Episodes
EPISODE ONE: “HOPE”
September 1853. Johannes Brahms is 20-years old and restless. Hungry for his career to begin, he shows up at the door of his idol, Robert Schumann, hoping the noted music critic can help. He plays some music he’s composed. Robert and his wife, the celebrated pianist Clara Schumann, are astounded. They christen Brahms the torchbearer of the romantic musical tradition. The new messiah. Robert and Clara take him into their lives, just at point when they need it most. Robert’s grip on reality has been slipping due to a degenerative mental condition, and Clara is worn down from being the buffer between her beloved husband and the abyss. The stress — emotional, professional, and financial — has been crushing. Adding to the overwhelm, days before Brahms’ arrival, Clara learns she’s pregnant with their seventh child. Life is stretched thin. But perhaps Brahms, this vibrant, ambitious, youthful, handsome Golden Boy, will save them all.
EPISODE TWO: “RAPTURE”
Robert and Clara introduce Brahms to the world, A whirlwind of performances, socializing, and career-building soirees — more than young Brahms ever imagined for himself. His presence injects the whole Schumann house with playfulness and joy. The children delight in his athletic clowning, and Clara grows addicted to his buoyant energy. Together with virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim, Brahms and Clara travel, performing in concert halls throughout Europe, reveling in each other’s company and the glare of the spotlight. Below the surface, though, a storm is gathering. Robert’s mental decline quickens. He bolts awake nights screaming, tormented by angels and demons, until one feverish night he wanders out of the house, and amidst a throng of costumed carnival goers, throws himself into the Rhine. At his own request, Robert is carted away to an asylum, leaving a pregnant Clara with six children, a pile of bills, and the loss of her heart’s most beloved.
EPISODE THREE: “INTIMACY”
Robert settles into his room at Endenich Sanitorium, though he continues to hear supernatural orchestras at night. Back home, Clara sits at her kitchen table booking herself on a grueling performance tour. No time for tears. She has a house and staff to support, Robert’s care to pay for, and six children who need to eat. Brahms agrees to stay on, and the two soon find themselves playing husband and wife in a sort of domestic charade, made all the more real with the birth of Clara’s seventh son, Felix. Brahms and Clara spend the next months studying and composing, usually late into the night. For the first time in years, she finds the exhilaration and inspiration of having a musical soul mate at her side. They travel, performing Brahms’s music throughout Germany, making a stop in Hamburg, Brahms’s home town. There, he introduces Clara to his parents and gives her a tour of his childhood haunts. He hints at certain traumatic childhood events, but leaves more questions than answers. They exchange intimate letters, professing their devotion to one another, recognizing that they can’t act on it while Robert is still alive. What they don’t know is that Robert has suspected their growing love, and trusting that Clara will be cared for, begins to to starve himself to death.
EPISODE FOUR: “DISINTEGRATION“
Clara sets out on a punishing concert tour, leaving Brahms at home to care for the children and work on his his own music. But thoughts of Clara derail his creativity. Clara, too, is suffering, torn between her feelings for young Brahms and her ailing Robert. To give context to Clara’s struggle, we FLASHBACK to her childhood. We see how cruelly her father, Friedrich, worked young Clara, parading her before all of Europe’s nobility, driving her to impossible extremes, and robbing her of her youth. We learn how Robert Schumann, then a student of Friedrich’s, fell in love with 16-year old Clara. How they hid their love from her father, how they fought in court for her emancipation, and how she was forever shaped — and ruined — by his harsh control and severe training. He made her the success she is. But it was Robert who rescued her from his brutality, Robert who rebuilt her confidence, and Robert who championed her talent. Theirs was an enduring and romantic love. Back in present time, Clara finally demands to see Robert. It’s the first time she’s been allowed to visit in the two years since being admitted. The very next day, while she and Brahms step out to meet Joachim, Robert dies. Clara writes in her journal, “All my happiness is over. A new life is beginning.”
