Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [117]
After work there were pleasant hours at the Stadt Frankfurt with a collection of new friends. On the whole, the Detmold job was Gemütlichkeit itself, a retreat from the world in sumptuous surroundings, with plenty of money, merry company, and good wine on hand. Being Brahms, he appreciated it all, but it was only a matter of time before the situation grated on him. It was not in him to smile at bores merely because they happened to pay his rent. As he wrote Clara later, looking back on it,
How attractive is a post at one of these little Courts. One gets plenty of time to play to oneself, but unfortunately one cannot always feel happy at heart, for, after all, one would become nauseated by the faces one sees there, they are enough to make anyone a misanthrope. One can enjoy the beauties of nature in solitude, but when playing music in the drawing-room before people, one does not wish to be alone.28
As always, nothing impeded his creative work, whatever trouble it gave him in those days, or his counterpoint study or other self-improvement schemes. He made good use of the Mozart and Haydn scores in the castle library. Meanwhile he decided to lower his embarrassingly high voice by doing vocal exercises of his own devising, and to strengthen the vocal apparatus by the method of shouting above the din at his Singverein rehearsals. The result of this regimen, besides annoying his singers, was to give himself a voice permanently hoarse and barking, while still rather high. The good singing voice he had once possessed was ruined. From then on, in heated moments his voice would break like a pubescent teenager’s. Given his disappointing vocal endowment and physical size, Brahms would be forced to rely on cigars, alcohol, gruffness, racy jokes, and eventually on beard and girth, to furnish him with manliness.
With his first conducting position, he naturally used the chance to perform contemporary choral music and to add new arrangements and original pieces of his own. Besides that, he was anxious to perform the older choral works he had been searching out in crumbling editions. These sometimes went back nearly three hundred years, antediluvian in the 1850s when J. S. Bach, who had died a hundred years before, seemed ancient to concertgoers and musicians alike. In his first season in Detmold Brahms performed pieces by Rovetta and Praetorius, plus Handel’s perennial Messiah.29 Meanwhile he arranged folk songs for the chorus, without feeling particularly happy with the results: “My stuff is so completely impractical!” he groaned to Joachim.30
After a sociable Christmas Day spent with Hofmarschall Meysenbug and family, with lots of presents and games with the children, Brahms headed for Hamburg with relief. En route he stopped over at the Hanover railroad station, where for three hours he and Joachim sat in the restaurant over coffee and the score of the D Minor Piano Concerto. After so many years of private labor the monster was scheduled for its unveiling, by conductor Otten in March, with his newly founded Hamburg Musikverein.31 Whatever apprehensions assaulted Brahms at the prospect, Joachim reported him to Clara as “in splendid spirits.”32 Weather reports on Brahms’s mood had become a regular item of news among his friends: is he stormy or sunny these days?
BRAHMS INTENDED THIS RETURN to Hamburg to be his final homecoming. In April 1858 the family moved to larger quarters at No. 74 Fuhlentwiete and reserved the best room for Johannes, his library and piano, his writing table and bust of Beethoven. For the family this was a relatively elegant place—spacious rooms decorated with ivy, an open fireplace, a view of the park.33 The road ended in a canal crowded with fishing boats. Elise made everything spotless and kept fresh flowers in the pots. Fritz lived at home but paid rent from his earnings as a piano teacher. Johann Jakob’s contrabass