Longing
Page 58
In his exhaustion, he caught a cold while standing there shivering and seeing through his tears the refracted image of his one great love floating briefly on the very skin of the world. He never regained his strength and died less than a year later.
Out of fear that their relationship would never be understood, Clara and Johannes late in their lives returned their letters to one another and, as agreed, destroyed them. Clara, many years earlier—almost immediately after Robert’s death—had anticipated not only lack of understanding but hostility and wrote in her diary a letter to her children about her relationship with Brahms. In it, she told them that only Johannes, as she called him in the letter, was able to comfort her through the illness and the death of their father. He shared her sorrow. He fortified her heart. He enriched her mind. He lifted her spirits. He was her friend in the fullest sense of the word. They shared an exquisite harmony of soul, and her dear children should never listen to those parochial and envious souls who begrudged him her love and friendship and therefore tried to reproach him or even to decry their relations, which they could not, and never would, understand.
When Clara’s safe was opened after her death, this letter was found, as well as the little box and its letter in praise of her given her by Goethe, and Robert’s favorite cigar case with several cadaverous, exfoliating cigars within, and the note she had found beneath his hairbrush on the day he disappeared from their house in Düsseldorf and she never saw him again until she saw him at Endenich. “Dear Clara,” it said, “I will throw my wedding ring into the Rhine. Do the same and both rings will then be united.”
The idea that Brahms might have fathered Felix Schumann was not merely the idle speculation of Robert Schumann’s damaged imagination as he lay in bed in Endenich. His grandson Alfred Schumann wrote a little book called Johannes Brahms: The Father of Felix Schumann. Most copies were burned by the Nazis because such a notion as the book asserted was deemed to dishonor all Germans.
Joseph Joachim married the contralto Ursi Schneeweiss in 1863. Their first child they named Johannes. Their second, Clara.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
The line of verse in the book’s dedication is from “The Seventh Elegy” in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell, copyright © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell.
Copyright © 2000 by J. D. Landis
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0739-9
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