EPISODE FIVE: “RETREAT“
Following Robert’s funeral, Clara and Brahms pick up the tatters of their lives. They travel to Switzerland to explore the possibility of a future together. There, they hike and boat idylly, visit with friends, and play music. Clara’s grief subsides. She confesses to Brahms that she can imagine a life together, and they make love, the culmination of three years of burning desire. But Brahms’s capacity to love is crippled, so the next morning, he tells her his only passion is his music, and nothing — not domesticity, not an older woman with seven children — is going to derail him from his path. There would be no marriage. He breaks away ruthlessly, and Clara, herself shattered from a lifetime of devoting herself to brilliant men who inevitably hurt her, moves the family to Berlin and plunges back into concertizing. Brahms accepts an invitation to the royal court at Detmold. There, he indulges in a summer surrounded by adoring women. It’s a summer of frolic, picnics, wine, and song. He falls fast for one beauty, the singer Agathe von Siebold. At the same time, Clara is being courted by the composer (and Brahms’s friend) Theodor Kirchner. The drama comes to a crushing climax when Clara brings Kirchner to Detmold and discovers Brahms with Agathe. Clara lashes out, years of stuffed resentment exploding. Brahms, stung from the pain he dealt to the only woman he ever truly loved, proposes to Agathe.
EPISODE SIX: “LIBERATION“
Just as Episode Four revealed the childhood roots of Clara’s self-punishing work ethic, now we see the origins of Brahms’ crippled capacity to love. We FLASHBACK to 14-year old Brahms as his father drags him to seedy Hamburg taverns to play piano for little money. He’s unable to escape the vulgarity happening around him. Whores and their sailor-clients regularly fondle the boy, using him as a prop in their wanton sexual games. The effect is utterly destructive. In present time, we see it manifest. Brahms premieres his first piano concerto in Leipzig — to horrendous reviews. For him, a total failure. But it offers him an excuse to seal himself off. He abruptly cuts off his engagement to Agathe and flees (once again) to form the Freuenchor, a choir of all-women singers. But his growing self-awareness makes his time with them less than alluring. He and Clara continue to write letters, each hiding the extent to which they miss each other, and how very unhappy they are being apart. But for Brahms, the pattern, albeit dysfunctional, proves effective. He plunges into composing, turning out piece after piece, major works all.
EPISODE SEVEN: “RUPTURE“
It’s 1863. Brahms has settled in Vienna, the center of European art and culture, home of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. He begins to find his routine, composing in the morning, hiking in the afternoon, wining and dining with friends and famous folk in the evening. And of course, a new infatuation — Julie Schumann, Clara and Robert’s 18-year old daughter. He visits with Clara often, spending summers with her family, but his motive is different now. Then Julie’s health worsens. Clara, in the midst of another arduous multi-city tour, leaves her daughter Marie to care for her sister, which outrages Brahms. He condemns Clara for putting her career before her children’s welfare, calling her maternal nature into question. They exchange letters, which escalate into an acrimonious feud. Four decades of unexpressed feelings, resentments, and guilt erupt, and their friendship splinters. All this plays out against the backdrop of Brahms as he composes, and in the end premieres, his greatest choral work. He is near the height of his creative rebirth, emerging as a composer of the highest rank. But without Clara to share it with, the achievement is bitter sweet.
