Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [99]
In that limbo she went on living and working, incapable of deciding anything, Johannes her mainstay. But neither then nor in the decades after did Clara ever really know what he was thinking.
WHATEVER HIS PERSONAL and creative dilemmas, Brahms had finally conceded that he must play piano for his bread. In October he began practicing for a tour, protesting the whole time. He knew he would never find the acclaim Liszt and Joachim and Clara had, and he hardly cared. Never comfortable in front of an audience, he had long since given up any plans to become a virtuoso. He played best in private, among friends. But there appeared no other way for him to get by outside of concertizing. Neither Brahms nor his parents had ever imagined one could make a living purely as a composer. After all, most of the great masters had gone before the public as keyboard soloists; the endless list includes Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Chopin. Some who performed less regularly, including Schumann and Berlioz (as conductors), had been forced to turn out journalism. Schumann’s family had scraped by on his composing and criticism, a small inheritance, and Clara’s performing.
At the end of October Brahms arrived in Hamburg to finish preparations to restart his playing career after a hiatus of two years. Earlier he had mainly appeared as an accompanist; now he proposed to play in chamber and orchestral concerts. He wrote Clara, “I shall certainly not be such a success as pianist; you will see that I shall fail.”8
His boyish spirits had not failed, though. The letter also mentions that he had not been able to resist a set of toy soldiers in a shop window, when he was scouting Christmas presents for the Schumann boys. “Now I have the most delightful battle piece I ever saw.… At Christmas in Düsseldorf I will parade all my troops.”9 In Hamburg he spent his spare time and his little money in second-hand bookshops, ferreting out old scores and theoretical works. His acquisitions included dusty treatises on fugue and double counterpoint.10 He not only wanted to study counterpoint, he wanted to learn it from the same sources as had Baroque Kapellmeisters.
Picking up Joachim in Berlin, Brahms went on to Danzig, where they took part in two of Clara’s soirees. The programs included a sarabande and gavotte of his and the C Major Sonata, and Brahms and Clara played Schumann’s two-piano variations. Nerves tripped his fingers, as often happened when Brahms went before the public. His confidence did not rise when his piano broke down during the second program and he had to change instruments in the middle of a piece.11 During this time in Danzig, pianist Anton Door, a friend of Joachim and later of Brahms, first encountered the composer—which is not to say they met. On a visit to Joachim, Door noticed a diminutive blond youth pacing back and forth in the shadows, nervously smoking one cigar after another. Over the course of an hour or so, Brahms never acknowledged the presence of a stranger in the room. “I was empty air to him,” Door recalled.12
Despite the nerve-wracking Danzig performances, Brahms was not about to renege on his engagements. Plodding on through his anxiety and disgust, he went to Bremen for his first appearance with an orchestra, playing the Beethoven G Major Concerto and Schumann’s Opus 17 Fantasia. This time he received a warm response from the audience.13 Hamburg went still better. In a concert with G. D. Otten’s Akademie orchestra, Brahms played Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and solos by Schumann and Schubert. To Clara he reported “great applause, quite enthusiastic for Hamburg. I really did play with both fire and restraint.”14 A local critic noticed more of the latter: “He carried his reserve too far. He might … have displayed rather more virtuosity.”15 During this visit he received, as a gift from Theodor Avé-Lallemant, another item of what would become an important private