Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [231]
A practical apartment, then, actually in sight of his place of employment, but, when all was said and done, hardly adequate for a famous artist. The painter Hans Makart, whose neo-Rococo kitsch was now the rage of the city, had a house decked out like a Turkish harem, a riot of palms, peacocks, and wall hangings, dripping with objets d’art. That, or as close as means allowed, was the way famous artists and their nouveaux riches admirers lived in Vienna (Wagner was a great admirer of Makart and his lifestyle). Brahms’s place looked, Max Kalbeck wrote, like the apartment of a student, a minor civil servant, a salesman just starting in trade.2 One entered the building on Karlsgasse through a plain door from the street, crossed a vestibule past French windows opening to the garden, and ascended winding stone stairs. At apartment No. 8 there was an old-fashioned iron bellpull that jangled loudly in Brahms’s living room. Landlady Frau Vogl would open the door on a narrow hall leading past her kitchen, and visitors entered the apartment through Brahms’s bedroom.3
In 1877 he rented a third attached room, but for the first years he had only the bedroom and living room, both small and plain though sunny, the larger holding his piano and stacks of books and music. (Most of his library stayed in Hamburg until he got the third room.) There was no bath. The furniture, scanty and shabby, was provided by Frau Vogl, and later and somewhat less shabbily by her successor, Frau Truxa. His landladies took care of his mending and housekeeping. Since chairs were in short supply and usually held books or music, there was a perennial problem with places for visitors to sit.4
Brahms ate lunch, with friends whenever possible, at one of his habitual restaurants—earlier the Kronprinz, Goldspinnerin, or Zur Schönen Laterne, later Zum roten Igel. At night in the 1870s he generally had a sparse dinner sitting at his little table, often cold meat and a tin of sardines; the latter he carried home in the pocket of his coat and finished by drinking off the oil from the tin, peasant-style.5
In short, Karlsgasse No. 4 seemed a stopgap sort of dwelling, a degree better than hotels, but entirely inappropriate to Brahms’s station in life. He lived in the place for twenty-four years, and died there.
ONE OF THE FIRST of many prose portraits of Brahms comes from Florence May, a young British pianist. In summer of 1871, when May arrived to study with Clara Schumann in Baden-Baden, she had barely heard of Brahms and had no idea what a rare experience she was in for. He had taught piano a great deal in his twenties, but now neither needed nor wanted pupils. As a favor to Clara, who had to be out of town for much of the summer, Brahms agreed to give Miss May some lessons.
This student’s descriptions of Brahms would be echoed by many observers. The short square figure, the long fair hair brushed back, the intense blue eyes under a broad forehead, the outthrust lower lip. Still clean-shaven, clothes plain and neat in those days, notably a short black alpaca coat (soon he would need larger ones). Pince-nez on a cord around his neck (nearsighted as he was, Brahms never wore spectacles for a photograph). His manner usually kind and sociable but always reserved (others found him awkward unto crude). His fervent interest in politics and science; his love of walking; his visible affection for Frau Schumann as he sat beside her every day at table. His dislike of celebrity hounds and autograph seekers, and of the French and English generally (the list of aversions would eventually extend to his fellow Germans). Outdoors he walked vigorously, usually with one hand swinging a soft felt hat, the other cocked behind his back. Most nights in Baden-Baden he went out to hear Johann Strauss’s orchestra. Few made note, maybe because it was so common in those days, that