Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [35]
“As you can see, my dear Johannes,” the music master concludes to his apprentice Kreisler, “the story of our Chrysostomus is most educational.” The tales within tales, the young man dreaming the song of a murdered maiden from the notation of mosses on a stone, the dream figure of a woman who is also flower and fragrance and bird and light and music, is a parable of what to Kreisler, to Hoffmann, and to a great degree to Brahms and the Romantic century, music is, as it floods our senses and our spirits with visions fantastic and ungraspable. As the music master explains to his pupil Kreisler in the “Certificate”:
Our realm is not of this world … for where in nature can we find, as painters and sculptors do, the prototypes of our art?… But then, does not the spirit of music, even as the spirit of sound, pervade all nature too?… Music … is the universal language of nature, speaking to us in beautiful, mysterious sounds, and we wrestle in vain trying to confine these in symbols, those artificial notes no more than hints of what we have heard.
Having poetically intimated nature as the fount of music to Johannes reading in Winsen’s woods and fields, at the end Hoffmann the magician creates one of his most dizzying shifts of identity: “This cross will … serve as seal to this Certificate of Apprenticeship, and thus I sign my name—which is also yours: Johannes Kreisler.” Thus Kreisler, who is Hoffmann, confers his seal of mastery on himself. What could be more Hoffmannesque, more Kreisleresque, more Brahmsian, than this self-created circle of personas?
As a teenager contending with chaotic emotions, Johannes Brahms lived in Hoffmann’s hall of mirrors that seemed to spread in every direction and to whisper directly to him: “Johannes … your music has really moved the beloved’s heart,” says a character in Kreisleriana.20 So perhaps did Young Kreisler dream. In another story, Kreisler sits at the piano playing one chord after another, in turbulent modulations, rhapsodizing between: “They carry me to the land of eternal yearning, but as they take hold of me, pain awakens and attempts to tear out of my breast.”21 There music sings directly from a suffering heart. And indeed, in Kater Mürr Hoffmann encourages others to enter his hall of mirrors: “I will never be convinced that the bizarre name Kreisler was not smuggled in and substituted for a quite different family name.”22 That other, secret name, Johannes thought, could be his own.
In that labyrinth of identities lay a seductive retreat for Brahms in his teenage years, when his life was wrenched between the ideals of art and the degradation of brothels. Heaped on that came the necessity not only to master two crafts as pianist and composer, but the far more difficult and elusive drive to find his creative soul. These struggles already set him apart from business-obsessed Hamburg, and from most of its musicians as well. Under it all lay the torments of puberty and the anxiety of delayed or somehow incomplete development—Johannes’s voice had not significantly changed by twenty, and he tried then without success to grow a beard.23 No surprise that in his seething imagination the teenager needed to dream of other worlds, to find a more Romantic disguise than Johannes Brahms—son of a Bierfiedler, obscure music student, pianist in dives. Johannes escaped the Animierlokale, but in his mind and his sexual identity he never left them. As with the poetry on the whorehouse piano, he needed to create refuges in his mind. So he withdrew into a hall of mirrors where he could refract his identity.
The paradox is that