Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [20]
In 1840, Johann Jakob took his seven-year-old to the home of Hamburg piano teacher Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel and drawled, “My Hannes should learn as much as you know, Herr Cossel, then he’ll know enough. He dearly wants to be a piano player.” The studies began, and Cossel took to the boy. Delicate and blond, with his mother’s forget-me-not eyes, Hannes would show up for lessons sometimes barefoot, sometimes in clattering wooden shoes. He would sit his tiny form down before the big keyboard and attack it with a large determination. His progress was remarkable, but once again the strange obstinacy turned up, as though the child had some vision before his eyes that only he could see. Now he insisted to Cossel that he wanted to learn how to compose music, not just play it. But that would be another struggle, in due time: if the piano seemed impractical to Johann Jakob, composing was an absurd indulgence for anybody expecting to make a living at music.
When he began teaching Brahms, Otto Cossel was twenty-eight. By then, defeated by a weak heart, he had given up his own hopes of becoming a keyboard virtuoso.28 He was still an able pianist who had studied with Eduard Marxsen, Hamburg’s leading light. Cossel tended to teach the children of less well-to-do families and gave them all the time he had, so he lived not much better than the Brahmses. Devoted and meticulous, he kept the boy at his scales and exercises and sonatas, his Czerny and Cramer and Clementi.29
Johannes would never quite become a virtuoso either, but from Cossel he picked up a solid foundation on the keyboard. Besides the technical and analytical part of playing, his first master taught Hannes that music was more than an ordinary job. The fingers “should be able to express what the heart feels.” That was the meaning of technique, not virtuosity for its own sake.30 So Hannes learned something he would not forget: musical skill, whether of the fingers or the composer’s craft, is inextricably connected to the heart.
For his lessons with Cossel, whom he began seeing nearly every day to practice and study and talk about music, Johannes was at first forced to walk a considerable distance between school, home, and teacher. In 1842 the Brahmses’ boarder on Ulrikusstrasse left to marry and Johann Jakob moved the family to a smaller place nearby, at No. 29 Dammthorwall. If clean and respectable, the flat was tiny for four people. Johannes practiced when he had to on a shabby upright piano that Johann Jakob installed in the parlor, with family and friends chattering noisily around him. Whenever possible Hannes practiced outside of the house, at his teacher’s or at local piano stores. Meanwhile, Cossel brought his own family to the Brahmses’ previous place, to be closer to his pupil.
In other words, Cossel was now organizing his and his family’s life around his student. By the age of eight little Johnny Broom had acquired the aura of the extraordinary that would surround him for the rest of his life. Already Johannes commanded not only respect but devotion from older musicians, without his asking or expecting it—and sometimes with his snarling resistance. Even Cossel’s other students recognized the primacy of this one. At home it was the same; Hannes was his mother’s golden child and would remain that to her last day.
So Brahms grew up a favored son and behaved like one, with an air of privilege. At the same time he could hardly be called pampered. The family finances were too chancy for that, and the job of becoming a soloist too exacting. To Johann Jakob this son was a mystery