Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [87]
Johannes could not help prodding and provoking even those he loved. He was egoism incarnate but also shy, generous but rarely capable of expressing it. Joachim’s resentment was a theme to be replayed many times, with variations, by friends of Brahms. Yet there was also the blazing talent and the wisdom in managing it. Joachim continued to Gisela:
The way in which he wards off all the morbid emotions and imaginary troubles of others is really delightful. He is absolutely sound in that, just as his complete indifference to the means of existence is beautiful, indeed magnificent. He will not make the smallest sacrifice of his intellectual inclinations—he will not play in public because of his contempt for the public, and because it irks him—although he plays divinely. I have never heard piano playing (except perhaps Liszt’s) which gave me so much satisfaction—so light and clear, so cold and indifferent to passion. His compositions, too.… I have never come across a talent like his before. He is miles ahead of me.8
It is surprising in the Romantic century to find a celebrated soloist praising the “cold and indifferent.” But Joachim, like Clara Schumann, pursued an ideal contrary to that emotionally extravagant age. Their style was restrained, pure, antivirtuosic, expressing the music rather than the performer. Both of them admired the same qualities in Johannes’s playing. His abiding problem was that when he went before the public his technique sometimes failed to gain the upper hand over his nerves.
Back home in Hamburg, in a cramped two-room flat on Lilienstrasse with his parents and sister and brother and a steady traffic of family friends, Brahms felt that things had changed and not changed. Now his parents seemed to regard him with awe, as some incomprehensible creature they had engendered by some unaccountable decree of the gods. At the same time there was the old discord, Johann Jakob bustling out to work or carouse with friends, fleeing the house and its women. By then the senior Brahms had made himself one of the better bass players in town, a regular in theater orchestra pits. He still donned his green uniform, however, to play bugle in the Hamburg Bürgerwehr band.
Brahms wrote Clara from Lilienstrasse, “I cannot understand the life I used to lead.” Still, he had another happy reunion with his teacher Eduard Marxsen, for whom he played Clara’s variations and his own recent work. Johannes wrote her that Marxsen “is extremely pleased with the improvement in my playing. That too I have to thank you for.… Indeed, if anything passably good is in me, or ever likely to come out of me, have I not to thank you two and your great love?”9 (Early in their romance, Robert Schumann had written Clara in nearly the same terms: “I must thank you for all the music I write.”)
At home, Brahms did not fall back into his old life. Never again in Hamburg would he be so cloistered as in his teens. The year before, he had left his hometown nearly unknown; now he returned as Schumann’s Messiah-designate. Despite the inevitable jealousy and spite around town, Brahms was welcomed by musicians who had not been so warm before. They included Theodor Avé-Lallemant, a bearded, garrulous old music teacher who sat on the Philharmonic committee and had a great deal of say over what transpired musically in town. Avé may have been put off by Brahms’s imperious personality, but he still admired Schumann’s young genius, and they shared a fancy for old music and books. The two would have a long acquaintance, strained at times as was axiomatic with