Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [27]
Brahms was driven beyond those dismal norms. As a grown man, he suffered from what Freud would name “degradation in erotic life”: he had difficulty sleeping with women he loved, had difficulty loving women he slept with.46 In his relations with women he was possessed by the old, poisonous dichotomy of virgin and whore.
Even so, his fear and hatred of female sexuality was only part of the equation. In regard to women too he turned away from corruption toward the ideal: the poetry on the whorehouse piano. His need for women contended incessantly with his scorn. Starting with his mother, a few women would play an irreplaceable role in his life and music. He admired those women extravagantly and depended on them and fell in love with them, all without giving up a contempt for their sex that now and then boiled to the surface, sometimes in jokes, sometimes in wrath. In his mind the women he loved must be talented, and must be eternal virgins. And he must not soil them with his lust.
The sharp dichotomies of experience in his teens played other roles too, however hard to pin down. Johannes lived amid irreconcilable worlds: the elegant pavilion and the whorehouse, the ideal and the degraded. His teacher Cossel told Brahms to make his fingers express his heart; Marxsen taught him to submit passion to relentless craftsmanship. In his maturity, his art would be marked by a reconciliation of elements that would seem irreconcilable had he not resolved them so magnificently, so nearly seamlessly.
These conflicting elements have been given names such as Classical and Romantic, Apollonian and Dionysian. In his maturity, Brahms’s music amounted to this: passion constrained within abstraction, personal anguish dissolved in impersonal form. Before that, the Lokale taught him something in the direction of the same lesson, in a more soul-searing way: Hide! He would live as a revered master with something to hide. In and out of music, he would become adept at masking his feelings, his identity.47
Which is to say, in the meanness and corruption of waterfront dives something was crushed in the young Brahms, and at the same time something liberated—if he could survive the experience. Perhaps that is a common element in the story of genius: beyond talent and ambition and luck, in some degree you have to be forcibly booted out of everyday life and everyday goals.
In any case, it was like that with Brahms. The fulfillment of love was denied him so that other things might take wing. In degraded places he formed an implacable compulsion to follow his course whatever the obstacles. For all his delicacy of build and romantic exuberance, he reached adulthood tough as nails, without illusions about himself, about music, or about humanity. What tortured him was that he understood what he had gained and what he had lost, and he could never stop grieving for what he had lost.
So in his teens Brahms played tunes in places mean and gradually better, and he read books, and with the guidance of teachers he made himself a very fine pianist and a creative genius of the highest rank. The abuse he suffered in dives was a kind of tragedy; it created a dangerous fissure in his psyche. Yet he not only survived that shame but exploited it, turning the random events of his life to the purpose—as genuine creators must. In later years, Brahms spoke of the Lokale with as much pride as bitterness: “I would not on any account have missed this period of hardship in my life, for I am convinced that it did me good.”48 Other times there was anguish, but never real regret. He never blamed his parents for subjecting him to the experience (though others did). The Lokale steeled him. He felt the shadow lingering on his soul, and he prospered in it.
At the same time, these experiences