Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [189]
Despondent, burdened by her seventy-six years, at the end of January Christiane Brahms spent five days laboring over a letter to her golden boy. She wanted him to understand her life now and her journey there, and the unlikely destiny that engendered him. “I am alone and will try to write you, you can’t believe how bad it’s gotten for me. The eyes weak, the hand unsteady.” An unsteady hand is terror to a seamstress. Father did not come here for Christmas, she wrote, only Fritz. Then Fritz went to a party on New Year’s, Elise and I were alone. “There was Fritz’s concert on the 4th, it was rather full and everything pleased, your Trio and the rest. Both Herren Marxsen, whom I hadn’t seen for a long time, were very friendly, and congratulated me saying that I must feel great joy over my children.” She rambled on. When I was a child I used to go out all day sewing, then for ten years I was a maid to honest folk, and there was sewing for the company and the Dutch Wares shop with Auntie, and then one day your father, almost a stranger, asked me to marry him. I couldn’t believe he was serious, but Uncle said he wasn’t joking, take your only chance, “and so I considered it Destiny.”
Now Christiane Brahms understood that it had been a profound destiny that joined her with a man young enough to be her son and too handsome for her, and the toilsome and finally unhappy marriage that produced a child as extraordinary as Johannes. “I have written something every day,” she wrote toward the end. “It is Tuesday evening at nine … and since we might not be speaking with each other soon I am writing you now, so that I may die in peace, that my child should have no misgivings about me.… And now I close with the hope that we can look forward to a better year.”6
Three days after she mailed her letter a telegram from Fritz Brahms arrived at Johannes’s door on Singerstrasse: “If you want to see our Mother again come at once.” Johannes reached Hamburg on February 4, two days after Christiane Brahms died of a stroke. “God took my mother away as mercifully as possible,” he wrote Clara. “She had not changed at all and looked as sweet and kind as when she was alive.”7
Now most of all he worried about his sister, still suffering chronically with headaches, who had never gotten through a day without her mother’s orders, never owned more than her one taler a month allowance. In Clara’s letter of consolation she echoed his concern: “Poor Elise! She will be the one to feel the loss most.… Could I help you at all by my presence in Hamburg? I would come gladly.”8 There was no question of that. Johannes could find nothing useful to do himself after the funeral, and only stayed in Hamburg a week. His sister became hysterical at any mention of their father; the two would remain estranged. For the moment Johannes arranged for Elise to stay with the Cossels, the family of his first piano teacher (where his old chorister Laura Garbe lived). In the spring Elise took a room with friends of Fritz Brahms.9 Like Johannes, their brother had long been on his own, earning enough as a piano teacher to support his dandyish lifestyle, but he hardly concerned himself with the family. Now and then Fritz performed his brother’s music, once even trying the Handel Variations in public; Clara heard the performance and reported that the piece was quite beyond him. After their mother died the brothers broke almost completely, and so the family lay in ruins.
Johannes told Clara that Theodor Avé-Lallemant had stood “nobly” by his side through the whole misery, and Avé persuaded him to go immediately back to Vienna.10 After he returned there, singing teacher Josef Gänsbacher visited his apartment at the “Deutsches Haus” and found him playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations on