Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [12]
Johann Jakob’s people were small-town bourgeois. The family name, indifferently spelled Brahms or Brahmst or Brams, identified them as Lower Saxon, speakers of Plattdeutsch, the Low German drawl. Their name comes from the broom plant, Planta genista, called Bram, common as dust but sturdy and useful, whose yellow flowers cover the sandy heathland and dunes of the Ditmarsh region on the edge of the North Sea. In France, Johann Jakob might therefore have been a Plantagenet, but in Germany he was plain Brahms: child of the broom, son of the heath. In his dingy Hamburg quarters Johann Jakob would display, framed over the sofa, what he called the family coat of arms—three brambles, a wheel in a shield, a helmet, and so on. Everyone knew what that amounted to, an attempt at respectability whipped up, for a fee, by a local genealogist. In the Brahms chronicles there had been no great deeds, no shield and helm. The first history knows of them is three generations back from Johann Jakob’s son, who would make the family name illustrious after all.
Around the middle of the eighteenth century the first-recorded of the clan, carpenter and wheelwright Peter Brahms, labored his way from Hanover northward until he settled in the seaport hamlet of Brunsbüttel, in fen country north of the Elbe. There Peter married and in 1769 fathered a son named Johann, grandfather of Johannes the composer. Like his father, this Johann drifted north in search of work. He took up innkeeping and selling groceries, married a country girl named Christiana Asmus, and settled in Heide, which means heath: town of Heide, area of Ditmarsh, state of Holstein, North Germany—when there was no country of Germany at all, rather a loose confederation of kingdoms and duchies and principalities and free cities. Although Heide is a little way from the coast, it has the North Sea weather of looming clouds and sudden squalls. Old Peter Brahms finally joined his son there, to spend his dotage sitting in front of Johann’s inn puffing a pipe and hailing passersby. One of those passing was a schoolboy named Klaus Groth, who would grow up to put Ditmarsh and its people and dialect into the poems of his Quickborn, and track the generations of the Brahms family down to his friend Johannes.
Johann and Christiana Brahms had two boys, Peter Hinrich and, fourteen years later, Johann Jakob. These sons were expected to take up the family trade of innkeeping. Peter Hinrich was agreeable to that; he married at twenty and succeeded his father at the inn. He had five children and many descendants, the only branch of the family to flourish. To innkeeping he added a pawnshop, which burgeoned into a house overflowing with antiques. Klaus Groth relates that in his old age a lame Peter Hinrich spent his days in an armchair inside the door of his antique shop, pointing out favorite pieces to visitors with a stick—here a suit of armor, there a fine pot—but he could not easily be persuaded to sell any of them. Such a preference for aesthetic over financial concerns would also characterize his brother Johann Jakob (disastrously) and his nephew Johannes (triumphantly).
Johann Jakob Brahms was born in 1806. If we did not know what he grew up to be, we might call him a dreamer. As a boy he was given to wandering out on the heath, his head full of tunes. Neither school nor innkeeping interested him. What did seize Johann Jakob’s attention were the bands of musicians who accompanied the eating and drinking and dancing in the family place as in most inns, who enlivened town holidays and harvest festivals and weddings. Johann Jakob was a sociable and amusing sort, dazzled by music and the laughing, skillful figures of the players. To become one of them seemed