Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [97]
When they returned to Düsseldorf, they moved the family to a sunnier house on Poststrasse, where Johannes installed himself in a room on the first floor. Then Clara went to Kiel for another sea-bathing cure, gathering her strength and playing his music privately for friends. One of them, soprano Livia Frege, began to appreciate Brahms’s Ballades after several hearings, but Clara was not encouraged: “I see … how difficult it will be for Johannes’s works to be understood.… Robert’s music … is always soft and melodious and sweet, which is not always the case with Johannes.… As with the man himself, the roughest husk conceals the sweetest kernel, but not every commonplace person is able to discover it.”59
Back in Düsseldorf Brahms began to see his way, his situation becoming clearer in his mind. The change shows in what he wrote Clara, and in what he did not write. In August:
I am always thinking of you.… Many a young man probably wishes he had the wings of an eagle, and may even imagine that he has them. Then he falls among books and music and soon sticks in the mire and forgets how to fly.… I frequently feel sad that I no longer seem to know how to compose.… Bertha [the maid] is a bit too much of a good thing with her lovesickness.… This love business is a funny thing. I am again confirming my old observations. It alters people so, often for the worse. When they begin by being so happy in their love and regard it as the most important thing of all, for which alone the world exists, I can’t stand it.60
He was turning away from love. His pages to Clara are still affectionate, but the ardor cooled in that autumn of 1855. He felt trapped, and not only in his practical situation: trapped by love. He did not know why he could not compose, but he suspected that Clara and her house and children were part of what held him down. He wanted to fly, to be a young eagle again, and he could not do it in that house. The year before he had written Clara, “I am dying of love.” Now he wrote, “I feel ever more happy and peaceful in my love for you. Every time I miss you more but I long for you almost with joy.”61
He was beginning to replace the actuality of Clara with longing for her. After the trip on the Rhine the spell of lovesickness broke like a fever. He awoke in what seemed to him the clear light of freedom, duty, possibility—alone. He still loved Clara deeply, but no longer helplessly. It was exactly the helplessness of love he could not endure. Mixed into it all was the inner voice from his childhood that forbade him to taint a respectable, beloved woman with the sordidness of sexuality. Even in their old age he would say of Clara: she is as virginal as ever. He was ready to substitute an archetypal, and unilateral, Brahmsian bargain: to live with yearning rather than fulfillment.
Nonetheless, Clara still relied on him utterly, and for the moment he stayed by her. His feelings had not settled out yet. To push away love, even a love frustrating and agonizing, is to give up passion for emptiness, something for nothing. Brahms could not make himself do that yet. Clara needed him. He had no money, no career, no public. What did he have at that point but love and an unfulfilled talent and her need? He made no final decisions in the autumn of 1855. He and Clara remained affectionate, occasionally wrangled, waited. The question that most troubled them remained unspeakable.
The Karlskirche in Vienna.
Brahms’s mother, Christiane, in 1862, three years before she died.
Robert and Clara Schumann about the time they met Brahms.
Brahms at twenty in 1853, by Laurens: Young Kreisler of the maidenly features. (Note the error in the inscription, presumably Laurens’s—“Joseph Brahms.”) Robert Schumann commented:
“He is truly one of the handsomest