Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [14]
In 1826 the city roared and teemed mostly along close streets and labyrinthine alleys. The broad artificial lake called the Alster in the middle of the city connected to the harbor on the Elbe with a network of canals crossed by hundreds of bridges, the effect reminiscent of Amsterdam or Venice. Unlike Venice, Hamburg existed for business, not as a showpiece for empire or an intellectual center. There was no university until 1919, mainly because the merchants did not want professors and intellectuals meddling in their business. The medieval houses of the old town and the merchants’ elegant new residences along the Alster were counterpointed by the sordid alleys and pubs of St. Pauli, where sailors and the poor lived and amused themselves. Still, everyone could enjoy the tall beeches along the Sachsenwald, the section of the Elbe called “piece of Italy,” and the woods and fields and classical buildings of next-door Altona. On summer nights the Alster was filled with lighted boats and swans and music.6
In the way of North Germans, Hamburgers were proverbially taciturn, tight with money and with words, conservative, at the same time hardworking, unpretentious, good-hearted, ready to enjoy themselves in the traditional modes: goose at Christmas, carp on New Year’s Eve, eggnog at celebrations, and a healthy allotment of beer to get you through the day. If these were the qualities of a Hamburg citizen, Johannes Brahms would run true to type.
As with all cities, music was required everywhere. The wealthy bourgeois of Hamburg wanted waltzes and polkas and mazurkas to grace their promenades and pavilions and cafés. Every theater employed musicians, and the first opera house dated from 1678. At the other end of the social scale, sailors lurching from ships into waterfront dives needed fiddlers and pianists to accompany their debauches. The city possessed an orchestra, the Hamburg Philharmonic, but it had never attained the polish of orchestras in smaller, less prosperous, but more musical places like Leipzig—once J. S. Bach’s home, where later Felix Mendelssohn blazed at the summit of his short life.
Hamburg’s musical glory days had been in the eighteenth century. In 1772, when historian Charles Burney visited to interview Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, this eminent son of J. S. Bach observed to the Englishman, “You should have come fifty years ago!” In that time G. P. Telemann, J. S. Bach’s more successful rival, was preeminent among musicians in the city. Hardly less important in that era was the composer, singer, music theorist, and historian Johann Mattheson. Working at the Opera, Mattheson became friends with a young violinist named Georg Friedrich Händel, and nearly ended Händel’s career when he came within an inch—or rather the width of a waistcoat-button—of stabbing him in a duel. The two made up and Händel wrote his first operas in the city before moving on to find his glory as George Frederick Handel, in Britain. Staying put, Mattheson among other herculean labors wrote the first biography of Handel. In the next century the Mendelssohn family also left Hamburg for greener pastures, taking two-year-old Felix with them. By the early nineteenth century the city’s lack of interest in the creative arts was so much a byword that a journalist from Leipzig entitled his observations “Musical Doings from the Unmusical City.”7
In Hamburg, music existed as an amusement incidental to real life. For most of the orchestral musicians and the few composers, music was a job like any other. As a young man, Johannes Brahms knew all about that: “Everybody always has business on his mind,” he complained. He would be the only first-rate composer actually reared in Hamburg, and the city shrugged him off. Yet for all his artistic idealism, inexplicable