Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [390]
Leaning there, gathering his strength, with the Musikverein and all Vienna at his back, Brahms looked out across the plaza and said, “How beautiful the church is, just look! And right behind it used to stand the ‘House of the Golden Moonlight’ … of the Golden …” He faltered, losing his thought, then continued, “where Schubert used to have a drink and sing. Do you know anything in Germany like the Karlskirche with its two columns and green cupola?” Kalbeck spoke of Dresden: the Zwinger, the cathedral, the Japanese Palace.
“Ah, that’s all really beautiful,” Brahms said in wonder, “but it’s still not the Karlskirche!”
Leaning on the wall, looking out at the church, Brahms spoke of the Thirty Years War and the destruction it wrought on German culture. Yet eventually, for all its divisions of kingdoms and of spirit, that culture had created a dominion of imagination, filled with fairy tales and folk songs and sorcerers and Doppelgängers and magnificent music, all shaping a myth of another world more wondrous and eternal and perilous than this one—and named that world Romantic.
With Max Kalbeck watchfully alongside, Brahms began to shuffle forward, pausing every few steps to rest, and so made his way across the plaza, past the church, to Karlsgasse. At the corner his future biographer offered him his arm again. Brahms brushed it away. “I can make it up quite well by myself. You go right on now. I need to lie down. Well, ade.”
Kalbeck understood. Brahms was afraid that if his young protégé accompanied him up to his rooms he would sit and visit, and the ailing man was embarrassed by his exhaustion. Trembling, Brahms turned away down the street. Kalbeck stood beside the church and watched him disappear alone, through the dark doorway.
Notes
The endnotes are in minimal form, usually consisting of an author’s last name and the page(s) being cited from that author’s book or article. The reader should consult the bibliography for full authors’ names, titles, and publication data of the works. Where a given author has more than one work cited in the text, the endnotes include the (abbreviated) title. Many notes also contain textual discussion, and some are exclusively discussion.
CHAPTER ONE
1. Niemann 4.
2. May 50.
3. May 51, italics added (Brahms certainly meant it that way).
4. Kalbeck I, 4–5.
5. Dittrich 7.
6. Niemann 16.
7. Dittrich 7.
8. An old Hamburg musician told Schauffler (35) that Johann Jakob was known around town as “a blockhead … a natural butt for all the boys.” That is only the most blunt statement of the kind of thing everybody remembered about Johann Jakob.
9. Kalbeck IV, Appendix.
10. From Christiane Brahms’S recollections, quoted in Geiringer Brahms 5.
11. Stephenson 12.
12. Kalbeck and Geiringer (Brahms) have Johann Jakob marrying in his town militia uniform, but Stephenson (17) doubts that, since Johann Jakob apparently did not join the militia band until 1835.
13. May 53.
14. Geiringer Brahms 9.
15. Stephenson 12.
16. May 57. May visited the Specksgang house while it still stood. It vanished along with most of old Hamburg during the bombings of World War II.
17. Keys 3.
18. Stephenson 23.
19. Kalbeck I, 6.
20. Stephenson 18.
21. Niemann 5.
22. Stephenson 21.
23. Dietrich/Widmann 188.
24. Kalbeck I, 14.
25. Waissenberger 117.
26. Gal 25.
27. MacDonald 6.
28. Specht 16.
29. MacDonald 7.
30. Kalbeck I, 23.
31. Jenner 193–4.
32. Stephenson entry on Elise.
33. Stephenson 51.
34. Keys 4.
35. May 72.
36. Kalbeck I, 25.
37. Niemann 21.
38. Niemann 21.
39. Niemann 21.
40. Niemann 19–20.
41. Kalbeck I, 34.
42. See Geiringer Brahms 18. He makes the point that Marxsen knew Chopin’s work, was influenced by it, and could have shown (or played) his pupil some Chopin; but Geiringer mentions no other living composers. Brahms always claimed he knew nothing of Chopin until later, but his early E Minor Scherzo suggests otherwise.
43. Niemann 21.
44. E. Schumann 153. Gal notes (104)