The Intermezzi

There are many sides of Brahms: the early waltz king of the 16 Waltzes and the Liebeslieder Waltzes; the magisterial prophet of A German Requiem, the two concertos, and the four symphonies; the Lisztian virtuoso of the Paganini Variations and the rhapsodies; and the wistful philosopher of the last songs and the intermezzi.

I have chosen 10 of the latter, possibly because of their touching on the yearning, the Sehnsucht, the twilight of the Habsburgs in doomed Vienna, when children would tumble in the Prater, in the half-light of Empire, midges amber in the setting sun, ducks swanning on the Danube, parasols side lit by the real-life Götterdämmerung, by the miniature apocalypse of each last day when beauty was in the air, before the wars took it all away and brought in the modern world.

It was 20 years before World War I, but the shards of the crumbling empire were in the air. Composers, poets, writers, and painters always sense things as they’re building up to events which history then documents. But before that, the aura in the air, the tension in the coffeehouses, the increasing brusqueness in the streets and frustration in the papers, all dramatically foreshadow the times which sluggish historians write about three decades too late. Although you can capture the atmosphere in Proust, or in the lyric histories of Frederic Morton, such as A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888–1889, you should play the Brahms intermezzi as you read, for the full effect.

In that light I have included the 1849 Romanze by Robert Schumann to introduce the carousel and the swing set, to summon up the gilded height of the Romantic Era in 1849, the centenary of Goethe’s death, when Chopin and Liszt were changing the musical world in Paris, and Schumann had moved to the small village of Kreischa to avoid the Dresden insurrection.

1848 had brought the greatest wave of democratic revolutionary fervor in history, in France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy. Schumann must have sensed his world falling apart, in his deteriorating mind, in the chaos of the widespread riots. Even small changes in the order of the objects around us, paint disturbed on the houses, cafés where they’ve never been, can disorient us and strangify the world, so we begin having visions rather than the usual protected views under the sheltering sky. Paintings are imprisoned in museums to lock out the world, to preserve their lost dreams. It won’t do for art to get loose. Brahms used the hanging note, the suspended resolution, the unresolved harmony, the unanswered question to leave his chords and passages in limbo for a while before they returned home to their underlying “tonic” key. In the meantime, they modulate far afield, like Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, Gulliver,

Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, or Richard Feverel—early episodic, picaresque adventurers.

Notes also have their lives, their adventures, their freedom, before they are roped home by the composer. (Chopin’s improvisations were much freer and more brilliant than the eventual sheds and palaces into which he chose to bend them.)

Brahms’s “leading” tones were cliffhangers, ways of postponing the instant harmonic gratification which tradition demands. We are all programmed to expect a chord to resolve into a comforting, reassuring base, and when it doesn’t, our world becomes dark, unsure, terrifying. We all understand the angst of unrequited love, the grief of delayed happiness, and our hearts go out to all such men without a country, notes without a key.

Schumann’s Romanze has the same unresolved notes. Brahms studied Schumann, with whom he boarded, as a man and as a composer before he dared to begin showing his early compositions to Clara. Since Clara was the source and the muse for Robert’s music, she was the ideal mentor for Brahms as well.

It is the mythologic longing for the eternal return of spring (what the poet Paul Muldoon has abridged to the “slight return” of the poet to his naive native land), the spring of Persephone risen from the winter, Finnegan rising from the dead, the sun god Amen-Ra emerging from his nightly trip through the underworld, which informs our ingrained need for a happy ending to our songs.

Added to that structural anguish is the “Clara” theme. Clara wrote it, Schumann adapted it as a private homage to Clara in many of his pieces, and Brahms improved on it in his own works, most audibly in the intermezzi. Four downward-traveling notes (which can be shortened to two or enlarged to seven), like Berlioz’s idée fixe or Tristan’s love theme, become a motif which summons up regret, lost love, the lost youth of Proust, the lost kingdom of the magnificent Meaulnes, Nabokov’s and Rachmaninoff’s lost Russia, the lost kingship of the Earl of Oxford, anyone’s lost dreams and faded ideals. So emotion can be encoded into melodies.

The descent of Brahms’s “Clara” theme suggests depression, a decline into madness or hell, the melancholy of a Scottish or Irish song which mourns the countryside lost to the English, or the illusions of youth lost to age.

We all see the lawns of our childhood as enormous; when we come back to them as adults we see them in perspective, without the mythologies we created as children, and often the “reality” is quite disappointing.

If the dreams of childhood, which age and accidents have stripped away from our souls, are the real “reality,” we can have them back again, endlessly, in the time machine of the waltzes, the idylls, the empires invoked and evolved by Brahms’s lost chords.

