and performing, some of it with Joachim. During that visit she once more left Johannes at home with the children and with his waiting. When she sent him greetings and a nosegay from Detmold, he replied impetuously, “I always kiss [the boys] from you, but I would very much like to give you the kisses back again.” He reported that he’d been practicing his running and jumping and could leap further than ever.51 He had taught the children to turn somersaults, and performed acrobatics for their amusement. One of daughter Eugenie’s early memories was of the children watching open-mouthed as little wiry Johannes performed a handstand on the hall banisters with his legs in the air, and ended with a reckless leap to the floor.52 Such shenanigans would give way to age and girth, but the vigor remained.

The games and athletics only marked time. “I can no longer exist without you,” Johannes wrote Clara in the perennial terms of forlorn lovers. “I want so much to be able to hold your hand again and to sit beside you.” At the end of that letter he used