Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [21]
The other children got what was left over. Elise would always be a burden, afflicted with chronic migraine headaches that could keep her in bed for weeks. (Johannes had migraines too in his childhood, but outgrew them.) Elise looked a good deal like her brother but without the aura, the penetrating intelligence in the eyes, or the sheer attractiveness. Because of her health Elise could learn little; she would live at home, collecting her one-taler-a-week allowance, until her mother died. She seemed content to play her role as semi-invalid and patient virgin, and to help keep house as best she could. She adored flowers and birds, shiny floors and tidiness, entertaining friends. Ostensibly with affection, Christiane Brahms called her daughter die dicke dumme Deern, the “fat dumb peasant.”32 Always the two women of the house teamed up against Johann Jakob’s foolishness and impracticality.
Brother Fritz, not afflicted like their sister, reasonably bright and talented but only so much, had the more difficult task psychologically: to live in the shadow of the golden child. Like Johannes, he resisted his father’s attempts to make him an orchestral player and took up the piano, following his brother with the same teachers. If he took on music as a profession, he did it in his negligent fashion, without Johannes’s drive or his ruthlessness. The brothers never exactly feuded, but were never close. Most of the time Johannes simply ignored Fritz. Great talents, geniuses, may sometimes illuminate those around them, but not always, and in any case a favored child goes hard on the others. Considering what he had to work with, maybe Fritz did all right for someone who came of age known around town as “the wrong Brahms.”
IN 1841, Uncle Philip Detmering died and the Brahmses borrowed three hundred marks of his estate from his widow, Christiane’s sister, to set up another Dutch Wares shop, with frilly curtains and embroidery in the windows, at the house on the Dammthorwall.33 Hannes was still progressing marvelously on piano; to Otto Cossel he seemed a phenomenon, a prodigy. What had begun as Johann Jakob’s idea of a practical education on the keyboard had slipped into something of another order—an intense and disciplined training toward a career as a virtuoso. That may well have happened without Johann Jakob’s even being aware of it.
Still, Johannes did not have the relentless education in music that some suffer, among them Beethoven. It was not all piano and study. At home he spent hours on the floor arranging toy soldiers in parades and battle formations, the martial music and the fury of battle roaring in his mind, sighting the cannons, laying out his rifle battalions as later he arranged the forms and forces of his music. (Perhaps the bright-painted lead figures reminded him of his father, parading with the militia in his Jäger-Bataillon uniform.)
In May 1842 a fire broke out in Hamburg, spreading from the medieval Deichstrasse to roar through the city for four days, one of them Hannes’s ninth birthday. The boy watched the terrifying glow in the sky, the roiling smoke and flames approaching the house. The police appeared to tell the neighborhood to pack up and get out. Then, like a miracle, the wind shifted and the house stood. When the inferno had run its course, a third of the inner city was consumed and a tenth of the population homeless. The elegant Jungfernstieg lay in shambles, though the Alster Pavilion survived.
After this historic disaster Hamburg rebuilt with little effect on its prosperity. That