Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [37]
A few days later came a pleasant notice in the Hamburg paper Freischütz: “A very special impression was made by the performance of one of Thalberg’s fantasias by a little virtuoso called J. Brahms, who not only showed great facility, precision, clarity, power, and certainty, but occasioned general surprise and obtained unanimous applause by the intelligence of his interpretation.” In fact the notice was written anonymously by Eduard Marxsen, as a pat on the head for his pupil. The occasion brought no further comment. A week later, Johannes appeared in another concert, playing the fantasy again and a Thalberg duet with Frau Meyer-David, with a similar review and the same outcome.27
Hamburg “the Unmusical City” in fact had an increasingly active musical scene, even if not of the caliber of Leipzig and Berlin. Friedrich Wilhelm Gund conducted the Philharmonic and a Singakademie he had founded. There were concerts by the orchestral Musikalische Gesellschaft and choral Cäcilienverein. If these groups tended to the second-rate, one could still hear good chamber music and visiting artists of stature, among them Hector Berlioz (he conducted his mammoth Requiem in Hamburg), Liszt, Thalberg, and soprano Jenny Lind.28 In March 1848, Johannes, then fourteen, heard sixteen-year-old prodigy Josef Joachim play the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Philharmonic. Seven years later, Brahms would write Joachim that in his innocence “I reckoned the concerto to be your own.… I was certainly your most enraptured listener.”
Already a constant reader, Johannes was becoming a bibliophile and collector, haunter of second-hand bookshops in search of rarities. Prowling bookstalls that year, he found a 1743 treatise on figured bass. Bound in the back of it was another old tome on keyboard playing by Johann Mattheson, biographer and friend of Handel from their Hamburg days. Brahms not only collected old volumes and music and manuscripts, he also studied them as living texts. As he was someday to inform Richard Wagner: “I do not collect ‘curiosities.’ ”
In spring of 1848, around the time he turned fifteen, Brahms returned to “Uncle” and “Auntie” Giesemann and to conducting the men’s choir. (His second departure to Winsen marks the end of his formal schooling.) On this visit there were further evenings of piano duets with Amtsvogt Blume. Since Lieschen Giesemann had given up the piano, they had no more lessons, but she remained a music fancier. Lieschen and Johannes had one more memorable time together when Adolf Giesemann sent them to Hamburg to take in Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro. It was Johannes’s first experience with opera. “Lieschen, Lieschen,” he whispered when the whirling, whispering overture began, “Listen to the music! There never was anything like it!”
That summer, at the last meeting of the men’s choir, he recited a poem of farewell, and there were tears. One of the men picked up little Johannes and carried him around the room piggyback to the sound of singing and hurrahs. In his life Brahms would leave many situations with tears and ceremonies, and rarely returned to any of them. He always had somewhere else to go, something else to do than what anyone expected of him. But he would visit Winsen and the Giesemanns for the rest of his time in Hamburg.
DURING JOHANNES’S gemütlich sojourn in the country that summer, revolution simmered and boiled all over Europe. In February 1848, Marx and Engels published the Communist Manifesto and a popular revolt overthrew King Louis Philippe in Paris. Beginning in March the French uprising touched off a wave of revolution. All the