Johannes, Robert, and Clara

The story of Brahms begins with Robert and Clara Schumann. Clara had written a theme when she was young, five descending notes in the Lento or slow section of her Romances variées, which later her husband Robert reshaped into what he called the Andantino and integrated into many of his compositions.

The Clara theme became a major building block for many of Robert’s pieces and, later, for the intermezzi of Johannes Brahms (you can listen to a podcast about this love triangle and its musical consequences at https://tippetrise.org/podcasts/peter-at-the-piano-robert-schumanns-clara-theme).

My concert starts with this Romanze, written nine years after Robert met Clara. It wouldn’t be until the end of his life that a third musical genius, Johannes Brahms, would weave that Romanze into his greatest compositions. It was not only a title, that Romanze; it was the greatest romance in the history of music, spread out over the lifetimes of three supreme masters. Their contributions to the history of Western society have since been diluted in the ocean of music which has surged around us over the last 60 years, but during their lifetimes they were at the heart of what it meant to be not only brilliant, but coruscating.

Clara’s Romance variée in C Major, Op. 3, written in 1833, when she was 14, has a Lento a piacere movement with theme and variations, which Robert Schumann turned into the Quasi variazione, the slow movement of his Piano Sonata No. 3. When Brahms came into their household, he understood how this theme had become the catalyst around which much of their music spun, and it began to incubate in him until it burst out, burning, 40 years later in his last, intense manifesto of passion, shame, and contrition, bundled up around that same simple theme. Although Brahms began writing his intermezzi as early as 1879, the majority of them began to

appear 40 years after he met Clara. His last four collections, mainly of intermezzi, were written in 1892 and 1893; three years later, Clara would be dead; a year after that, Brahms would be dead.

He and Clara would play the intermezzi together in those last three years of her life, renewing their passion through the many ways Brahms integrated Robert Schumann’s love theme (four descending notes), based on Clara’s variations, into every intermezzo. Although Brahms and Clara were entirely platonic, it was she who made his reputation and who inspired so much of his music. She was the only person he ever really loved, the only person he could talk to, although they went for many years pursuing enormous careers apart from each other.

Schumann and Clara had been madly in love, ever since Schumann came to tutor her in her family home when she was 11. In exchange, her father taught Robert composition. It is hard to believe that either Clara or Robert required much tutelage; education the mask under which many carnivals happened. If anything, they tutored each other.

Clara had given her debut public recital at the age of nine. That same year she met Robert Schumann at a concert she gave at the Leipzig house of the director of the mental hospital at Colditz Castle, later a high security dungeon for foreign soldiers who had broken out of other German prisons. They broke out of Colditz as well, later the subject of a book by Pat Reid, one of the British escapees, and a film starring John Mills (father of Hayley) and Eric Portman (Soames in The Forsyte Saga of 1967, the first viral TV series, so popular that no one went out on Saturday nights, when it was broadcast).

Schumann admired Clara so much that he asked her father, Friedrich Wieck, if he could study

with him. As so often happened in those days, the pupil was mentored fully by the master— tutelage came with room and board, and Schumann moved into Wieck’s house in 1830, when he was 20. Schumann was nine years older than Clara; it was her talent, and her aura, which convinced him to give up the law and pursue music.

He and Clara began a platonic relationship, which culminated in their marriage in 1840. (Before that transpired, Wieck had forced Clara to break off with Schumann, who was briefly engaged to Ernestine von Fricken.)

But in 1837 Robert asked Wieck for Clara’s hand, which Wieck refused. Robert and Clara ultimately sued her father for permission to marry. They married one day before she turned 21, to make the point to Robert’s former teacher that they didn’t actually need his permission.

Those were fraught years in music, when the greatest achievements of Western society sprung from the bedroom farces captured much later by Arthur Schnitzler in his 1897 banned play, Reigen. 1897 was the year it was all over. Brahms died that year. It was incidentally the year in which the piano, Seraphina, which I’m using to record the Brahms intermezzi, was built. The affairs of Reigen were cynical liaisons, callous affairs, while the love of both Schumann and Brahms for Clara Wieck was the quintessence of innocent romance.

At that time, musicians, writers, poets, and painters were the focus of Europe; they composed the body of the culture which America later came to regard as the canon, the standard against which all future art has been judged. This was partly because of World War II, which drove the European intelligentsia to America, where they taught in liberal arts colleges for the next 40 years, shaping the curve of knowledge. But both World Wars were born out of the failure of empire, that indeterminate disintegration

sprung from boredom with a frivolous society and the human need for change. Social unrest has been traced to class inequalities, to new philosophies of government such as Marxism, to the birth of the unconscious with Freudianism, to atonality in music. But possibly all those causes are in fact effects of what André Malraux called “la condition humaine.”

