The Spoken Text CD 1 1 a Door Creaks; Wind, Thunder, and Woman's
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The Spoken Text CD 1 1 A door creaks; wind, thunder, and woman’s scream. Well that, as you may have guessed – if with a certain puzzlement – is the beginning of a ghost story; and this – though you mightn’t guess it – is the ghost. Beethoven: Sonata in B flat, Op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’ (opening) There, with a characteristic shake of his spectral fist, speaks the spirit of Beethoven – a spirit whose unique combination of intellectual toughness and emotional depth has loured, sometimes menacingly but always inspiringly, over composers as diverse as Wagner, Berlioz, Tippett, Dvořák (who once in his youth rushed out after a performance of the Beethoven Ninth and proclaimed ‘I must write music like that!’), and Brahms, who knew from the beginning that that privilege was Beethoven's alone. Or perhaps not quite from the beginning, because at the beginning he was haunted. So let's renew our acquaintance with the ghost. Beethoven: Sonata in B flat, Op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’ (opening) And now let's get on with the haunting. Let us turn to Brahms's Opus 1: Piano Sonata No. 1 in C, Op. 1(opening) The opening bars of Brahms's First Piano Sonata. When that was first published, its resemblance to the opening of Beethoven's so- called 'Hammerklavier' Sonata was widely remarked. And wherever he went, whatever he wrote, the name and image of Beethoven haunted him, sometimes almost to the point of obsession. In fact, his coming to terms with Beethoven's ghost is one of the great dramas – perhaps the central drama – of Brahms’s creative life. It was a life that began on the 7 th of May 1833, in a small slum dwelling in the docklands of Hamburg, one of the great port cities of Germany, then much better known for its commerce than its culture. At one level, Brahms’s life is a classic tale of rags-to- riches, except that he never had any interest in riches and gave away, anonymously for the most part, vast quantities of the money that poured into his coffers, as he reaped the benefits of his reputation as the greatest composer of his time. Nor, though his relative poverty in childhood was genuine, was he ever remotely in rags. He was, however, the product of one of the most unlikely marriages in musical history. His father, Johann Jakob Brahms, was the son of an innkeeper and grandson of a wheelwright. There was nothing much in the way of culture in the family, and when Jakob began to develop a passion for music his parents did everything to discourage it. With a stubbornness which he later passed on to his son, he ran away from home three times in search of tuition before his father finally relented and had him apprenticed to the local town musician. He now began training in earnest and became fairly adept at all of the stringed instruments as well as the flute, the French horn, and the bugle. At the end of his apprenticeship, with a double-bass strapped on his back, he set off on foot to seek his fortune in the city of Hamburg. He wasn’t very talented, he had hardly a bean to his name, and the only work he could find in the big city was playing in various dockside dives, near which he lived in a sequence of ramshackle dwellings, before working his way through the ranks to become a horn player in the Hamburg militia. He wasn’t brilliant, but he had a lot of charm, and to say that he was impulsive would be, at the very least, discreet. Within a very short time of his arrival he found himself a bride. Many years later, in a letter to their by then very famous son, she told him a little about his origins and the circumstances preceding his birth. CHRISTIANE BRAHMS: Your Auntie and I grew up very simply. I was thirteen when I started going out to sew. In the evenings I came home at six o’clock, then I liked to give mother a hand, and sometimes I sewed until midnight. Six years I went on like that. Then I worked for ten years with very respectable employers as a general servant. Then again I 2 went out sewing... Then Auntie married, and I lived with her, helping out in the family shop, and earning what I could by sewing. Your father took a room with us, and so we got acquainted. When he said he wanted me to become his wife, after only being with us for a week, I could hardly believe it, because our ages were so different. They certainly were. He was twenty-four, she was forty-one – seventeen years his senior. Frail and physically handicapped (one leg was longer than the other, resulting in a marked limp), Johanna Christiane Brahms was almost spectacularly plain and had long since resigned herself to spinsterhood when the mercurial Johann Jakob proposed to her. She was wasn’t well educated, but she was conspicuously intelligent and extraordinarily charitable. In the 120 letters she wrote to Johannes there’s scarcely a complaint to be found, about anyone or anything, from beginning to end. She loved all three of her children, but from the start it was clearly Johannes who was the light of her life. Despite the poverty of their circumstances, the children grew up in a generally happy household – though cracks in their parents’ marriage became plain to see well before Johannes left home, plain enough to colour his outlook on marriage for life. As a child, Brahms saw his mother as the perfect woman: loving, protective, encouraging, uncomplaining – and compounded of natural common sense. The order, peace, and spirit of thanksgiving in the Brahms household came almost entirely from Christiane. And in spite of her very limited education, it was she alone who seemed to have an intuitive understanding of Johannes’s inner world. As a result, it was with her that he spent most of his free time. In the whole of his life, his love for her never wavered. By the time Johannes was born, the couple were living in a cramped apartment in one of Hamburg’s most notorious districts, the so-called Lane Quarter, known to the locals as ‘Adulterer’s Walk’. After Brahms’s death, Florence May, a former pupil and his first English biographer, visited his birthplace and left us a description which is borne out by the surviving photographs. FLORENCE MAY: The house and its surroundings testify only to the commonplace reality of a bare and repulsive poverty... Each of its habitations is planned exactly as every other, excepting that those near the top are contracted by the sloping roof. Jakob 3 and Christiane lived in the first-floor dwelling to the left on facing the house. On entering it, it is difficult to repress a shiver of bewilderment and dismay. The staircase door opens on to a diminutive space, half kitchen, half lobby, where some cooking may be done and a child’s bed made up, and which has a second door leading to the living-room. This communicates with the sleeping-closet, which has its own window, but is so tiny it can scarcely be called a room. There is nothing else, neither corner nor cupboard. Where Jakob kept his instruments and how he managed to practise are mysteries which the ordinary mind cannot satisfactorily penetrate. 2 It would be hard to conceive of a greater contrast in Brahms’s experience of the opposite sex than that between his mother, with her continuous emphasis on the beautiful and the good, and the painted whores of the Hamburg docklands who introduced him to the world of sex, lust, and prostitution. It was here, in the beer halls, dancing parlours, and so-called ‘stimulation saloons’ which flourished in and around ‘Adulterer’s Walk’, that the young Brahms first plied his own trade for money, playing popular music on the piano in taverns which doubled as brothels. It left scars which never entirely healed. On the rare occasions when he spoke of this chapter in his life at all, it was with undisguised bitterness: BRAHMS: I was surrounded by the basest kind of public women – they called them the ‘singing girls’. And these half-naked whores, to fan the appetites of the men still further, would sit me on their laps between dances, and kiss and caress and excite me. This was my first impression of the love of women. Not quite true, of course – he seems for just a moment to have forgotten his mother. But the point holds. In these ‘saloons’, on the threshold of puberty, and beyond, Brahms regularly saw sex, avarice, and lust at their most degraded. But, typically, he distracted himself by reading while he played – mostly volumes of poetry by the leading Romantic poets, and the fantastic novels and stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, which he bought from the second- hand bookstalls lining the canal. He had a hunger for knowledge and literature which 4 stayed with him to the end of his life, and despite his unprivileged circumstances he had a very reasonable general education and two music teachers who were amongst the best in the business. By the time he was fourteen, he was composing in earnest and had his first experience of conducting a choir in music of his own; and at fifteen he made his solo debut as a pianist, playing, among other things, a work of his own, and Beethoven’s great ‘Waldstein’ Sonata – a handful even for seasoned pianists.