Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [13]
But Johann Jakob would not give it up. As a teenager he began playing hooky from school once a week to take music lessons. One day his father, on a visit to a nearby village, was shocked to find his son sawing at a viola among the musicians at a dance. There was a scene and his father forbade the foolishness, whereupon Johann Jakob ran away from home to continue his studies with one Theodor Müller, a local leader of the old Stadtpfeifer guild.1 In a sort of medieval-style apprenticeship, the teenager lived with Müller’s family, worked in house and garden for his keep, and was taught his notes. After a while he had learned a little violin, viola, cello, flute, and French horn. When he was able enough, he began playing for his master in the town band.2
Twice the prodigal son returned to the inn, hoping his father would consider his career as settled. But Johann Brahms disdained the idea as much as ever, and Johann Jakob bolted again. (These escapades were noted by Klaus Groth, who learned them from Johannes Brahms, who observed in the telling: “I can’t give such proof of my devotion to music!”3) At last Johann Jakob’s father wearily gave in: his son was not destined for the respectable trade of innkeeper, but would be a mere horn-blower and fiddle-scraper.
On December 16, 1825, the boy of nineteen received his signed and sealed Certificate of Apprenticeship:
I Theodor Müller, privileged and invested Musicus of Weslingburen in the region of Northern Dithmarsch attest herewith, that Johann Brahmst of Heide has studied three years with the Stadt-Musicus in Heide and two years with me in order to learn instrumental music. Now, as during his apprenticeship the aforementioned Johann Brahmst has proved himself conscientious, thirsty for knowledge, diligent and obedient towards myself, I declare herewith his apprenticeship to be over and done.4
Now Johann Jakob was prepared to mount the most splendid stage he could imagine: Hamburg. He parted with blessings and bedding from his parents, along with his instruments, probably a horn and flute and fiddle, maybe a contrabass on his back. He headed for the Free and Hanseatic City—proud, rich, and not as welcoming of musicians as Johann Jakob Brahms imagined, or as his son Johannes would bitterly wish.
THOUGH IT LAY SIXTY-FIVE miles from the North Sea, for centuries Hamburg had been one of the primary gateways in and out of German lands. The reason was the River Elbe, its channels spreading miles wide below the city and opening to the sea. The city’s harbor brought Hamburg prosperity even before the Middle Ages, when it joined the fabled Hanseatic League of North German trading cities. Hamburg had never concerned itself as much with empire or religion as with profit. Its stock exchange, the first in Germany, was organized in 1558. It invented convoy protection for its ships in 1662, and in the seventeenth century it rode out the Thirty Years War relatively untroubled while most of Germany was left a ruin. When Johann Jakob arrived in 1826, Hamburg had some 200,000 souls and was rising toward its greatest years, in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. The city’s fleets were the largest and some of the fastest in the world, making it one of Europe’s primary departure points for sending goods and immigrants and refugees to the Americas. In the second half of the nineteenth century, much of the city’s wealth flowed back across the Atlantic from the United States via the Hamburg-American Line. By the 1860s the port was the largest in the German states.
In Johann Jakob’s time the old city was still enclosed within the defensive walls built during the Thirty Years War to keep out the armies of Sweden and Denmark. At sunset the city still locked the gates. Five Protestant cathedrals raised their steeples; returning