Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [25]
NONE OF THOSE MYSTERIES can be answered—not what lay behind those bright blue eyes, what was going on in the child’s head as he gravely lined up his toy soldiers, why the passion for books and Scripture and everything to do with music. Neither then nor later, through years of talking about his life, did Brahms ever really reveal himself. Nor from moment to moment could you tell what would come out of him, or why. From his childhood on, sometimes what came was kindness, sociability, volubility. At other times it was slashing sarcasm, an imperious indifference to everyone and everything except his own concerns.
Later, when he and Luise Japha became friends, she admired the younger musician greatly but did not really like him. When she knew him, Luise said, Johannes was sehr herbe im Wesen: very harsh, bitter, acrid in nature. Eventually, when he had money and power in abundance, he showed enormous generosity. Nearly everyone close to Johannes Brahms understood that underneath it all he had a great heart. But in dealing with him face to face you rarely got beyond the surface, and much of the time that surface was sehr herbe im Wesen. So, like Luise, all his friends were wary of him. He could bite as well as bark, and he had wounded them all.
Why were there doors inside Brahms that he never opened for anyone? Never opened in his golden-boy childhood, nor in his gruff maturity? It is one of the great questions of his life. Only some of it can be accounted for. But clearly in his youth there were dark counterweights to his brilliance and eagerness, his sunny virtues.
As with every child raised in an exacting discipline, with long hours in lonely rooms, the rest of life and education took second place. That is the only way to train a virtuoso. Most of Brahms’s closest friends in later life had gone through something comparable as children. The eternal problem is that such an upbringing teaches you how to make music but not how to be a friend or a lover or husband or wife: how to live. To the degree at least that Hannes still spent time with his parents, he absorbed from them something of life’s pleasures and values—Johann Jakob’s waggery and garrulousness, Christiane’s generosity and her love of books. Brahms would say that some of the happiest hours in his life were spent by the fireside talking with his mother. When it came time, he launched into adulthood with extraordinary poise and fine North German common sense.
Yet his maturity remained incomplete, his socialization crippled in startling and frustrating ways. Despite his sociability, much of the time Brahms seemed to have something better to do than be with a friend or a lover, and he could express it with wounding heedlessness. He shared that self-absorption with the virtuosos he called friends. A good deal of the time, for all the mutual love and admiration, they could hardly endure him or he them.
Besides the repercussions of a virtuoso’s education, humiliating experiences weighed on him. They came from the time of his first paying jobs, which rose from his family’s shaky finances, compounded by an all-but-fatal ignorance.
As soon as Hannes was able, Johann Jakob took it as a matter of course that he must start playing for money. There is no record that Christiane objected. Eduard Marxsen may never have known about it. They were a struggling family and, with Elise incapable, it was the boys who had to bring in money. That meant playing piano in St. Pauli near the docks.
The waterfront places in Hamburg were known as Animierlokale, roughly “stimulation pubs.” For their clients fresh from sailing ships the Lokale handily integrated the services of dancehall, bar, café, and whorehouse, integrated them also in the persons of the “Singing Girls” who served the food and drink, sang and danced with the customers, and took them upstairs for more intimate services. The St.