Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [128]
Shortly after the Hamburg concerts, at a rehearsal of the women’s contingent of his Akademie choir, conductor and Brahms friend Karl Grädener asked the ladies if they would like to perform something by Brahms. To the conductor’s surprise the whole alto section jumped to their feet. Some of the choristers had been singing Brahms’s folk song arrangements with Friedchen Wagner and her sisters; more had been among the admiring crowds at the recent concerts.
In the middle of May, Grädener pupil Jenny von Ahsen was to be married at St. Michael’s, with the Akademie women singing for the ceremony. Brahms offered to play organ for the wedding. That day, as he listened to the women’s voices spin through the church, his imagination spun a fantasy of those voices in the Ave Maria he had composed at Detmold, and other things he might write for them. Presumably he knew about Grädener’s plan to sing something of his, but he preferred to handle it himself, and Grädener approved. Brahms asked Friedchen Wagner to see if any acquaintances in the Akademie and elsewhere might be interested.
On June 6, twenty-eight women turned up for the first rehearsal at Friedchen’s house, along with Karl Grädener, Theodor Avé-Lallemant, and other local lights. Brahms was so befuddled at the crowd of eager young women that Grädener had to calm him down before he could start the rehearsal. Finally Brahms led them through his Ave Maria and two new neo-Renaissance sacred choruses, O bone Jesu and Adoramus te (they would appear in Opus 37). Two days later, after another rehearsal, the choir presented the three pieces at a private performance in St. Peter’s.6
Brahms followed that experiment with a proposal for meetings on Monday mornings, the repertoire to be varied but including his own things. The women agreed immediately. Thus began the Hamburg Frauenchor, the women’s chorus that occupied him for much of the next three years.
By the end of that June 1859, Brahms had begun a new set of pieces for the choir with the first two of the eventual six Marienlieder, settings of folktales of the Virgin in a style as lilting, sweet, and ingenuously folklike as the verses. Most striking of them, in music and lyrics, is Marias Kirchgang:
When Mary once to church would go
She fain would cross a deep, wide sea.
And as she reached the waters’ flow
A boatman there she chanced to see.
“Oh boatman safely ferry me
What e’er thou ask I’ll give to thee.”
“I’ll bear thee safely over the sea,
If thou wilt come and marry me.”
“Before I deign to marry thee,
I’ll swim alone across the sea.”
Now as she neared the other side,
The church bells rang out far and wide,
Both large and small, with one accord
Proclaimed the Mother of our Lord.
And when the shore they did regain,
The boatman’s heart was broke in twain.
The singers soon grew to about forty, including daughters of Avé-Lallemant and Grädener.7 Some of them also belonged to a select choir, a dozen or so of Friedchen’s friends who met with Brahms in the evening. A solo quartet of women worked further with him.8 Naturally he developed crushes on several of these young women, and they of course the same with him. To his sister Elise, Brahms took to calling Laura Garbe, of the quartet, “your future sister-in-law.”
Another favorite was little Bertha Porubzsky, visiting from Vienna with an aunt in Hamburg. From a distance, Brahms had observed Bertha’s Viennese ebullience, so different from the starched North German women he was used to. Whether as a joke or in earnest, he went literally down on his knees before Frau Grädener to beg for an introduction to this vision. The good lady obliged and, for a while, Brahms got another voice for his choir and another girl to dream about. As much as anything Bertha diverted him with her renditions of