Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [143]
With great relief Brahms moved out of the family house in July 1861 and took an apartment in Hamm, a country suburb on the left bank of the Alster. The house was owned by widow Elisabeth Rösing, aunt to Betty and Marie Völkers of the solo quartet. The Völkers’ thatch-roofed house next door had seen a number of Frauenchor gatherings.22 From Frau Dr. Rösing Brahms had a large sunny studio with tinted glass, once a billiard room, and a balcony looking out to the garden and its old trees full of nightingales.
After years of his family’s cramped apartments, mostly in shabby sections of town, he was charmed by the beauty and quiet of Hamm. The A Major Piano Quartet has a dedication to Frau Dr. Rösing, who provided him with such inspiring accommodations. Only at his insistence did she accept any rent at all.23 The idyll produced an extraordinary outpouring of music during the next two years.
Most days after working hours Brahms showed up cigar in hand for the sociable and musical gatherings of the Rösing and Völkers houses. Laura Garbe and other Frauenchor veterans came to visit the Völkers sisters, and him: houses full of the bright voices and laughter of young women. Brahms accompanied the daughters and their friends in songs, his own and others’ music twining in the scented air with the nightingales’, and he played late into the night. “It was so wonderful,” Marie Völkers wrote, “that I cannot describe it or re-create it in words.”24 Frau Dr. Rösing recalled Brahms in those days:
Of medium height, and delicately built, with a countenance beneath whose high, fine brow were set flashing blue eyes, with fair hair combed back and falling down behind, and an obstinate lower lip! An unconscious force emanated from him as he stood apart in a gay company, with hands clasped behind his back, greeting those who arrived with a curt nod of his fine head.25
He invited friends to visit, and among those who took him up on it were Albert Dietrich, who stayed in Johannes’s room in Hamburg and marveled at the esoteric and antiquarian depth of his friend’s library, and also at the collection of toy soldiers carefully sorted in boxes in the writing desk. Dietrich spent much time with fragile, toothless Christiane, listening to her chatter on about Johannes, and noted that Johann Jakob was rarely to be seen around the house. He remembered enchanted evenings in Hamm, the quartet of Frauenchor girls singing to them from an arbor in the garden.26 Another visitor that summer was a young conductor named Hermann Levi, newly Kapellmeister of the German Opera in Rotterdam. Levi had become enthusiastic about Brahms’s music and wanted to have a look at its creator.27 A few years later they would begin a long friendship and collaboration.
Brahms had not anticipated a visit earlier in the summer of 1861. Lischen Giesemann, his friend from the summers at Winsen, announced herself and her new husband at the family house in Fuhlentwiete, but found Brahms away (this just before he moved out to Hamm). Lischen had not seen her old playmate since his teens. Christiane, groaning and cooing, roused herself to show off her son’s room, where a freshly copied manuscript of four lieder lay on the music desk. When Lischen took a look at it, indelible moments of her childhood rushed back. Through the crabbed scribble of Brahms’s handwriting she made out lyrics of songs from The Beautiful Magelone. They came from Tieck’s adaptation of the old romance she and Johannes used to read to each other in the fields and woods of Winsen. Brahms had begun a song cycle on this story from his youth and his Romantic wellspring.
The songs of Count Peter of Provence and his ladyloves had stayed with Brahms until the musical friendship with Julius Stockhausen released them. Written for that masterful singer, the cycle absorbed and worried Brahms for some seven years more before he finished it. For Lischen Giesemann in 1861, finding them on his desk was a magical