How can anyone relate to someone who looks like this?
This is a man hiding behind his beard in the later, more successful years of his life when he could afford Cuban cigars.
But this is what he looked like as a young man.
He was short with a high-pitched voice, saw his hairline recede early in life, chain-smoked cigarettes once out of his teens, and had a difficult personality with a dangerous wit.
His father played a variety of instruments, but settled on string bass. Cafes, restaurants and theaters all had need of musicians in the years before Muzak, and Daddy Brahms was known around Hamburg as a “beer fiddler”.
I got a chance to see this in action recently at the Spoleto Music Festival in Charleston. A small group of waltzes by Lanner, the inventor of the waltz, was programmed with an ensemble of three violins and string bass. The bass player kept the pulse with one note per bar. Sometimes a bass player of that era could skip a bar and grab his stein for a gulp. It wasn’t all that much of a living.
Born in 1833 in Hamburg, Johannes was a blond, blue-eyed boy with a load of musical talent, and Daddy had him learn a whole slew of instruments. But Jo (pronounced in German as “Yo”) settled on the piano, for which he had a serious gift. At his first recital at age 10, he played the Beethoven Quintet for Piano and Winds, and an impresario tried to talk the family into taking him to America to turn him into the next Mozart. Young Jo’s teacher put a stop to that foolishness and turned him over to his own teacher, who figured out that the boy had a gift for piano but had real fire in his belly for composing. He put Jo on a diet of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.
But you have to live, and by the age of 13, Jo was playing piano in the waterfront dives of Hamburg where the drinking, dancing – and other goings on – were continuous. Jo was as fair and pretty as a girl, and it was the wrong place for an impressionable kid, especially when the girls poured beer down his throat, passed him around, and fondled his gestüffenpoken. He probably got it worse from the sailors. Hamburg was a tough town, and if you couldn’t handle yourself, you were likely to get the scheiss beaten out of you. Seeing people having sex in public scarred him for the rest of his life, gave him a bad view of human sexuality and women, and gave him a taste for hookers in his later years. He was never to marry and had a serious Madonna Complex for any woman he loved. Freud would have paid handsomely to have him as a patient. Yet in his later years, Brahms spoke of that experience with some degree of pride. “I would not on any account have missed this period of hardship in my life, for I am convinced that it did me good.” But at the age of 14, Jo Brahms was turning into an alcoholic.
Daddy rescued him by sending to live in the country for the summer with an amateur musician, and it turned Jo’s life around. He was up at 5 AM for a skinny dip in the river, practiced the piano, and then walked out into the countryside with the daughter of the family, immersing himself in German Romantic poetry. He got the opportunity to conduct the local choral society and write a few pieces for them which he later destroyed. Brahms was a ruthless self-critic and knew which of his pieces were good and which didn’t live up to his standards. Thus his juvenile songs went into the fireplace.
Fifteen and sixteen year old Jo performed in a series of recitals, in one of which he handled Beethoven’s difficult Waldstein Sonata. In his later teens, he was teaching piano to the student overflow from his two piano teachers and playing piano in theaters and restaurants. He was not an easy person to get along with and had a prickly personality prone to mercurial blowups. In the ongoing conflict between German classicism and the “new music” of Berlioz, Liszt and Wagner, Brahms sided with classicism.
At the age of 18, Jo Brahms finally wrote a short piece that he felt was worth saving from the fireplace, and it has stood the test of time. It is demonic, and from the first bars there is no doubt that this is a young man who has settled on his composing style. He has found a voice.
A scherzo is traditionally in 3/4, although that’s not a hard and fast rule. The format for this piece is AAB-CCD-AB-EF-AB. The CCD and EF sections are labeled “trios” for reasons going back to the Baroque era that have nothing to do with the number three. Music can be strange sometimes.