There are countless myths around the relationship between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. Some of them involve love triangles and infidelity. Most of them belittle Clara in some way, either morally, personally, or professionally. Some of them poke fun at Johannes or try to humiliate Robert. One myth even claims that Johannes dumped Clara – that she was desperately in love with him, he rejected her, and that’s why they never married.

There is a lot we will never know about Clara and Johannes’s relationship. They were very private people and destroyed like half of their letters. But over 800 letters do survive from their 43-year correspondence, from 1854-1896, along with numerous diary entries from Clara. What survives is more about music than romance; Clara was fourteen years older than him, more of a mentor than a muse.

But what do we know about Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms’s relationship?

Was Brahms in love with Clara Schumann?

The number of times Johannes declares his love for Clara or calls her “My Beloved Clara” in letters between 1854-1856 is in the dozens. That he was in love with her is undebatable. (If you want to know about the first day Johannes met Clara, read this.)

Though while Robert was still alive, Johannes was very careful and reverential about his feelings. He most often addressed Clara in the formal German “Sie” pronoun, or declared his respect for Robert in the same letter, or wrote “in deepest friendship” after his love words. He loved her but was always very respectful of her husband too.

[If you’d like to read some early love quotes direct from Johannes’s romantic pen, I made a YouTube video of some of them.]

Was Clara Schumann in love with Brahms?

Clara’s love words for Johannes were far fewer. In all of her letters to him, she never outright declares her love for him. In her diary in 1854, she twice wrote, “I love him like a son.” This was her reasoning for allowing him to address her by her first name (because he begged her) despite her being married. She also occasionally referred to him as “my beloved friend.”

Clara loved his music. Her words of praise and affection for the manuscripts he sent her for forty years are effusive and numerous. After her husband died, he was her favorite composer. Though… she was equally critical of him. He relied on her musical praise and criticism all his life.

By her published assertions, she only loved him as a friend, composer, or surrogate son.

Was Brahms attracted to Clara Schumann?

Clara never mentions finding him physically attractive. The first day she meets him, her diary mentions his “handsome face” and “beautiful hands.” (If you want to know about the first day Clara met Johannes, read this.) They talk of hand holding. She talks of wanting “to hang on his neck” for gratitude when she loved his music.

But just as a factual FYI, Johannes was small and slight, shorter than Clara by at least six inches, and Robert had been much taller and bigger. It’s very possible that for all she cared for Johannes, she never found him attractive.

Johannes never mentions finding her attractive either. He mentions MANY TIMES wanting to kiss her or hold her hand in his early letters. And longing to “sit beside her” is a sentiment he asserted into old age. But he also mentions wanting to “set her under glass” which implies he saw her in an untouchable Virgin Mary kind of light. (But she was still married at that point so who the heck knows what that was about.)

But again, THERE IS NO PROOF of attraction on either side.

Did Brahms propose to Clara Schumann?

Yes, probably, or at least, they discussed what would become of their relationship after Robert died. In May 1856, Clara was in England touring, giving concerts while Johannes was at her home, caring for her children, trying to compose, but his frustrated letters say he missed her so damn much that composing was hard.

At this point, Robert was still alive in the hospital. But they knew he was dying and would probably be gone within a few months. It’s a little cryptic with Clara’s letter missing, but Johannes wrote to Clara on May 24th 1856:

“My idea was that I could not avail myself immediately of your kindness and love as you might regret it later on. That is why I always continued to write to you in the second person plural. I take it then that all these tactics of siege and assault had some connection with the unanswered question? Or is that not so?”

Some argue “the unanswered question” was a “marriage” question. In other words, Johannes proposed to Clara and she refused to answer him.

Why did Clara Schumann and Brahms break up after Robert died?

We don’t know.

Here are the facts: In July 1856, Robert died. Clara left behind a detail description of her last visit to Robert and his funeral, her depression at losing him, etc. But there are no letters between Clara and Johannes because they were living in her house together through October.

In August, they went to Switzerland on vacation, Clara’s diary tells us. They took along her two boys and Johannes’s sister as babysitter. We have no idea what happened there.

In September, Clara took her two sons to boarding school. Johannes had spent a lot of time playing with them while he was living with her. They’d been his favorites and he’d felt a responsibility to them as a surrogate father in Robert’s absence. Perhaps one of the reasons he left in October was because her sons were no longer there. Or it was vice versa, Clara took them to boarding school because Johannes was moving out. Clara’s diary says she planned to tour Copenhagen and England that year.

In October, Johannes finished his concerto. Clara’s diary says that they played it together. Then on October 21st, the day Johannes moved out, her diary says:

“Johannes left. I went to the station with him—as I came back I felt as if I were returning from a funeral.”

This is the quote people take out of context and point to when they say “See! She wanted to marry him and he refused her!” Did she say she wanted to marry him? No. Did she say she wanted him to stay and he refused? No.

The quote does reference her husband’s funeral two months prior. Saying goodbye to Johannes was hard. She says this in letters many times over the years.

