Brahms and Clara
Brahms and Clara 
It’s been traditional to see Clara Schumann (1819-1896) only in relation to her composer husband Robert and to Johannes Brahms, who was helplessly in love with her.
She’s often spoken of only as their inspiration, which does a huge disservice to a woman who was probably the foremost concert pianist of her generation, a brilliant composer in her own right, and who did it all while caring for her mentally unstable husband and raising their eight children.
Brahms was a complicated man who bore the scars of his adolescence his entire life. According to his own account, repeated many times through his life to Clara and others, he played in sleazy waterfront bars, was sexually abused there by prostitutes (and possibly sailors), and the experience traumatized him. As Clara’s daughter recalled, it “left a deep shadow on his mind.”
After Robert Schumann died at age 46, Brahms and Clara were finally able to fulfil the deep yearning they had long felt for each other. Off they went for a three-day tryst in Switzerland. Except he left after the first night, and though they remained the closest of friends the rest of their lives, they did so alone and unrequited.
Perhaps in reality this wasn’t as romantic as I’ve made it sound — there’s a lot we don’t know. Still, whatever happened to Brahms in his youth, it left him with a bottomless capacity to feel romantic yearning but no path to physical intimacy.
It’s another of those tragic ironies the universe subjects some of us to. His genius as a Romantic composer came at the price of the one love he wanted most of all.
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Painting: Andreas Staub ("Clara Schumann")
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