Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [22]
Still, while the city rebuilt from the fire there was less time or money for music. For a while Johann Jakob had no work at the Alster Pavilion.35 That threatened the always shaky family finances. Johann Jakob probably concluded that if the boy could play the piano nicely now, he was going to have to earn his keep with it. In 1843 Hannes survived a wagon running over his chest; he recovered after six weeks in bed, with no lasting effects. Convalescence from the accident may have kept him from hard labor for a time, but he would not long be spared a dismal initiation into the profession of music.
In 1843, Johann Jakob pulled together something of a formal debut for his son. It was a private benefit concert to raise money for Hannes’s studies, and to show off to the paying public the ten-year-old who played the piano like a grown-up. The program included a Mozart piano quartet, a Beethoven quintet for piano and winds, and a virtuosic étude by Henry Herz. Johann Jakob contributed his bass-playing to the occasion. His son’s performance seems to have done credit to his family and his teacher Cossel.
But the results of the concert were too dramatic for Cossel’s taste. An impresario who had been in the audience took Johann Jakob by the arm and offered to take the boy—why, the whole family—across the ocean to the United States: this blue-eyed prodigy could make heaps of money on those golden shores. Perhaps the scenario the promoter had in mind was to present tiny Johannes as younger than he was, a wunderkind like Mozart.
Johann Jakob was naturally bedazzled by the scheme, but this time so was Christiane. To the teacher’s wife she declared, “Look here, Frau Cossel, if we go to America and Johannes plays there, we can live in hotels and I won’t have to do any more scrubbing.”36 In short order the Dutch Wares shop was sold, at a loss, to collect funds for the trip. (Widow Detmering would not get back a groschen of the money she had loaned the Brahmses until a decade later, when she received it from Johannes.) Glorious strategies were spun out in the parlor. Our Hannes is going to be another Mozart! In America!
Otto Cossel was horrified. He knew that prodigies are fragile creatures; the great majority of them crash and become nothing. This uprooting and sailing and American show business he could only see as a disaster for a student just ten years old, far from what he could become if he kept on track. How, Cossel reflected in desperation, could he convince the parents to give up this idiotic scheme? He had given Johannes a fine foundation in music, but this teacher’s true service to art, and his immortality, lie in this: he had the courage and the insight to let go of what he recognized as an extraordinary talent.
It would not be easy to do. Cossel brought Johannes to his one-time teacher Eduard Marxsen and asked him to take on the boy. In three years, Cossel told Marxsen, he had taught the child everything he knew about the piano. If Johannes was to develop properly, he needed Herr Marxsen’s superior gifts as a teacher and musician. Besides, the boy wanted to compose and Cossel could not help him with that. (He had tried, without success, to discourage composing as a distraction from practice.) Presumably Cossel added in his proposition to Marxsen a more pressing reason to get a more advanced teacher: the parents needed something as impressive as Marxsen’s opinion to get them to give up this mirage of Hannes making