Despite Wieck’s feeling that Schumann was too unstable to succeed, Schumann was to become the greatest German composer between Beethoven and Brahms, and Clara the greatest pianist of her age throughout her six-decade career.

Brahms, who was to become Robert’s protégé, came to live with the Schumanns in 1853, when he was 20. Clara was 34, and Robert was 43. Schumann had also been 20 when he moved into Wieck’s house to become his protégé. Brahms and Schumann both understood each other’s genius, and both idolized Clara as a person and as a pianist.

Wieck was right about Schumann’s instability, and in 1854, after trying to drown himself in the Rhine (an alternative he had been considering for many years), Schumann committed himself to a sanatorium in Bonn. From that day on, Clara never saw him again, except the day he died. On that day she was 36, and Brahms was 22.

A sanatorium was in a way an ivory tower from which people could coddle their genius at a safe distance from the slings and arrows of demanding soirées and salons. Resorts were in a way the last resort, where abandoned and fragile people, shunted aside by families, rode out their lives until death or a new resolve took them. Many patients had undiagnosable diseases; in Schumann’s case, later critics have called it psychotic melancholia (which writers and composers probably need to distance themselves enough from life to create), vascular dementia (strokes brought on by hypertension), schizophrenia, syphilis, bipolar disorder, and so on. Richard Kogan, in Music and the Mind: The Life and Works of Robert Schumann, felt that Schumann’s vast piece, Carnaval, with its schizophrenic narrators, Florestan and Eusebius, “could not have been written by someone who did not suffer from bipolar disorder.” (The descendants of madmen were often at pains to solicit medical diagnoses after the fact about their insane forebears, certificates which proved that they themselves did not suffer inherited madness, allowing them to marry into polite society with the mad money they had inherited.) Brahms’s attentions to Clara had grown as Robert’s had withdrawn. Brahms no doubt needed

an unreachable love, having grown up playing background music in bordellos, where the residents regarded him as a mascot. Love was platonic and reserved for pure affections; lust was for brothels. Brahms was awkward with women; he possibly would act as guilty as he felt of impure thoughts. But with a maternal musician (Clara had seven surviving children and was 14 years older than Brahms), he could speak of music alone, and allow passion to bloom outside the pressures of sensuality.

Johannes and Clara agreed that after Robert died, they would marry. But after Schumann died in 1856, Brahms left town. He knew he was married to music. Clara had young children at home. It was too much for Brahms. And so Clara realized she was truly alone.

It took Brahms 23 years to begin to apologize. When he did, it was through music, with his first four intermezzi: short, matter of fact, with slight but as yet hidden deviations into Robert Schumann’s Clara motif. In these early efforts, the great Brahms is muted.

Brahms lived to be 64. It wasn’t until 1892, when he was almost 60, that he was somehow freed to incorporate into his music the Clara theme, in ways even more gorgeous than Schumann’s. Schumann had woven the Clara theme into his piano concertos, into the Carnaval, even into his F-sharp Romanze in 1839, written when he was only 29. Never was the Clara theme more obvious, more integrated, more heartbreaking. The entire piece is only 34 measures long. (It is the first piece I play here.) It is the piece around which the intermezzi whirl.

Fifty-three years later, Brahms figured out how to do the same thing Robert had done at 29. By that time, Brahms had already composed his folk songs, his love songs, his gypsy songs, his waltzes, his Hungarian dances, his chamber works, his two great concertos, even his symphonies. In his four last collections (Opp. 116, 117, 118, and 119), written at the end of his life, he

wrote the 14 great intermezzi, filled simple technique, and yet modulations that are still heartbreaking 150 years later.

In these pieces he no longer hid the Clara theme: he celebrated it, with as much invention as his Handel Variations or his German Requiem. Each version of the theme used exactly the same four notes, and yet each version was entirely new, wrenching.

He and Clara would play them together in their last years, reminiscing. Only Clara knew how clever they were, and the meaning they bore. Her children would have paid no attention. But a great history, both in music, in affection, and in a strange kind of loyalty, was unfolding. This was a marriage, borne aloft after the fact by notes alone, but creating all the passion, warmth, nostalgia of any intense, lifelong love.

