Bride gets a letter from Brahms
mainThe Brahms-Institut of the Lübeck music academy has acquired an unknown letter of Johannes Brahms.
Dated October 1868, it congratulates the singer Maria Schmidt on her marriage to the composer Theodor Kirchner.
Brahms is 35 at the time and unmarried. Had he fancied Maria?
We may never know.
photo © Brahms-Institut Lübeck
Brahms had originally introduced the singer and Kirchner. Maybe he was proud of his matchmaking ?
Kirchner and Brahms were very close – until a falling out. Dear me, where have I heard that before?
Is there a link to the text of the letter?
Wiki says the marriage was “not successful.”
She should have married Brahms and made a Mensch of him.
Then he would have ranked alongside Herzogenberg and Klughardt. Artists are not meant to live a typical bourgeois life. You know that.
And yet politically they are mostly very bourgeois.
Being ‘politically bourgeois’ – apparently, not on the barricades of some ideology – is a protection of inner freedom.
We can also consider the fact that Theodor Kirchner had an affair with Clara Schumann in the early 1860’s (as reported in biographies of Clara). Apparently it is not known whether Brahms knew about this.