Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [267]
With Henschel Brahms was voluble about his own life, in the forthright but still circumscribed way he spoke with friends. “I sometimes regret that I didn’t get married. I ought to have a boy of ten now; that would be nice. But when I was at the right age to marry I didn’t have the position to do it, and now it’s too late.” He supported his sister Elise, he told Henschel, but had little in common with her, and hardly any connection with brother Fritz except to send him money now and then, on request. (He had his publisher Simrock forward new piano pieces to his brother.) He relished stories about his father, “a dear old man, very simple-minded,” the tales an excuse to indulge in some Low German dialect. There was the time Johann Jakob scolded a beggar who had walked into the house: “Why, you could’ve easily stolen my overcoat that’s hanging in the hall! Get out o’ here and don’t you come back!” Naturally, Brahms added, when it came time for his father to go out, the overcoat was missing.
“Brahms is looking splendid,” Henschel reported to his diary from their summer in Sassnitz. He was the sort with whom you use the word splendid: handsome and ruddy of face, rambunctious when you caught him on the right day, a lusty eater who attacked his plate with manifest pleasure and likewise the accompanying mugs of beer and Kaffee afterward. Even to those who didn’t recognize the famous figure, Brahms stood out in a crowd, walking with his vigorous rocking gait, soft hat in hand, waistcoat unbuttoned, the wool-flannel Jäger shirt collarless whenever possible: the archetypal tie-hater. Likely Henschel was not the only person who thought “his whole appearance vividly recalls some of the portraits of Beethoven.” Brahms might not have taken amiss that comparison, but he did not cultivate it: for one thing, Beethoven never grew a beard and Brahms was working up to one.
DURING THE WINTERS in Vienna he had a circle of friends on whom he relied for society. (He followed some of them, or vice versa, to summer vacation spots.) Most of the friends naturally were musicians, but there were also writers, physicians, businessmen, and other professionals from the upper Grossbürgertum. The group included pianist Julius Epstein, cellist Josef Gänsbacher, composer/pianist Ignaz Brüll (Brahms’s preferred partner for trying out new pieces four hands), and Conservatory professor Anton Door. C. F. Pohl, the Haydn biographer and Gesellschaft librarian, lunched with Brahms regularly in Zum roten Igel, his preferred restaurant of the 1880s. Eventually Karl Goldmark, composer of the exotic and in those days famous opera The Queen of Sheba, joined the circle of regulars.
Satirist Daniel Spitzer of the Neue Freie Presse (who published Wagner’s letters to the milliner) and his fellow journalists made Brahms an honorary member of their “Board of Scoffers” that met at Gause’s Pilsner Beer Hall. One of the group’s trademark ditties satirizing the members ran this way, to the tune of an old bawdy song:
At Gause’s sang Johannes Brahms,
And whatever good he found he brought
Into the realm of airy spirits;
but since there already existed a Master,
He became Assistant Master.
Everybody knew The Master referred to Richard Wagner.4
Further regulars of the Brahms circle included the crabbed, thick-bearded scholar and composer Gustav Nottebohm, student of Beethoven sketchbooks, to whom Brahms dispatched novices to be drilled in counterpoint. (Nottebohm had been a pupil of Mendelssohn and Schumann.) At postconcert dinners Billroth often joined the table, and also Hanslick—a cozy cohabitation between a composer and the critic who was often slated to review him next day.
Brahms appreciated the knowledge and skill and brains that had made these men eminent in their fields. He also required companions who, like him, could light up a cigar and down a few glasses and make a back room ring with gossip and