Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [18]
From 1831, Johann Jakob had been a substitute at a better job, with a sextet that played daily from noon to midnight at the Alster Pavilion. The café lay on the promenade of the Jungfernstieg, on the southern edge of the Inner Alster. There the fashionable families of Hamburg liked to stroll and drive along the rows of lindens, looking out to the swans on the water and the little boats passing under low bridges, in and out of the canals. Besides wealthy Bürgers of the town, patrons of the Pavilion included tourists, literati, and artists. Eduard Marxsen, Hamburg’s leading piano teacher and composer, took his coffee there, enjoying the music dispensed by the sextet.20
The group consisted of two violins, viola, contrabass, flute, clarinet, plus whatever instruments the members could double. They played overtures, operatic arrangements, the latest waltzes from Vienna, and the like. For nine years, Johann Jakob substituted at the lowest rung of the sextet, mostly playing horn and handing round the plate.21 That may be how he met Eduard Marxsen and others on the higher levels of the Bürgertum: with begging bowl in hand.
Finally in 1840 the bass player of the Alster Pavilion sextet was so good as to die, and Johann Jakob took his place as a regular. The militia and the sextet would be his slim staples for many years. In the 1840s he also found work playing bass in town theaters. Years after, his persistence would secure Johann Jakob a job in the bass section of the Hamburg Philharmonic; even in old age he kept up his other instruments and apparently was a capable flutist. All the same, typical of the meager and backhanded progress that characterized his life, there was no pay for the Philharmonic rehearsals so he had to keep taking jobs in theaters and cafés and beer gardens.22 Until Johann Jakob retired on a pension from his famous son, as far as Hamburg was concerned a Bierfiedler he remained.
AS THE YEARS WENT BY, the family at least felt a sense, or an illusion, of improvement however halting. But to be the modestly successful freelance musician Johann Jakob was does not mean—then or now—a reliable income. Work was unpredictable. Whenever there was a little money to spare, Johann Jakob was apt to become ambitious to bad effect. He lost a good deal of the family savings playing the lottery, and tried raising chickens, rabbits, and pigeons, all with unfortunate results. When Hannes was three they moved from Ulrikusstrasse to marginally larger quarters at Erichstrasse, in crime-ridden St. Pauli, and two years later back to another place on Ulrikusstrasse.
In 1839, Hannes began attending a private school on the Dammthorwall; at eleven he was placed in a school run by a Johann Friedrich Hoffmann on A-B-C Strasse. This school was progressive, with a strong course in mathematics and natural history, a gymnasium, and an atmosphere less tyrannical than that of most schools of the day. There, besides his usual lessons, the boy would acquire a fair reading knowledge of French and English, useful to citizens of a seafaring town. In 1846, Hannes wrote extended Christmas greetings “à mes chers parens … par leur fils Johannes Brahms.”
Johannes grew up surrounded by water, the immense expanses of harbors and the canals lapping at the feet of ramshackle houses, and everyplace littered with boats, from the fishing smacks and skiffs that moored in the canal at the foot of Fuhlentwiete to the great fleets of sailing ships, the forests of high masts and furled sails that stretched numberless along the docks on the sea-restless Elbe. Like all Hamburg