Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [23]
Then in his late thirties, Eduard Marxsen was more experienced than Cossel, had seen more and better students come and go.37 Upon hearing this ten-year-old play, he was impressed but not overwhelmed. As he probably sized up Johannes, here was a child obviously gifted and diligent, but one who took to the keyboard more as to a duty than as a fish to water. That is how great pianists take to the piano, even before they become great. Johannes might become a fine player, even a soloist, but he did not seem likely to develop into a true virtuoso. Something held him back. He hadn’t the fire in the belly.
Marxsen told Cossel he was crazy to give up this student. The boy was doing perfectly well under his tutelage and he should stay there. But Cossel would not retreat. Day after day he appeared at Marxsen’s door to renew his plea. A few months later, Johann Jakob also showed up, entreating the Herr Doktor to teach his son.
Under this assault Marxsen finally gave in, to the extent of agreeing to give one lesson a week; the boy should also continue with Cossel as before. Somewhere in these maneuvers the American boondoggle was dropped. So one more of Johann Jakob’s schemes came tumbling, leaving the family worse off. After some months of sharing Johannes, Cossel once more declared that he could not trust himself with this kind of talent. Only then did Marxsen agree to become the boy’s sole teacher.38
If Eduard Marxsen assessed Johannes as having no great promise as a virtuoso, he was an earnest child and his progress at the piano continued steadily. But with that curious persistence for one so frail and dutiful, the boy kept prodding Marxsen to help him with composing. He was already doing it on the side, in fact by age eleven had composed a piano sonata that he played for a young musician named Luise Japha, whom he had met at a piano store where he practiced. Luise, seven years older, thought the sonata quite a feat for his age.
Marxsen tried to keep his student’s mind on his work: You can compose all in good time, my boy, now do your scales. But Johannes would not be put off. So once again Marxsen relented. He began looking at his pupil’s little songs and piano pieces, initiating him into the arcana of musical theory and the forms of music as perfected by the masters of the past. Very soon it became clear to Marxsen what had been holding back this student. Here was the real thing, the fire in the belly.
YEARS LATER, Eduard Marxsen recalled the period when he first discovered Johannes Brahms’s gift.
When I started teaching him composition, he exhibited a rare acuteness of mind which enchanted me, and, insignificant though his first attempts at original creation turned out to be, I was bound to recognize in them an intelligence which convinced me that an exceptional, great, and peculiarly profound talent was dormant in him. I therefore shrank from no effort or work in order to awaken and form it, that I might one day rear a priest of art, who should preach in new accents what was sublime, true, and eternally incorruptible in art.39
At the time, Marxsen was probably less lofty in his attitude. He had always been more a practical composer than priest of the sublime. A compact man with plump cheeks and a sardonic glint in his eye, Eduard Marxsen was Hamburg’s most prominent musician in those days—well read, well dressed, a notable pianist and prolific composer. His music was Mendelssohnian in style, and included many fashionable “homage” pieces for piano, the honorees including Jenny Lind and Clara Schumann.40 Still, his most celebrated effort was an 1835 arrangement for orchestra of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, the sort of thing that later in the century would be understood as an aberration.
Where Otto Cossel had been earnest and in awe of Johannes, Marxsen was flinty and worldly, with a hardheaded perspective on the profession. In his fashion, though, he was also a generous and idealistic artist. “I’ll never forget,” Brahms recalled, “how he refused to accept the heavy moneybag that my father had saved