Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [336]
After his lunch of goulash or roast beef or pork with a glass or two of beer or a Viertel—quarter liter—of wine, Brahms might walk to the Café Heinrichshof across from the Opera, to have his Mokka and read the newspapers on sticks, then snooze for a while as tourists gawked at the famous beard in the window, motionless as a statue.8 On sunny summer days he frequented the outdoor casino under towering trees in the Stadtpark. After evenings out he might stop by the Igel late for one more Mokka, which never seemed to trouble his sleep.
FOR INTIMATE FEMALE COMPANIONSHIP Brahms still relied on brothels. His acquaintances, the male ones at least, knew about his regular visits to the places. The record of these escapades stops at the door of the establishments; one did not speak in public of such things, and in those days madames had more class than to write memoirs of their famous customers. For variety there was the occasional compliant serving girl. The names of Brahms’s favorites appear jotted here and there on his manuscripts.9 Probably friends accompanied him to the whorehouses; it was what bachelors and some married men did in Vienna as in many cities. Some Viennese men acquired a lower-class “sweet girl” as mistress, but that was not Brahms’s style. Since his childhood in the dives, sexuality had been for him a matter of secret transactions with the demimonde—efficient, predictable, and without obligations except for the fee.
With his hired companions Brahms seems to have been a thoughtful customer, with the same democratic consideration for working people that he showed to other professions. Once he recommended a prostitute to an acquaintance; when the man followed the suggestion he found that she could not praise the kindness of the Herr Doktor enough. He treated her like a daughter, she said. Streetwalkers affectionately called to him on the street and sought him out when they were short of cash; generally he reached cheerfully into his pocket. One evening when Brahms was out with Frau Brüll a passing streetwalker hailed him. He flushed bright red and muttered sheepishly to his companion: “I want you to know that I have never made a married woman or a Fräulein unhappy.”10
It was in this decade that Brahms got drunk at a party and branded all women with a word so shocking that it broke up the occasion and nobody would repeat it. Walking it off in the Prater with singer Max Friedländer, Brahms poured over that friend his scorching recollection of the “singing girls” of the Hamburg Animierlokale. It was as if he were living it over again. “And you,” he snarled to Friedländer in a frightening burst of fury, “you who have been reared in cotton wool; you who have been protected from everything coarse—you tell me I should have the same respect, the same exalted homage for women that you have! You expect that of a man cursed with a childhood like mine!” “In that period he wrote another acquaintance, “People always call me rough and tactless. Where should I have learned tact? In my youth in order not to starve I was forced to play in saloons frequented by sailors, and indeed one learns nothing good there.”12 As far as history knows he told the truth to Frau Brüll: he kept his hands off respectable women, and he took pride in that.
The sights and smells and rough laughter of the places on the Hamburg docks never left him, nor the thumping of feet on creaking boards in time to the tunes he had played there night after night. Once late on a cold winter night in Vienna, critic Max Graf, during his student days, was dining with companions in a cheap café when a group of elegant party-goers swept in on a gust of snow and sat down to have a beer. Graf noticed Brahms in the middle of the group. Directly the door flew open again and a well-known streetwalker and two gigolos straggled in, all of them drunk. In short order the lady was shouting for the “Professor” to give them some music, they wanted to dance.