Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [24]
Johannes still did much of his practicing at Otto Cossel’s house and in piano showrooms. (He stayed close to his first teacher; as late as 1857, Brahms stood as godfather to one of Cossel’s daughters.) Although Marxsen continued to teach the boy piano, as Johannes moved into his teens composition and theory took precedence. The training was based on the towering Germanic musical tradition that had been created mostly by artists of living memory. Marxsen had studied in Vienna with men who had personally known Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. Those composers were Marxsen’s touchstones, as well as J. S. Bach, whose work had been neglected and was only now being fully explored, like a vast half-known territory. The forms, craft, and principles of these demigods defined what Marxsen meant by the “sublime, true, and eternally incorruptible in art.”
Marxsen made sure Johannes knew these composers exhaustively and founded everything he composed on their example. At the same time the boy was allowed room to find his own voice, what Marxsen called “new accents” on the eternal patterns of musical language. By age eighteen, with the first works he allowed to survive, Brahms possessed something that cannot be taught: a musical voice audibly grounded in tradition and at the same time unlike any other ever heard. In his recollections Marxsen took some of the credit for that, and he deserved it. In more than one sense, he had reared a priest of art.
The great Viennese had been the composers most responsible for raising Western music to the peak of its influence, “the art to which all other arts aspire.” That would not have been said in any earlier age. The overwhelming presence of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven—later joined by Schubert and Schumann—would make the past increasingly present in the musical repertoire, as it had not been in the time of Bach and Mozart, when most music heard had been new music.
In the course of the nineteenth century, the discipline of music history first flourished and the concert hall became a museum as well as a proving ground for the latest music. Increasingly, listeners no longer wanted to hear new work for its own sake; they wanted to hear certified Masterpieces. In Brahms’s training in the 1840s we see that process already at work. Marxsen gave his student mostly those masterpieces, and very little music by living composers—perhaps a hint of Chopin, not all that much Schubert, the occasional piece of Marxsen’s own.42 It would be Luise Japha, years later, who first told Johannes about Robert Schumann.
As the months went forward, Marxsen found composition opening the boy’s intellectual curiosity to an extraordinary depth and breadth. In and out of music, Johannes leaped at everything given him, took it in and made it his own. Along with the lessons Marxsen gave him books, and the boy devoured them too. Though he was to be a freethinker in religion, Johannes pored over the Bible beyond the requirements for his Protestant confirmation.
His teacher had never seen a talent like this, and he was willing to stake his reputation on it. In 1847, when Felix Mendelssohn died and Johannes was fourteen, Marxsen declared to friends, “A great master of the musical art has gone hence, but an even greater one will bloom for us in Brahms.”43
At the same time, Marxsen had to have wondered where it came from. A little towheaded working family’s child like this, son of that blockhead Johann Jakob and a simple goodwife like Christiane, with a weak-minded sister and a brother of no great gifts—how could he have acquired this depth of talent and intelligence,