Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [334]
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Laurels
THOUGH HE DID NOT SPEAK OF IT YET, by 1887 Brahms had begun to feel like an elder composer with the world passing him by. His main professed worry of that year, however, had to do with his lodgings in Vienna. Frau Vogel, from whom he had long been subletting, had died and Brahms was left suddenly helpless.1 Most of his furniture belonged to the Vogels so he was going to lose it, and he might have to give up the apartment entirely. The prospect of changing his accommodations was an alarming thought for an old bachelor. The situation presaged a period of loose ends for him.
In one of several worried letters to Maria Fellinger in Vienna during the summer of 1887, Brahms called the apartment “my chief topic.” When word got around about Frau Vogel’s death, a row of ladies—“From the far corners of Europe!” Brahms complained—offered their services as his housekeeper, but he dithered and balked at the idea of having some strange new woman in his rooms. Finally Brahms told Maria that he would keep the place, borrow furniture from friends, and let the aged lady called the Hausmeisterin, who dusted the stairs and such, take care of his cleaning.
Maria Fellinger would have none of that. The care of the great man was a serious affair, not to be left to chance. She scraped together some temporary furnishings and prodded Brahms to find a real housekeeper. One day after he returned to Vienna she showed up at his rooms to lift the sofa cushions and reveal triumphantly the dust the Hausmeisterin had left under them. Giving in to Maria’s prophecies of squalor overtaking him, Brahms let in the door someone she sent over, a stout, no-nonsense journalist’s widow named Celestine Truxa. She inspected the empty rooms, brusquely made an offer, and left with his assurance that he would think it over. At home a week later her aged aunt, who lived with Frau Truxa and her two boys, ran in to say that a strange man was measuring the furniture in the living room. The intruder turned out to be Brahms, brandishing a tape measure. To the bewildered Frau Truxa he exclaimed, “The things will go in!”
So Celestine Truxa was installed in Frau Vogel’s old apartment with her aunt and sons. From then on she would make a study of Brahms’s daily routines and rituals. If he did not consider his housekeeper a friend or confidante, he still appreciated her and delighted in her children, as sign of which he usually spent Christmas Eve with the Truxa family.2 The holidays made pleasant memories for all concerned, except perhaps the one when Brahms decided to tease the Truxa boys. He solemnly announced to them that the Christ Child had come down with the flu and would not be bringing presents this year. The boys fell to howling and his attempts to ply them with candy got nowhere. Frantic, he ran to their mother and pleaded, “Look here, Frau Truxa, now I don’t know what to do! Can’t you calm them down? Tell them the Christ Child has gotten well!” As with most situations, she soon brought this one under control.3
For the most part Frau Truxa had an easy enough job, since her employer was intensely private and generally fastidious. She learned to clean without moving anything; Brahms even noticed when she turned his spectacles around. His communication of that like everything else, however, was peculiarly circuitous. One had to learn his little games. If he needed a glove or a sock mended he would leave it draped over an open drawer until Frau Truxa got the message, then express surprise and delight to find it repaired. If his boots needed polish he would set them a shade further from the wall. He needed to maintain the fiction of asking nothing, of being no trouble even as he relied on everyone for favors. Once he sulked mysteriously