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who in her operatic career beginning at age sixteen had gone under the name Weiss. In the letter Joachim sternly reassured Johannes that his bride, despite the temptations of the theater, had remained safely intact: “Do not run away with the usual notions which are unfortunately connected with the life in our operatic circles … her mind and her appearance have remained simple and refined.”33 Perhaps to placate her constitutionally jealous husband, Amalie agreed to give up the stage and sing only in the concert hall. Clara wept, for joy perhaps, at the news of the engagement. Johannes wrote the expected manly felicitations, with an accompanying sigh:

You lucky dog! What else can I write but some such exclamation? Nobody will feel your happiness as I do, more particularly since your letter came upon me when I was in a dark mood. The whole time I have been here I have not stopped wondering whether, since I have to guard against phantoms of another kind [he means loneliness], I had not better experience and enjoy everything with that one exception, or whether I should … go home and let all the rest slide. And then you turn up and boldly pluck the ripest and most beautiful apple in Paradise for yourself.… I shall look forward to the time when I can come and see you and, as I have already done at the house of many a faithless friend, bend over a cradle and forget everything in the contemplation of the laughing baby face.34

Brahms did bend over the cradles of Josef and Amalie Joachim’s children, and for their first—a boy, naturally christened Johannes—wrote the “Geistliches Wiegenlied” for low voice, viola, and piano. As a token of their friendship he wove his own beautiful lullaby melody around the old Christmas song “Josef, lieber Josef mein,” played by the viola. As the marriage was to play out, though, this Josef was no lucky dog or Amalie a lucky Frau.

JULIUS STOCKHAUSEN WROTE BRAHMS in April 1863 from Hamburg, “Your little mother is looking more depressed than ever.”35 Christiane Brahms was seventy-four now and drained by age. Elise with her debilitating headaches, Christiane with her ailments and apathy, weighed on Johann Jakob, but the two women also ganged up on him. Christiane was now demanding that he practice his bass up in the drafty attic. He had been threatening to move out of the house for some dozen years, and was at it again now. Brahms headed for home in May, to make one more attempt to patch up his family. With him he brought for his library a collection of engravings of Madonnas from Vienna’s Belvedere Gallery, and the complete works of Schubert printed to that point, the latter a gift from publisher Spina.

On the way to Hamburg he stopped off in Hanover to hear Amalie Weiss’s farewell opera performance, in Gluck’s Orpheus. Brahms was enchanted equally by the person of Joachim’s fiancée and by her artistry. Amalie had a dark fiery contralto that Max Kalbeck compared to an old Italian viola, a voice uniting masculine power with a womanly soul.36 As with Julius Stockhausen, Brahms was to write many songs with Amalie’s voice resounding in his inner ear, and she was often their first and finest interpreter. During that visit in Hanover, Joachim organized a second reading of Brahms’s F Minor String Quintet; once more, the friends did not like the effect. Soon Brahms arranged the music for two pianos, not entirely satisfactory either, and eventually destroyed the string quintet version.

Going on from Hanover to Hamburg, Brahms managed to calm his squabbling parents for the moment. Then, for want of anything better to do, he decided to stay on in town. Even though the apartment on Fuhlentwiete was roomier than the ones he had grown up in, with a room reserved for him and his library, he had no intention of living with his parents again. Instead he took a place nearby on the Elbe in the suburb of Blankenese, and got to work. The main product of the next three months would be his strange, barely Brahmsian cantata Rinaldo, originally intended to be submitted for a composition contest of the Aachen choral society.