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By Root 1457 0

children, he spent years exploring the dockside and the warehouses and granaries and butcher shops there, and he dreamed of ports in America and the East. Yet though he prowled the byways of the old city throughout his youth, the slums and where the tumbledown edged into antique charm, though he knew the docks as well as he knew Scripture, Brahms would never happily set foot on a ship in his life, and never board an oceangoing one at all. He had an instinctive fear of sailing, one more thing that made him a peculiar native of Hamburg. He would travel much, by preference on solid land. Sailing measureless seas was not his style. The Eisenbahn, the iron road, would be his vessel.

From early on, what fascinated Hannes, far more than the romance of an old harbor town, was music and musical notation, the arcane language of dots and flags hanging from lines. At age six, not quite clear that there already was such a thing, he invented his own method of writing down music.23 Johann Jakob was delighted to discover that his boy had perfect pitch—not a guarantee of talent, but a good sign. Even better, Hannes loved to play “Katz und Maus” and the other children’s games that were always accompanied by song; even when he was tiny he could sing any number of tunes for you in his piping voice. When Johann Jakob practiced at home, the boy would leave his toy soldiers and come listen, then sing back what he had heard.24

Johann Jakob took it as a matter of course that his son would take up his trade. He would start the boy in music himself, then turn him over to teachers who would make him into an orchestral player, the highest level of success Johann Jakob himself aspired to. To that end, Hannes would work his way up in the musical world just as his father had, such as it was, playing fiddle or cello or horn, and someday join the Hamburg Philharmonic. That would be a proud day, a proud achievement, when Hannes did that.

All this was the style of the time: one found a niche and stuck to it. After the early Napoleonic wars, the nineteenth century was an era of unprecedented social and economic stability in Europe. Wars flared only briefly, and ran their course with far less destruction than in the past (or the future). During this century the middle class triumphed not only economically but in its influence on social and artistic life. Three decades of relative peace and conformity followed the aristocratic restorations of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, which as far as possible turned the clock back before Napoleon. The time is captured in the term Biedermeier, with its implications of bourgeois domesticity, cozy interiors, sentimentality, philistinism, and kitsch. The characteristic design elements of the era were the household chair and the chest of drawers.25 The operative tone was Gemütlichkeit, meaning something on the order of cozy, sanguine, wine-enhanced good cheer. Nur immer gemütlich! went the saying: Take it easy, don’t get excited.

Prosperous, bustling, conservative Hamburg suited the era and its style. In the Biedermeier, between 1815 and 1848, life seemed good and getting better for those, like the Brahmses, who did not stop to notice how fragile and police-enforced the Gemütlichkeit was. Across Europe the complacency would shatter with the barricades and cannons of 1848. But outside that flare of revolution, quickly suppressed, no extended wars or social upheavals troubled the course of Johannes Brahms’s life, and he left the scene before European peace of mind departed for good. In those decades, writes Brahmsian Hans Gal, “The course of a successful man’s life … was of almost trivial uniformity; it could be practically reconstructed from a set of surveyable given conditions.26 Whatever imagination, genius, innovation, touches of nonconformity Brahms grew up to, he would never entirely outgrow that style, those North German bourgeois and Biedermeierish ideals: loving wife, cozy kitchen and parlor, laughing children, and a respectable position.

WHEN HANNES WAS ABOUT FOUR, Johann Jakob began teaching him the useful instruments