Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [15]
ALONG THE BANKS of the Alster the rich merchants’ houses stood gleaming and straight, and the Stock Market and other marble trading edifices of the city grand and solid. This was the world of the North German well-to-do that Thomas Mann captured in Buddenbrooks:
Say what you will, it is pleasant to awake every morning in a large, gaily tapestried bed-chamber, and with one’s first movements to feel the soft satin of the coverlet under one’s hand; to take early breakfast in the balcony room, with the sweet fresh air coming up from the garden through the open glass door; to drink, instead of coffee, a cup of chocolate handed one on a tray.
St. Pauli and the Gängeviertel, where Johann Jakob Brahms lived during his early years in Hamburg, were not yet the appalling slums they were to become, but were still a mingling of the picturesque and oppressive: a warren of reeking canals and dirty passages only as wide as a wagon, stuffed with high-gabled, many-windowed, half-timbered houses that doddered in long rows down alleys, leaning like drunken sailors. When Johann Jakob arrived in the city in 1826, he began playing on the streets and in waterfront dives for small change and grog, and sleeping in squalid rooms next to the dives. He became a familiar figure in the little bands of players standing here and there, indoors and out, sawing away in the gray out-of-tune whine of musicians who play much of the day for an audience that is hardly listening. The German term, derisive but accurate, is Bierfiedler, beer-fiddler.
Garrulous and good-looking, Johann Jakob made friends easily. Nobody ever accused him of great intellect, but various stories recall a droll peasant wit. There was the time in his later years when a conductor declared his bass-playing out of tune and Johann Jakob rejoined, “Maestro, any decent sound from a contrabass is purely accidental.” Friends knew Johann Jakob as a reliable player on several instruments, no less a reliable drinking companion, a Bierfiedler par excellence, a joker, a buffoon.8
Slowly, he got ahead. He practiced, took every job he could manage, learned the stacks of music he needed to have at his fingertips. He began to focus on the contrabass, a good practical instrument because most groups needed one. The bulky wooden box shared his narrow quarters like a wife. In May 1830, Johann Jakob petitioned successfully to be made a Bürger of Hamburg, testifying before Almighty God that he would honor and decently represent the city.9 Thus he became a certified wage-earning citizen, even if his wages were fickle and he roomed in slums.
And so Johann Jakob’s great plan went forward. As a necessary part of his ascent to the position of proper Bürger, he began courting a prospective bride. The object of his affections, Johanna Henrike Christiane Nissen, seems a curious choice as an inamorata. She was sister to Frau Christina Detmering, in whose house on Ulrikusstrasse Christiane lived when Johann Jakob came there to room, early in 1830. Christiane was small, sickly, gimpy from a short leg, plain of face though she had enchanting blue eyes (they reappeared in her son Johannes), and a com-plainer. When twenty-four-year-old Johann Jakob became smitten with her, she was a spinster of forty-one.
Christiane came from a line of town-councillors, pastors, and teachers, her family manifestly more respectable than her suitor’s. Though her father had been a tailor, she could claim a real coat of arms, tracing her mother’s side of the family back to illustrious names in the fourteenth century. But Christiane had grown up frail and plain and found no husband, and had done small handiwork from the age of thirteen. In those years, after a day’s labor at sewing outside the house she would often come home and help her mother sew until midnight. At nineteen she became a household servant and remained one for ten years; then there was more sewing, for eight years at a Hamburg firm. Legend calls Christiane an exquisitely