Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [29]
It probably seemed like a joke at first, the slight, girlish boy leading a group of men. But the men of the chorus were charmed by this teenager’s aplomb, his knowledge, his forceful if childish time-beating. Unanimously, they declared Johannes their conductor. The twelve members practiced in a schoolroom or around a billiard table in a Winsen bar; now the practices were called to order by the soprano voice of their blond maestro. That summer Johannes wrote two pieces for his men’s choir—an “ABC” song, consisting of the alphabet in four-part harmony, and a “Postilion’s Morning Song.”1 The next summer he would arrange a couple of German songs for them, the first record of a lifetime’s concern with folk music.
None of Brahms’s Winsen music survives. In later life he obliterated those pieces along with his other juvenilia, demanded the return of his letters and musical manuscripts from the Giesemanns, and despite his old benefactors’ tears destroyed them too (some of that music was dedicated to the family).2 With a ruthless instinct for recognizing and seizing what he required, Brahms drew from the experience of Winsen what it could teach him, how it could save him, then covered his tracks. He did not want history nosing too much into what the German language calls his Bildung—his growth in knowledge and wisdom, his creative and sentimental education.
In Winsen the teenager continued to inspire people to do things for him without his seeming to ask, or even to notice. As his teachers had discovered, there was an aura around him. A town official, Amtsvogt (Bailiff) Blume, offered his piano for practice and spent hours with Johannes playing Beethoven in four-hand arrangements—the way much orchestral and chamber music was heard in the nineteenth century. Johannes became friendly with choir member and music teacher Alwin Schröder of Hoopte, who made himself available for questions of music theory. One day Schröder delivered his young friend late to the worried Giesemanns, telling them that Johannes had gotten lost and simply gone to sleep out on the heath, his keyboard and notebook by his side.
Lieschen Giesemann remembered another day, when the fourteen-year-old had just arrived from Hamburg, pale and frail, and ran afoul of some older rowdies at the river. She found little Hannes, his long hair bedraggled, stripped of his notebook and everything else in his pockets, crying on the riverbank. Since the culprits were still playing in the water, a wrathful Lieschen went down and demanded her friend’s things back, and got them.
After the piano and his compositions, that notebook was the most important thing in Johannes’s creative life. Probably it was an early stage of the collection he would name “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein” (The Young Kreisler’s Treasure Chest). In it, he was copying down quotations from books he had read. The Young Kreisler of the title is Johannes himself, in his alter ego.
FROM HIS TEENAGE YEARS, when he became attached to literature and history and Scripture, Brahms looked to books for knowledge and wisdom. As someone who thought in tones and felt clumsy with language, he was willing throughout his life to let writers articulate ideas for him. Thus the quotes of “Des jungen Kreislers Schatzkästlein” that filled several notebooks from his teens and twenties. After a lapse of decades he would put down the final entries, in a shaking hand, in the last months of his life.3
The “Schatzkästlein” is the record of Brahms’s Bildung—the part of it he allowed to survive. Like a diary in other people’s words, the notebooks sketch out a conception of music and art that he shared with his age. Its title and the figure of the half-mad composer Kreisler he gleaned from E. T. A. Hoffmann, who with his stories and criticism initiated the high noon of musical Romanticism. The title