Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [16]
When Johann Jakob Brahms began courting Christiane a week after he took up residence in Ulrikusstrasse, she thought he had to be joking; it was unbelievable. After all, though poor he was a fine-looking figure of a man, with a handsome forthright face and flowing brown hair; and his dark gray eyes were roguish and merry. Surely he could find a younger and prettier wife. But Johann Jakob proposed, and appeared to be earnest about it, and Christiane’s brother-in-law Detmering persuaded her that she should accept: it was her last chance for home, children, happiness. “And so,” Christiane was to write her son Johannes shortly before she died, “I considered it Destiny.”11 Christiane and Johann Jakob were married on June 9, 1830.12
There is no indication of why Johann Jakob chose Christiane, but a likely reason in his mind was that, having become a Bürger, he intended to be a proper one, and that meant having a wife and children, and the sooner the better. If the reasoning sounds elementary, his son Johannes would share more or less the same North German bourgeois ideal. Besides, Christiane was a fine seamstress and her experience as a servant made her a splendid cook and housekeeper. Friends described her eggnog and bilberry fritters as “famous.” Her son would become a connoisseur of fritters and of Germanic cooking generally.
In her later years a family friend called Christiane, approvingly, “a little withered mother who busied herself unobtrusively with her own affairs, and was unknown outside the house.”13 Few noticed her intelligence, her plainspoken wit and articulateness. Though her husband would not have cared, she seems to have been well read. (Biographer Max Kalbeck’s idea that Christiane Brahms could quote all of Schiller by heart is an embellishment14—an attempt to conjure up some explanation for the unaccountable sensibilities of her son.) Christiane’s letters to Johannes reveal her as reasonably literate, archetypically motherly, shrewd in understanding his needs and gifts.
As far as Johann Jakob was concerned, Christiane would be a fastidious Hausfrau, perhaps grateful for his saving her from spinsterhood. He probably aspired to no more complicated a household. He had married up in the social scale; her life surely was easier after she joined him. Apparently their first years together were relatively happy, however shabby their setting. It would be only after some three decades under the same roof that their incompatibility, and the cumulative effects of their seventeen-year difference in age, overwhelmed them.
The Brahmses changed houses nine times in their three decades together,15 much of the moving due to Johann Jakob’s restlessness and his financial mishaps. In February 1831, daughter Elisabeth, called Elise, was born. Soon afterward, Johann Jakob joined the Hamburger Musikverein, a sort of trade union that he hoped would improve his prospects. If it did, the trend was slow to develop. Johann Jakob spent much of his time at the Musikverein’s clubhouse, where jobs were posted and there was a pub on the premises.16 In 1833 he moved the family to a ramshackle half-timbered house on Specksgang—“Bacon Lane”—in the Gängeviertel, the “Lane Quarter.”
At that point and for a long time after, the Brahmses were nobodies living nowhere. The Gängeviertel was an area of dark streets and passages, infested with sailor’s dancehalls that doubled as brothels—hence the familiar Hamburg name for the place: “Adulterer’s Walk.” The house on Specksgang fronted not on anything so respectable as a lane but on a narrow alley. Christiane and Johann Jakob probably lived on the first floor in two tiny, low-ceilinged rooms, a kitchen/entrance and a sitting room with sleeping closet. Unlike most of the houses in the Gängeviertel, this one was set back