Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [98]
Laurens’s companion drawing of Schumann in 1853. The artist could see his subject was ill, but could not know that he was making a portrait of incipient madness.
Josef Joachim in his dashing youth.
Joachim and Clara Schumann in a recital of December 1854, drawn by Adolph von Menzel.
Two views of Brahms in his beardless thirties: the features still fair, but now an aggressive underlip and a magisterial gaze.
The beginning of “All flesh is grass” from Ein deutsches Requiem. Brahms’s hand was fast and inelegant, but decisive.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Resolution in a Minor Key
AS CLARA’S THIRTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY approached in September 1855, Brahms sent her a despondent greeting: “As I have written myself dry, aye and already getting along in years, I find I cannot compose, but I have written something for your birthday or for your return all the same.”1 It was a prelude and aria, the final movements of a Bach-inspired A minor suite that Brahms had been working on, based on old sketches.2 He and Clara performed some of the movements in public in the next months, but most of the suite ended up in the stove. Whatever might be the solution to Brahms’s creative block, little neo-Baroque gigues and gavottes were not going to cure it (though the surviving numbers proved useful in a more productive time). For months he had been living more or less on nothing, staying at Clara’s, teaching a few students, borrowing from friends. For want of anything better to do, he accumulated practical experience wherever he could find it—grist for an idle mill.
That summer Joachim, still staying in Düsseldorf, got some associates together for a regime of reading chamber music twice a week, three or four pieces at a time. Outside, townspeople would gather to listen to the music drifting through the windows. Clara and Johannes attended the evenings regularly. Generally he claimed a corner sofa and sat listening, hand over his eyes. Before this period Brahms had usually heard chamber works in keyboard arrangements; now he had regular contact with the live article, and sometimes it overpowered him. One night during a Mozart adagio he leaped up from the sofa and stalked from the room, slamming the door behind him. Later he apologized to Joachim, explaining he had felt so full of the music that it was like being seasick and he could not bear another note. In sessions when Joachim wanted to try a piece with piano, Brahms usually took the part. Clara did not like to play with Johannes around because, she explained, “his criticisms are too sharp; and unfortunately he’s always right.”3
The year before, Clara’s friend Fräulein Leser had scolded her for submitting to him, cheapening herself before this callow youth. Since then, others had made the same objection to an artist of her caliber putting up with his arrogance and imperiousness. “I am convinced that Brahms knows exactly what I am worth,” she explained in her journal. “But it seems to me that an artist … is not to be judged by age but by intellect, and when I am with Brahms I never think of his youth, I only feel myself wonderfully stirred by his power, and often instructed.”4 It was like Clara to disguise—to herself—her attraction for a man behind a screen of giving sympathy or receiving wisdom. She had always considered herself too plain to appeal to men in the usual ways. In later, more hard-bitten years, Brahms expressed his own view of that period, maybe with Fräulein Leser in mind: “I believe that she would have gone mad if I, little man that I was, had not been near her, the only man among all those females to talk the nonsense out of her.”5
Into the quiet but unsettled interlude of that time intruded terrible news from Endenich. On September 10 the doctors, though they still had little idea what was wrong with Schumann, declared that he could never completely recover. He was becoming incoherent, hearing voices. They did not mention that he was weak from refusing to eat.6 “Can I wish him back to me in this state?” Clara groaned