That same week, she left for Copenhagen to give concerts. He left because she was leaving. She wasn’t even home. She was not pining for him and sad they didn’t get married. She was not even depressed that she had to give concerts. She looked forward to her tours as she always did.

Johannes came back for Christmas. From 1854-1858, he spent every Christmas with her and her boys, because he knew it would be hard for them all without Robert.

Most likely, they mutually decided marriage wasn’t an option. Or maybe it never really was. There were many practical reasons why marriage made zero sense for either of them.

Marriage was a horrible idea.

Clara had three MAJOR reasons for never marrying again, not anyone, even Johannes.

1. She didn’t want more children. In 1847, when she found out she was pregnant with child number five at age 27, she writes, “What will become of my work?!” (Yes, that exclamation point and question mark are in the text.) Robert’s response she writes, “Children are blessings.” It’s pretty easy to infer that after child number four, she’d had enough and that Robert refused to take precautions against having more. She still birthed 4 more children after she’d had enough. That she was relieved to have no more children after Robert went into the hospital is evident simply by her touring schedule. She relished the freedom, even as she mourned her husband. Having more children was a non-option. She could barely take care of the seven she had.

2. Money. Clara was always practical and money conscious because of her father. She spent lots of time in her betrothal letters to Robert worried about him making enough money for them to marry. It was her father’s primary objection to their marriage. She made LOTS OF IT by touring. Her concerts pulled in enough for her to put all her children in boarding school and for her to buy a house in the mountains. She LOVED financial stability.

Johannes had no money. He was a dirt poor composer who would spend money as soon as he earned it. He carried his cash around in his pockets. Clara begged him in the 1860s to let her invest it for him in government bonds, which he did. She was his financial adviser until he reached his 40s. He never could’ve supported her family.

3. Her career. Clara’s performing career was epic. She wasn’t giving up her touring for anyone, ever again. She’d given it up for Robert. Every year, Johannes told her in letters not to tour so much. She never listened, and frequently fought him for saying so. Johannes or any man she married would’ve curbed her career and demanded she stay home. Which was a non-starter for her.

Why Johannes Brahms Never Married

Johannes had reasons for not marrying too. He composed best when he lived alone. It took him a number of years to fully realize this. It became clearer and clearer as he got older. It grieved him to be so alone, but the number one for him was always his music. Period.

Clara knew this. She knew that living in her house with her children had inhibited his ability to compose. She was a composer too. What’s also a very real possibility, she realized perhaps sooner than he did, that for him to realize his potential as a composer, he couldn’t live with a wife and children. She wanted his symphonies and music above even her feelings for him. Art as a calling from God and all that. The pressure on Robert to make enough money with his composing to support their family, she believed, was one of the reasons he went mad and died. She didn’t want the same thing to happen to Johannes.

The Romantics, especially the Schumanns and Brahms, regarded their art as religion. Brahms and Liszt referred to Clara as a priestess in 1854. Johannes and Clara likely also chose to never marry simply as a monastic devotion to their art. Johannes Brahms never married. He never had children. He was lonely but his music always meant more to him.

Johannes Brahms Would’ve Made A Terrible Husband

I know most of us love Johannes’s love letters to Clara, but for many reasons, as a husband, he probably would’ve been as bad or worse than Robert.

1. Johannes had an arrogant mean streak and a nasty temper. He knew how to cut down people closest to him with his keen intelligence in the most hurtful ways. Clara mentions it in later letter and her diaries, how he would criticize her playing much in the same way Robert had. By the end of his life, he had very few friends. Clara was the only one who stood by him despite his capacity to insult everyone.

2. Johannes tried to control her career too. From 1855, when Robert was in the hospital, Johannes tried to stop her touring. And all through their lives, he was always telling her to give it up and settle down in a town somewhere with him, either in Vienna or Leipzig. Which she refused to do until she turned seventy, and then she picked Frankfurt.

3. Johannes was kind of an alcoholic and a cigar chain smoker. To be fair, most men were at that time and Robert loved to have too much beer and cigars too. But this was yet another reason for Clara not to ever marry again. Johannes spent half his life in pubs and brothels. I’m not exaggerating. He was out most nights. His years in Vienna, he took all his meals at the pubs. He practically lived there, except when he was composing. And he definitely had a real serious thing for sex workers. I’m sure he tried to cover it up, but Clara wasn’t stupid.

Did Brahms have a relationship with Clara Schumann?

In conclusion, there is too much MISSING INFORMATION for us to know what officially happened between Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The two composers had a 40-year professional friendship that was mostly about their mutual love of music and their intertwined careers. We have two volumes of letters that show they deeply cared about each other. But just as many letters were burned by her or dropped in the river by him. Less than half of Clara’s diaries were published before they were destroyed. 40 years is a lot of time for a relationship to eb and flow or grow and fade.

But Clara was not the woman scorned. Clara dealt with an inordinate amount of vicious slander for her close relationship with Johannes, both in her lifetime and into the twentieth century which continues today. This slander is one-sided. Johannes endured, neither in the past or now, no such judgement. The short answer to why they never married was not because Clara was the guilty party or that Johannes was the one who rejected her.

The most likely answer, there were plenty of reasons on both sides.