Chapter 6 - Correspondence

Summary

In the nineteenth century, letters functioned as bridges between people. Brahms as a correspondent was part of many interconnected social webs; thus, his letters offer a view into this world. The vicissitudes of lifelong friendships, such as that with Joseph Joachim, can be traced seismographically through his greetings: from the romantic, rapturous letters of the twenty-year-old (‘Dear Friend of my heart!’, ‘Beloved Friend!’) to the ‘Dearest’ he used until 1863, the reserved ‘Dear Joachim’ after the crisis in the Joachims’ marriage (1883) or ‘Most honoured one’ (1886), until the restored intimacy of ‘Dear Friend’ (1894). Many of the composer’s letters, beyond the lifelong, established correspondents like Joachim or Clara Schumann, also trace the Brahms network. They are interwoven into a synchronous toing and froing of letters, for example in the early correspondence between all the Schumann friends: Brahms, Joachim, Grimm, Dietrich and so forth, which can be read in parallel.