Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [335]
During one period a lady downstairs took to playing his music on her piano, to impress her famous neighbor. If that was not bad enough, her playing was appalling. Driven to distraction, Brahms spoke to the lady with his usual degree of tact, which was none. His diplomacy can be judged from the fact that after they spoke the lady hired a conservatory student to come into her apartment and play for hours on end, as loud as possible. Now really traumatized, Brahms took his anguish to Frau Truxa. After thinking over various plans of attack, his housekeeper decided to extol to the lady downstairs the wonders of the zither, which Frau Truxa played herself. She even offered to give the woman free lessons and persuaded her (this was not a remarkably bright sort of neighbor) that the thing to do was fire the conservatory student and devote her time to that admirable and pleasantly quiet instrument, the zither.5 Peace returned to the house.
Maria Fellinger’s photographs of Karlsgasse No. 4 in later years show Frau Truxa’s furniture, mostly simple chairs and tables. Brahms particularly prized her unstable rocking chair. He generally directed visiting ladies, especially pretty ones, to have a seat in it. They would lean back to find their legs thrown in the air and skirts flying, or lean forward and be deposited on their knees, as he watched with blue eyes sparkling. A firescreen served him as a place to hide from guests, whom he would startle with a burst of fiendish laughter.6
George Henschel remembered Brahms’s rooms as sunny and smelling of coffee.7 He kept the lid of his Streicher piano closed and draped to mute his playing, and used the top to display a changing collection of medals, awards, and keepsakes. The artworks on the wall were his own, a pantheon of household gods: a great white bust of Beethoven over the piano (he had owned it since Hamburg), Bach’s portrait over the narrow bed, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna over the leather couch, near it a portrait of the neglected composer Luigi Cherubini, with whom Brahms identified as a once-famous craftsman whom the world was determined to forget. In the picture Cherubini was being blessed by the Muse of Lyric Poetry. Brahms found the lady ridiculous, so he cut out a piece of cardboard to cover her up. Eventually there was a bronze bas-relief of Bismarck under the bust of Beethoven, with a laurel wreath circling it.
In the library one wall held his books, original editions, treasured manuscripts from Beethoven and Schubert to Wagner. The shelves looked casually arranged, but he knew every item’s place and on his vacations could order things sent him citing their precise location. Facing the bookshelves was a standing desk where he worked in winter, and the room held his trunk, kept packed for a quick getaway. Surprisingly, he was willing to lend out books and even manuscripts, and once while he was away he invited Richard Fellinger to go in and borrow anything he wanted.
Rarely did Brahms eat at home anymore, but now had lunch and dinner mostly at Zum roten Igel, whose name means the Red Hedgehog, in the Wildpretmarkt. He came to call the place his “prickly pet,” and himself another: once he invited Frau Brüll to join “the two pricklies.” For his money the Igel had the best cheap food in Vienna, and he prided himself on eating better for less than his companions. When Brahms came alone to the Igel he sat in the lavishly appointed main room, but behind a curtain, or in good weather out in the garden. With friends he retired to the dark rear Stube with its barrel ceiling, and a table that could seat six or so. If he preferred those plain accommodations beside working people, the management still reserved a barrel of first-rate Hungarian Tokay for him, and there is no record that he objected. As a meeting place of the