Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [26]
Johannes began playing in the Lokale of St. Pauli in 1846, before he turned thirteen, often playing until dawn. After a few months of it he was weak, anemic, tormented by migraines. But he was kept at the jobs until better came along, off and on through that year and maybe longer.
His months in the Animierlokale do not seem to have interfered with his studies or his intellectual growth. Once Johannes’s fingers had learned the requisite waltzes, polkas, mazurkas, and such, he would place on the piano rack a novel or a volume of poetry and read the night away as he played, leaning into the book nearsightedly, the revels going on behind him. It sounds almost charming. But the effects of the Lokale on him were indelible. For the rest of his life, with friends or in his cups, Brahms would recall those nights as dark and shameful. No one has had a harder time of it than I have, he would say, and narrate the shocking details. He told one beloved that “he saw things and received impressions which left a deep shadow on his mind.”44
It had not been all polkas and poetry. Johannes was surrounded by the stench of beer and unwashed sailors and bad food, the din of rough laughter and drunkenness and raving obscenity. He had to accompany the bawdy songs, he had to turn around and look sometimes at the drunken sailors fondling the half-naked Singing Girls, and he had to participate sometimes too. Between dances the women would sit the prepubescent teenager on their laps and pour beer into him, and pull down his pants and hand him around to be played with, to general hilarity. There may have been worse from the sailors. Johannes was as fair and pretty as a girl.
Many years later, in Vienna, the old Brahms got drunk and broke up a birthday dinner by branding all women with a word that nobody would repeat. Later that night, walking it off with a friend, he spoke disjointedly of what he had seen and suffered in those places. In a seizure of anguish and rage he cried out: “You tell me I should have the same respect, the same exalted homage for women that you have! You expect that of a man cursed with a childhood like mine!”45
Everything that happens plays a part in an artist’s life. What elevates one and not another to the level of genius is not only talent and ambition and luck, but a gift for turning everything to the purpose. Many first-rank creators have had traumas in their lives—Beethoven’s drunken father and his chronic illness and deafness, Robert Schumann’s mental decline, Bartók’s sickly childhood. With Brahms, it was first of all the lowlife of Hamburg. The Singing Girls shaped him along with the training in music, the novels and poetry. The brutal dichotomy between the squalor of his home and the Lokale with his playing jobs in bourgeois theaters and restaurants, and with the idealistic intensity of his studies and his reading—all that is one with the story of his music.
As he approached puberty, Brahms was steeped in an atmosphere where the deepest intimacies between men and women were a matter of ceaseless and shameful transaction. That sense of human relations haunted him for life. He felt intimacy as a threat, female sexuality as a threat. To preserve yourself, look away, get away! Even before puberty his relations with women were subverted: “You expect me to honor them as you do!” All his life Brahms would sustain a taste for whores and a deep-lying misogyny.
True, this attitude only exaggerated norms of his time and culture. Hamburgers like most North Germans were proverbially taciturn and reserved. In the terms of a later era, all Germany was misogynistic, the role of women relentlessly circumscribed by Kinder, Kirche, und Küche (kids, church, and kitchen). Only women of unusual talent