EPISODE EIGHT: “TRIUMPH“
We’re spying, watching Brahms move through his day-to-day Viennese life. A woman’s voice narrates over picture, giving us intimate insight into the man. How he interacts with people. His creative process. His personality defects, his bluster, his moodiness, his flirtatiousness. His public acts of selfishness, his secret acts of generosity. We reveal the narrator to be Florence May, a 20-year old Londoner and virtuoso piano student who’s come to study with Brahms. She documents his struggle to complete his first symphony, a project 14 years in the making. We travel with Brahms as he reconciles with Clara. The two play music together, then Clara tells him Julie is engaged. His shock tells Clara everything. At the wedding, he’s the picture of convivial, celebratory joy. But in private, he mourns Julie’s loss, composing profoundly melancholy songs. He’s now become the picture of success, the wealthiest and most autonomous composer in history. Clara’s life, however, is on an opposite trajectory. She commits her son Ludwig to a mental institution, while her other son Ferdinand leaves his five children with her as he enters a clinic for morphine addiction. Julie’s health declines further. All this as Clara’s own condition worsens. Severe arm pain, hearing loss, exhaustion, neuralgia, neuropathy... It’s making it nearly impossible to perform, her only solace. The night Brahms’s symphony premieres to triumphant reviews, Clara’s son Felix dies of tuberculosis in Clara’s arms. Two days later, she steps onto a stage to perform. Work, the only escape she knows.
EPISODE NINE: “INTERMEZZOS“
In a stylistic departure from the previous episodes, “Intermezzos” covers Brahms’s and Clara’s last, and most revealing, decade of life in a series of seven short pieces. Isolated vignettes of key defining moments that show, for as divergent and disconnected as Brahms’s and Clara’s late life experiences were, how enduring their love ultimately was. For example:
Intermezzo #1 intercuts between the two as they each take the stage. Brahms, now robust in full beard and belly, marches to the piano and bangs away. His playing has deteriorated, he grumbles as he plays, but the concert hall erupts. Clara, looking frail in her hausfrau black dress and cap, fusses with the bench, starting and re-starting, oblivious to the disheartened crowd.
In Intermezzo #5, Clara is in her hotel room, her arms in agonizing pain, dressing for a performance. Her eldest daughter and personal assistant, Marie, goes over tour business. Clara finds a memento of Robert’s, and has a memory. FLASHBACK to 1843, the Battle of Dresden has broken out, and troops are going door to door conscripting local men for war. Fearing Robert too unsound for such a thing, Clara — seven months pregnant — grabs her youngest and leads Robert, through the dead of night, across fields and farms to safety. She returns for her other five children and repeats the trip, now with bomb blasts around her. A true story of this now frail woman’s heroic rescue and lost vitality.
Intermezzo #4. Brahms regales a cafe crowd with the story of how composer Anton Bruckner, attending the exhumation of Franz Schubert’s coffin in 1861, became so overwhelmed with the dead master’s magnificence that he seized Schubert’s skull and ran off with it. Laughter erupts, wine is poured. It is Brahms the Charmer, Brahms the Scoundrel, in full bear.
EPISODE TEN: “REST”
1896. Brahms sits with his doctor, who tells him he has advanced liver cancer. He refuses any treatment, imploring the doctor to keep the news secret. No one should know. He continues his life, composing, attending (begrudgingly) music festivals in his honor, courting his latest infatuation, contralto Alice Barbi, and frequenting prostitutes. Clara, facing the final days of her life, writes Brahms to ask him to return all the letters she wrote him, to read one last time. He agrees, provided she allow him to read the letters he wrote her. They meet and reminisce. Brahms takes tender care of his now frail old friend, playing piano for her, taking her on a stroll, regaling her with stories, and asking forgiveness for the injuries he caused her. In the end, they cast their letters into the fire. What they had belongs to them. History will forever have to wonder. With a kiss, he bids farewell. Weeks later, she lies in bed, fading, and holding a letter of Brahms that she had secreted away. Brahms is at his alpine get-away in Bad Ischl when the telegram arrives: Clara Schumann has died. But the telegram arrives two days late. The funeral is tomorrow. Brahms races to get to Bonn in time, but runs into a series of nightmarish missteps. He arrives at the funeral as Clara’s casket is being lowered into the ground. He runs, but stumbles into a hedge, where he sobs achingly. Ten months later, ill, exhausted, and quite sad, he prepares for the end. He visits the statue of Beethoven one last time, offers his critique to a young Gustav Mahler, then dies in his apartment, a letter from Clara — one that escaped the fire — clutched in his hand.