They had three years of this Wagnerian idyll, brewed over a lifetime of tragedy and betrayal, steeped in Schumann’s near-suicide, incubated over the length of the greatest epoch in creative history: Liszt, Chopin, Brahms, Schumann, Wagner, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Berlioz, Goethe, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Schiller, Hugo, de Musset, Lamartine, Gautier, Stendhal, Turner, Friedrich, Constable, Lorrain, Blake, Church, Bierstadt, the Brontës, Jane Austen. Never had so many young prodigies been so in love with love, believing in art for art’s sake.

The World Wars, disease, disillusionment, anomie, noise, atonality, irony led to a very different world soon after Brahms and Clara died. It was childhood’s end.

Brahms died in 1897, Clara in 1896.

On her deathbed, she asked her grandson Ferdinand to play her husband’s F-sharp major Romanze for her. This is the piece with which I begin the concert.

In it is a muted waltz, such as would be played by musicians outdoors under the trees of the Prater gardens in Vienna, as small children ran around the bandstand and midges danced in the long twilight. The midsection is the Clara theme; this time only three notes descend.

Brahms died 11 months later. It was almost the fin de siècle, the end of a century, and of an era. Oscar Wilde died of meningitis in 1900 at a cheap hotel in Paris. The world would never be as carefree, as indolent. Lazy afternoons on the river, in the park, music played in the drawing room, the drawing room itself, all would be gone in a few decades of disease and death: World War I, brought to an end by the Spanish Flu, so called because only Spain reported its existence.

But the paradise lives on, in these intermezzi, in the afternoons they bring back, the insouciance, the clean air, carriages on cobblestones, lace fringes and leather gloves, in Johannes’s and Clara’s freedom to love from afar, faithfully, without any thought of jealousy, without sensuality. The last minutes of sheer Romantic love. Proust would catalogue it in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, Robert Musil in Vienna.

And here, for an hour, you can hear its heartbeat. You can be alone with Johannes and Clara, in their household, still one of the few people in the world to share their secret. Their ruined, wrong, tragic love. And to be able, with them, to marvel at how it all transmigrated into music.

Russian pianists like Volodos try to find the orchestral timbres smelting among the ashes of Brahms’s passion, of his attempt to write his way out of his immortal humiliation for having left Clara at the altar. Volodos drives the notes before him like sheep, intent on the horizontal rush to glory.

Seong-Jin Cho’s approach is wiser, free of performance nerves and posturing, calm and infused with the lassitude of Viennese summers in the park.

Glenn Gould focuses on the vertical, the interlacing of notes in each chord, voicings from forgotten cultures. He is intent on singing Clara’s lament by stressing the pain of the melody, of the inner voices, as if the split personalities of Schumann howl through the trees of the Prater. Each note is about life, or death.

I am of that calling. I think it depends on which version captures your heart at an early age, and I was born into the era of Gould, from which there is no return. I have tried to add my own sense of how the conflicting melodies, les paroles confuses, swirl around the constant anchor of Clara’s theme. But in most ways the great challenge is to do nothing at all, to leave them alone and let them sing.

My teacher, Russell Sherman, studied with Eduard Steuermann, who in turn studied with Busoni and Schoenberg, whose many piano works he debuted. Steuermann taught Alfred Brendel, Theodor Adorno, Gunther Schuller, and Menahem Pressler. So I am in a direct line with the Marxist and Hegelian dialectics of those stern practitioners.

The German School believed in analyzing the vertical, to the point of coming to a complete halt. So many things were happening up and down the apartment block of the chord that you lost the momentum of the street.

My first piano was a 1928 Steinway, which refused to play fast. It brought out all the voices, the trios and quartets in the chords. It didn’t play single notes. It played 1928. I regret that we ever let it go. The resonance of this instrument led Cathy and me on a quest to find instruments which could reproduce the twilight of those golden years, the piano sounds I remembered coming from Victrolas in Victorian houses in my childhood.

And while I feign wariness today, I have been from my youth as deeply mired in Viennese values as Gould or Gropius, as anyone in the Weimar Republic, the center of the last gasp of Romanticism before the wars brought in atonality, entropy, and atrophy.

Rather than reading about Brahms, and seeing Brahms looking in a mirror, it is possibly more enlightening to put yourself in Brahms’s place: Brahms looking out of a window. What did he see? What influenced him? What went into his immense longing, his Sehnsucht? It wasn’t just nostalgia for the life that late he led, for the great works he wrote; it was mourning for the entire pageantry of it, for the meaning behind the notes, for the indolence of a world without consequences, where “illusion and reality embraced elegantly, seamlessly,” as Frederic Morton put it in Thunder at Twilight.

Books that capture the Viennese zeitgeist are Eric Kandel’s The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain; Morton’s Thunder at Twilight: Vienna 1913–1914; Morton’s A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888–1889; and Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture.