Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [34]
[Music] is the most romantic of all the arts—one might also say, the only genuinely romantic one—for its sole subject is the infinite … music discloses to man an unknown realm … a world in which he leaves behind him all definite feelings to surrender himself to an inexpressible longing.
Inexpressible longing, Johannes read, sitting beneath a tree in a Winsen glade, or beside the harbor in Hamburg. And this:
Every passion—love, hatred, anger, despair and so forth … is clothed by music with the purple luster of romanticism, and even what we have undergone in life guides us out of life into the realm of the infinite.
Life, the teenaged Brahms read there, one’s own life, all human life and emotion, can be encompassed in music that intimates a world apart and better. Music evokes an existence beyond this one, toward which the soul inexpressibly yearns. Music is the voice of the inexpressible. So, in the heart of his essay, Hoffmann writes,
Beethoven’s music sets in motion the mechanism of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and wakens just that infinite longing which is the essence of Romanticism.16
That infinite longing, Johannes read, which is the essence of Romanticism.
Hoffmann took these dazzling and cryptic metaphors further. In the Beethoven essay, with a characteristic turn of mirrors, the true author vanishes. It turns out that the one supposedly writing all this is not Hoffmann at all, but his alter ego: “The gifted lady who indeed honored me, Kapellmeister Kreisler, by today playing the first trio.…” Hoffmann placed the article in a series of writings and stories called Kreisleriana, circling around the fictional half-mad Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler. His name is taken from Kreis, “circle,” and thus signifies “Circler.”
For the teenaged Johannes Brahms, the mirroring of the name Johannes, the fact that Hoffmann/Kreisler was a composer like himself17—these were reasons the dreamy young artist refracted his identity between mirrors he called Brahms and Young Kreisler, and why Kreisler became his Doppelgänger, shared with Hoffmann: an alter ego of an alter ego.
One of the most enigmatic stories in the Kreisleriana cycle is called “Johannes Kreisler’s Certificate of Apprenticeship.” For the boy Johannes Brahms, this story begins as if directly addressed to him, and to his yearnings: “Now that you, my dear Johannes, really want to escape from your apprenticeship and seek your own fortunes in the wide world, it is only fair that I, your master, should stuff a certificate into your pouch so that you have a passport to show to all musical guilds.” It had been with just such a Certificate of Apprenticeship that Johann Jakob Brahms had come to Hamburg. To his son, perhaps, Hoffmann’s story amounted to a similar but secret and mystical credential, no less personal to him: “Ah, my dear Johannes, who knows you better than I do, who has so deeply looked into you, nay, has looked out from inside you?”
In Hoffmann’s “Apprenticeship,” the music master/narrator tells a story of a “quiet, friendly youth, whom we call Chrysostomus.” (A clue there: in Hoffmann’s unfinished novel Kater Mürr, Kapellmeister Kreisler is born on St. John Chrysostom’s Day.18) This youth tells a story-within-the-story, actually related to him by his father (another level of story), about a stranger who appears at a castle and bewitches the nobleman’s daughter with fables and songs—something like Count Peter in the Magelone, Brahms would have noted. But the tale takes a malignant turn. After learning the art of music from the mysterious stranger, the maiden elopes with him; when her father rides out to search for her, he finds his daughter murdered in the forest, her body lying beneath a stone.
Upon hearing the tale, Chrysostomus is drawn with strange fascination to the fatal stone. After his father teaches him music, the youth conceives an uncanny project: to re-create the songs of the murdered girl, hinted