Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [28]
CHAPTER TWO
Kreisleriana
BY THE SUMMER OF 1847, Christiane and Johann Jakob Brahms could no longer ignore the plight of their son. By day Hannes was the precocious high-minded music student, by night a piano-tinkler in dives. Headaches tortured him; he had become anemic and overwrought. Likely in the Animierlokale he dosed himself with the unlimited supply of drink to ease the oppressiveness of the places. Sometimes in the mornings he could only make it home by staggering from tree to tree. He was fourteen years old.
His father had gotten Hannes into that predicament; now his father got him out of it. Playing at the Alster Pavilion, Johann Jakob made the acquaintance of an amateur musician named Adolph Giesemann, who owned a paper mill and farm in Winsen-an-der-Luhe, a hamlet south of Hamburg on the Lüneburger Heath. Giesemann was an aficionado of Johann Jakob’s Pavilion sextet, and also enjoyed listening to the gabby bass player go on about his talented sons Hannes and Fritz. In the spring of 1847 the talk turned to the older boy’s health. Johann Jakob made a proposal: let Hannes come out to Winsen for a few weeks to live with the Giesemanns, get some sun on his pale skin, and teach piano to daughter Lieschen. At the end of his next visit to Hamburg, Giesemann took the boy home with him.
Johannes had never been out of the city for any length of time, but he took to the country as if born to it. In Winsen during this and the next summer he found a love of forests and hills that never left him. Here was presaged the Brahmsian seasonal rhythm of city man in winter and spring, outdoorsman in summer and fall. From that point too, his works would mostly be conceived during walks in woods and countryside. And the cure worked spectacularly. After weeks of drinking milk and wandering in the woods and swimming in the river, Brahms turned a corner into a lifetime of robust health.
As in his later career, these two Winsen summers were working vacations. He brought with him a silent practice keyboard and every week took a steamer to Hamburg for a lesson with Eduard Marxsen. He got in the habit of rising at the farmer’s hour of five a.m. to have a swim in the river. After breakfast and piano practice, Frau Giesemann would send him into the fields with his keyboard and notebook, with orders not to come back until dinner.
From the dirt and inglorious dives of Hamburg, Johannes had been transported into an Edenic idyll, with a little sister to share it. His pupil Lieschen Giesemann, one year younger, accompanied him on treks around Winsen. Besides her lessons and her pleasure in music, Lieschen shared Johannes’s passion for books. They roamed the heath looking for flowers, sat in the shade reading. A local boy they befriended, Aaron Löwenherz, was willing for a small fee to sneak books for them from his mother’s lending library. One of them was a play called The Robbers, by Schiller. Johannes had never heard of this author but thought him quite fine. More compelling to the friends, though, was the medieval romance The Beautiful Magelone and the Knight Peter with the Silver Keys. Johannes and Lieschen sat in the fields reading aloud that tale of a knight inspired by a minstrel to go adventuring, who finds and loses and regains an eternal love.
With the serendipitous good fortune that marked his early life, practical experience fell into his lap. The Giesemanns liked to spend Sunday afternoons