Clara was a central figure in the life of Johannes Brahms. When Brahms was just 20 years old, Robert announced in his popular music magazine that Brahms was the successor to Beethoven. This early recognition, even before Brahms had written much music, transformed Brahms’s life. After Robert went to the asylum, Brahms moved in to Clara’s house and helped raise her children for two years. The question of their relationship is one of the great mysteries of music history. Were they lovers? Just extraordinarily close friends? Nobody knows.
Brahms had troubled relationships with women throughout life, but Clara remained his most important friend. After Robert died, Clara expected a proposal. Instead, Brahms moved out and fled the city. Brahms was the ultimate romantic composer and the ultimate commitment-phobe! For the rest of their lives, they remained close, corresponded frequently, even vacationing together. But they never married.
The January/February Brahms Festival will explore Brahms’s music and his life. His relationship with Clara will be the focus of two of the 19 artistic partners in a concert by the SOLI Chamber Ensemble and Ballet San Antonio called Love Triangle/Forbidden Love.
Of course, there are even bigger questions about Clara’s life. The 19th century restrictions on women’s activities and the challenges she had raising her family under difficult conditions certainly limited her potential as a composer. Clara and Robert kept a joint diary and Robert wrote, “Clara has composed a series of small pieces, which show a musical and tender ingenuity such as she has never attained before. But to have children, and a husband who is always living in the realm of imagination, does not go together with composing. She cannot work at it regularly, and I am often disturbed to think how many profound ideas are lost because she cannot work them out.”
If Clara had different opportunities, would she be as famous a composer today as her beloved Robert and her best friend Johannes?
For more blogs by Jack Fishman visit: www.sasymphony.org/blog