Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [39]
BY AGE SIXTEEN, Johannes was earning his keep mainly by giving cut-rate piano lessons to talentless students—probably the overflow from Cossel and Marxsen—and playing incidental music in various venues. Over the years these included Sundays at the Bergedorf inn Zur Schönen Aussicht (for three marks and free food) and manning piano and harmonium behind the scenes of plays at the Thalia Theater. Here and there jobs turned up accompanying virtuosos who were passing through town. Probably he arranged and composed little pieces for his father’s sextet at the Alster Pavilion. It was the way any number of musicians lived, in Hamburg and everywhere else. His piano career appeared to be settling into the position of workaday accompanist, something Brahms was suited for technically but not temperamentally. He was composing more serious pieces now, and would say that some of his best lieder melodies came to him as he polished his boots at dawn for another day’s work.
Johannes often practiced at the firm of Baumgarten and Heinz, and there in 1849 he again ran into Luise Japha. With this older student he formed one of the few close friendships of those years—a strained friendship, like all of them. Despite his boyish high spirits, Johannes lived too much in his own thoughts and labors to adapt to the demands of friendship. Earlier he had spent much time in Bergedorf playing duets with a young admirer named Christian Miller. This pianist recalled that when they were together away from the piano Johannes usually ignored him, walking hat in hand humming to himself.
One night a friend of Luise Japha, impressed with his music, escorted Brahms home but could not get a single word out of him. Later Johannes explained to Luise, “One is not always inclined to talk … and then it is best to be silent. You understand that, don’t you?” She did not.32 Luise was not particularly keen on his “harsh, acid” personality. Tempered by a genuine compassion and need for companionship, Brahms’s social skills would eventually improve in some degree, but he remained maladroit and unpredictable even with close friends.
Luise, seven years older than Johannes, was herself exceptional as a pianist and song composer, and headed for a notable performing career. For all the harshness of Brahms’s manner, she found much remarkable about him. Once he brought her a counterpoint exercise Marxsen had assigned him and told her that doing it had given him a terrible headache, but “that’s always when it works best for me.” His students were stupid, he said, and the ones who appreciated him the least paid him the least. He did not, Luise recalled, talk to her about playing dances in bars, or how poor his parents were.
They got along, in the distant and sometimes abrasive way one got along with Brahms. They played duets together, talked technique, discussed books, critiqued each other’s music. Once they played through a long piano duet that Johannes finally admitted was his own. Luise praised it, but when he dismissed one of the themes as routine she agreed. Suddenly indignant, he barked, “Why didn’t you say so? Why did I have to ask you?”33 She could tell that Johannes had picked up his teacher’s deification of Bach and Beethoven, and was suspicious of newer music. Already a Schumann devotee, Luise showed Johannes an aria from Schumann’s oratorio Paradise and the Peri. He condemned it for beginning with a seventh chord, an unprepared dissonance forbidden in the theory books. (Presumably he forgot that Beethoven’s First Symphony begins likewise.)
His conservative reaction to Schumann says something about Marxsen’s training. Brahms’s subsequent development says more. In the first of his surviving pieces, songs and piano music written from