Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [233]
For the father the talent and success of his boy had seemed a mysterious, inexplicable force. When Johannes was home in Hamburg he was treated with deference, spoken of in hushed tones. Once when family friend Karl Bade came to visit at Anscharplatz, Johann Jakob greeted him solemnly with finger on lips. To Bade’s surprised look the old man whispered cryptically, “He is there,” silently pushed the visitor into Johannes’s room, and closed the door quietly after him. (Brahms, busy packing books to send to Vienna, turned around brandishing an old volume at the befuddled Bade and said, “See here, Kuhnau was a capable musician!”)8
Johannes arrived in Hamburg on the first day of February 1872 and spent ten days sitting by his father’s deathbed. During that time he and Fritz Brahms reconciled as much as was possible for two brothers who, despite their shared musical careers, had never had anything between them. Fritz was still getting along as a piano teacher, no doubt in part because he was the famous man’s brother. (To get away from the family, Fritz had recently spent two years in Venezuela.) They would maintain a polite distance. Elise, estranged from her father since he left Christiane, stayed at home with her new husband while her father faded.
On the tenth, Johann Jakob roused himself to say good-bye, then sank into silence and died peacefully the next day. From Hamburg, Brahms wrote Julius Stockhausen that his father’s death marked “an epoch in my lonely life.… You know my weakness for the homeland and you can imagine with what special feelings I went through the streets this time—which I certainly won’t see again for a long time.”9 In 1874 he would compose three songs on Klaus Groth’s lyrics, all called “Heimweh” (“Homesickness”). It was after Johann Jakob’s death that the last word in the text of the Alto Rhapsody—Wüste—began haunting Brahms’s letters.
After the funeral he gathered mementos—Johann Jakob’s old Certificate of Apprenticeship, the fanciful Brahms family coat of arms, the certificate of Hamburg citizenship. He gave Karoline a small oil portrait of Johann Jakob as a young man, asking her to leave it to him when she died. In the end, Karoline outlived her stepson, who was some six years younger. If the deepest part of his connection to his hometown was severed now, Brahms never slacked in his attention to his stepmother, stepbrother, and sister. As he had from the beginning of his career, he continued to dispatch a large percentage of his earnings to his family. All of them would receive steady appeals to ask for more when they needed it, and they rarely asked for anything when he did not give more than asked. Karoline returned to her old trade of taking in boarders. The unlucky Fritz Schnack, with his back injury from which it took years to make an incomplete recovery, was the particular beneficiary of Brahms’s generosity and concern. Brahms hired medical care for his stepbrother, “the second Fritz,” and finally set him up in a watchmaking shop in Pinneberg near Hamburg, where Karoline joined him.
After settling his father’s affairs Brahms returned to Karlsgasse for the spring, then in May to Lichtental. There he perhaps worked on string quartets or songs, perhaps tinkered with the symphony long in progress, but finished nothing. At the same time he prepared for his duties as Gesellschaft artistic director, set to begin in September.
Most of all, echoing a pattern from the fallow years of the 1850s, he studied counterpoint while lamenting his aimlessness. “What for?” he wrote Clara. “The better to run down my beautiful things?—I did not need counterpoint for that. To become a Professor at the Academy?