Status Updates From Johannes Brahms

The Handel variations were Brahms’s attempt to match the enormous structural, aesthetic and emotional challenge of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. In February 1865, Josef Gänsbacher found his friend Brahms, just after he had been told that his mother was dying, ‘..playing the Bach variations with tears running down his cheeks. He didn’t stop when I came in, but just said, They’re like balm’.

I don’t think for a moment I shall ever go to England, at least not until I’ve walked all round Swabia and the magnificent German forests, not until I’ve been to the Tyrol, Switzerland, Italy, Greece, Egypt, India etc, etc, despite choirs of 3000 singing Handel and the magnificent scenery and battle scenes in Shakespeare’s plays…(3 July 1859, Letter from Brahms to Clara Schumann).

Brahms’ stormy C minor Piano Quartet Op 60 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5zu-d...) was his most explicit and passionate statement of his ill-starred love for Clara Schumann. Brahms knew his Werther: I have sent you the quartet purely as a curiosity. As an illustration of the man in the blue coat and yellow waistcoat in the last chapter.

Despite now being much reduced by the loss of so many letters, the correspondence clearly delineates the course of the relationship between Brahms and Clara Schumann. This can almost be intuited from merely reading the changing forms of address:Dear Madam, it starts, then Dearest Friend, My most beloved Friend, My most dearly beloved friend, My beloved Frau Clara, Dear Clara.

Might I dedicate my Opus 2 to your wife?When Brahms met Clara Schumann she was a 34-year-old mother of six, but this does not seem to have diminished her otherworldly charm. For an idealistic young man such as Brahms, she must have seemed the epitome of cultivation, exotic beauty and intelligence;not a vision from his imagination, but the living embodiment of his Romantic yearnings and intellectual aspiration.

Brahms’s reluctance to talk about himself has been attributed to his North-German background. He never got over his irritable taciturnity, even after living in Vienna for years. He was also inordinately shy. He could never overcome his shyness, so he hid it, especially in later life, behind a mask of rudeness, perhaps hoping to make a virtue of necessity.

Brahms was soon being called upon to contribute to the family finances, playing with his father at night in the taverns and dance halls on Hamburg Hill. Some of his later admirers, especially concerned female admirers, harboured a suspicion that the lax morality of these bordellos and banlieux had caused him psychological damage, and this may have accounted for his inhibitions with regard to women.

Playing music was a craft, and Brahms’s father, with his strong North-German accent, talked like a true craftsman. Famous sayings of his allegedly include:’Herr Kappellmeister, it’s my double bass and I’ll play it as loud as I like’, and, ‘Herr Kappellmeister, a pure note on the double bass is pure chance’.

I invest all my money in books, Brahms said, books are my greatest delight, from earliest childhood I read as much as I could and, without any guidance at all, went, from the worst to the best. As a child I devoured countless novels about the knights of old, until one day I happened on Die Raüber, not knowing it was the work of a great writer…I demanded more by this Schiller and so onwards and upwards.’