 Brahms Love for Clara Schumann 勃拉姆斯对克拉拉的爱 By Peter Y. Chou On February 12, 1856, he wrote Clara one of the most revealing letters of his life.It always saddens me to think that after all I am not yet a proper musician; but I have more aptitude for the calling than probably many of the younger generation have as a rule. It gets knocked out of you. Boys should be allowed to indulge themselves in jolly music; the serious kind comes of its own accord, although the lovesick does not. How lucky is the man who, like Mozart and others, goes to the tavern of an evening and writes some fresh music. For he lives while he is creating.He concluded jokingly, 'What a Man!' and crushed his quill pen onto the page. In fact, he was fighting despair. (p. 153) 1856年2月12日，他给克拉拉写了封他一生中最刻骨铭心的信：想到我毕竟还不是一个合格的音乐家，我总是感到难过；但我比许多年轻一代更有能力从事这项工作。这个想法使我溃不成军。应该允许男孩纵情声色；严肃的音乐是自然产生的，尽管相思病不是这样的。像莫扎特和其他人一样，晚上去酒馆写一些新鲜的音乐是多么幸运啊。因为他在创造中活着。这些人看似戏谑地说：“人就应该这样活着！”说完，他把笔尖踩在书页上。事实上，他是在与绝望作斗争。 I wish I could write to you as tenderly as I love you and tell you all the good things that I wish you. You are so infinitely dear to me, dearer than I can say... If things go on much longer as they are at present I shall have sometime to put you under glass or to have you set in gold. If only I could live in the same town with you and my parents... Do write me a nice letter soon. Your letters are like kisses. For all the extravagant language— which sounds like a true lover's in all senses— the distance still lingers between the lines: set you in gold, live in the same town with you and my parents. To set one's lover in gold in the presence of one's parents is not a prospective husband's fantasy. It means: I want to admire you, be near you, but stay with my own and not touch you. (p. 159) 勃拉姆斯致克拉拉的信： 我希望我可以像恋人一样柔情蜜意地给你写信，告诉我你所珍视的东西。你对我来说是无以言表的珍贵。如果时间不会流逝，我想把你嵌入玻璃之中，或者把你铸成金石。要是我能和你和我父母住在同一个城镇就好了。一定要尽快给我写封漂亮的信。你的信就像亲吻。尽管所有这些华丽的语言听起来就像一个真正的情人，但言语之间的距离也太过遥远：在父母面前给爱人镀金不是未来丈夫应有的幻想。它的意思是：我想欣赏你，在你身边，但是我却踟蹰不前，尽量不要去碰你。(p.159) He came as a true friend, to share with me all my sorrow; he strengthened my heart as it was about to break, he lifted my thoughts, lightened, when it was possible, my spirits. In short, he was my friend in the fullest sense of the word. I can truly say, my children, that I have never loved a friend as I loved him; it is the most beautiful mutual understanding of two souls. I do not love him for his youthfulness, nor probably for any reason of flattered vanity. It is rather his elasticity of spirit, his fine gifted nature, his noble heart that I love... Joachim, too, as you know, was a true friend to me, but... it was really Johannes who bore me up... Believe all that I, your mother, have told you, and do not heed those small and envious souls who make light of my love and friendship, trying to bring up for question our beautiful relationship, which they neither fully understand nor ever could. (p. 164)
勃拉姆斯像一个真正的朋友来到我的身边，与我分享我所有的悲伤；他使我即将破碎的心坚强起来，他唤起我的思想，减轻我精神的重压。总之，他是我的朋友，名如其实。我可以非常肯定地说，孩子们，我从来没有如此真挚地爱过朋友；那是两个灵魂之间最美丽的相互理解。我爱他不是因为他年轻，也并非不是因为虚荣。我爱的是他的精神张力，他善良的禀性，他高尚的心……你知道，勃拉姆斯对我来说也是一个真正的朋友，但是……真的是勃拉姆斯让我振作起来…请相信妈妈，妈妈把一切都告诉你们，不要理会那些轻视我们爱与友谊，试图对我们的美好关系提出质疑的渺小而嫉妒的灵魂，他们完全无法也永远不能理解妈妈和勃拉姆斯之间的感情。 Clara may have had her own misgivings about marrying someone as young, inexperienced, and egocentric as Brahms. That summer of 1856 she was 36, he 23. She wanted to be done with childbearing and was determined to perform full-time. Yet it is inescapable that Clara did want him, for the same reason she had wanted Robert, however unrealistic that had been. She loved and admired Johannes, and for all her gravity Clara respected passion and had always followed hers, purely and directly... In 1856, she wrote down what she wanted her children, and history, to know about the relations between herself and Brahms. Her journal, written for the record as much as for herself, did not note unseemly intimacies. She wrote a testament transparently idealized and evasive, perhaps self-deluding, extraordinarily forgiving. 克拉拉对于嫁给这样一个年轻缺乏经验并且以自我中心的勃拉姆斯的确有所顾虑。1856年的那个夏天，她36岁，他23岁。她希望不再生孩子，并决心做全职工作。克拉拉确实需要勃拉姆斯，这也是不可避免的，就像她需要要罗伯特的原因一样，尽管这种依恋非常不切实际。克拉拉爱并且钦佩勃拉姆斯，尽管她严肃，但她尊重激情，并且一直纯粹地、直接地追随她的感情。1856年，她通过日记的形式记述下自己同勃拉姆斯的感情，以便她的孩子和历史能够正确解读二人的关系。她的日记中并没有描绘她与勃拉姆斯不正当的亲密行为。她写了一份遗嘱，并在其中理想化回避这些问题，也许也是自我欺骗，她对这段关系表现得异常宽容。 Yet if Brahms denied Clara as a wife, in his heart he could never desert her. To the end of his life he loved Clara Schumann to the extent of his crippled capacity to love. But always he placed that in some other time, some other world. She was the virginal priestess, going to the stage as to the altar. So in his mind and in his music only the past would seem tryly alive. Maybe for that reason, some of the warmest and most haunting moments in his music seem to voice a lyrical Romantic evocation of what was or could have been: the lost idyll, the unattainable lightness of life. (p. 165) 然而，即使勃拉姆斯不承认克拉拉是他的妻子，但在他心里他决不会抛弃她。在他生命的尽头，他对克拉拉·舒曼的爱已达到了他无法去爱的程度。这份感情象征着另一个时间，另一个世界。克拉拉对她宛如一个贞洁的女祭司，走上舞台，就像走向祭坛。因此，在他的思想和音乐中，只有过去的回忆散发着光彩。也许正因为如此，他的音乐中一些最温暖、最令人难忘的时刻似乎总在表达一种抒情的浪漫，唤起人们对曾经或可能发生过的事情的回忆：追忆逝去的田园生活，和难以企及的生命的轻盈感。   
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