Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [181]
SOON AFTER RECOVERING from his crush on Ottilie Hauer, Brahms had to contend with another intimidating female—which is to say, one beautiful and talented. Elisabet von Stockhausen was born in 1847, daughter of Freiherr Bodo Albrecht von Stockhausen, Ambassador at the Court of Vienna, the family an old Hessian noble line tracing back some eight hundred years. (They were no relation to Julius Stockhausen.) Elisabet came to Brahms as a sixteen-year-old piano student with creative ambitions. This blond girl was not so much lovely in her features and form as in an inner and outer grace that enchanted everybody who knew her, male and female alike. Her extraordinary talent and intelligence, always gently expressed, seemed only a natural part of her radiance.
Elisabet inflicted on Brahms a kind of trembling awe. Especially just after his recent brush with the altar, he was terrified of touching her, of falling in love with her. With the skewed sexuality the Animierlokale of Hamburg had bequeathed him, he could only imagine himself soiling such a creature with his passion. In those days, in that culture, an affair with a respectable woman was a dangerous and rare escapade, while at the same time men were expected to wait years to marry, until they had made their fortune. Janik and Toulmian write, “If a man was to find a sexual outlet … he had to turn to prostitutes, for sexual relations with a girl of ‘good breeding’ were entirely out of the question.”57 With Elisabet the choices were marriage or frustration.
After coaching her on a few pieces including Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Brahms handed Elisabet back to her former teacher, Julius Epstein, who had declared that it was impossible not to fall in love with her. Eventually, married to composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Elisabet would re-enter Brahms’s life and become a rival of Clara Schumann for his affection.
Yet another Vienna pupil Brahms briefly fell for in that period was Amalie von Bruch-Vehoffer. On her death in 1871 she left him a trunkful of music. Hidden in it he discovered a pile of money with a note saying it was for him. Rather than keeping the cash, Brahms returned it to her widower, saying it had been left in the trunk by mistake.
For a finale at the end of summer 1864, Brahms extracted himself from one more ball and chain when he changed his mind and resigned as director of the Singakademie. His reasons for quitting after one season he never exactly spelled out, but they seem clear enough. The job was a drain on his creative time and energy and its practical responsibilities one more threat to his freedom. (There is no indication it ever occurred to Brahms that conducting the Hamburg Philharmonic would have been worse, and he would have soon quit that position too.) So by preference he was jobless again, even as he observed that his purse of late “has been leading a remarkably limp and inactive existence.”
While he was making up his mind to leave the choir, in the middle of June Brahms journeyed wearily from Vienna back to Hamburg to oversee the long-delayed, long-anticipated separation of his parents. As de facto head of the family it was up to him to try and contain the upheaval. He found his father a room in the Grosse Bleiche. Christiane and Elise stayed on for a while at the Fuhlentwiete place, then moved to a small, pleasant apartment on the Lange Reihe, reserving a room on the garden for Johannes. That year Johann Jakob had been accepted into the bass section of the Hamburg Philharmonic, the end of his long ascent from the streets to the higher ranks of Hamburg musical life. Though he was a perfectly adequate player, the job had probably come about after a word from Johannes to his friend Stockhausen. Despite his grief over the shattering of his family, at least it gave Brahms great satisfaction that after so many years of struggle his father had finally, in his late fifties, ascended to a comfortable middle-class life.
His mother and sister,