The young Johannes Brahms.
I discovered the piano music of Brahms when I was very young. Classical music had been the means for my mother to transcend her own dreary, motherless childhood, and she had an extensive record collection to prove it. My grandmother, Josephine Nordstrand, was a noted Communist at the height of the Red Scare, and my mother didn’t know where Josephine was for many years (underground in Detroit, according to her FBI file). My own mother was a single teen mom when such an identity was vanishingly rare, as well as a high school dropout and factory worker.
But my mother had a profound connection to the great music of the past. I’m not sure entirely how or why. She played piano, but never became proficient. While her parents weren’t particularly musical, her extended family was. Her sister Miriam was an aspiring opera singer who abandoned her career ambitions when she married young. Two cousins — sisters — were also opera singers, and apparently performed together in Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel as the title characters.
(It’s hard for me to imagine the joy that the sisters must have felt singing this music together. Hansel and Gretel should not be dismissed as a work for children; the music is extraordinary, and Humperdinck’s fairy tale operas to me are the apotheosis of the Romantic program, but that’s a topic for another post.)
Another cousin, Marcus Raskin (whose son is Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin), was a child prodigy pianist. He went to Juilliard at sixteen, but crippling stage fright convinced him to lay aside his musical ambitions for the law. Marcus, the son of a plumber — one of my great-grandfather Abraham’s six brothers who fled Russia together for Brownsville, Brooklyn — seems to have been in that cohort of astonishing American Jewish polymaths born to immigrants in the first half of the twentieth century. While himself still a student at the University of Chicago, Marcus taught piano to the young Philip Glass, and later launched a brilliant career as a leftist gadfly and public intellectual.
Marcus Raskin at the piano, somewhat past his child prodigy days.
I don’t have any good explanation for the centrality of classical music to the modern Jewish experience, but it provided a vehicle for emotional connection and release as well as social advancement. Perhaps Alfred Kazin, another son of Brownsville, is on to something in his breathtaking memoir, A Walker in the City. As a boy, Kazin was often asked to play his violin at family gatherings, and recalls:
You could melt their hearts with it; the effect of the violin on almost everyone I knew was uncanny. I could watch them softening, easing, already on the brink of tears — yet with their hands at rest in their laps, they stared straight ahead at the wall, breathing hard, an unforeseen smile of rapture on their mouths. Any slow movement [from a violin sonata or concerto]. . . seemed to come to them as a reminiscence of a reminiscence.
And he concludes:
It seemed to have something to do with our being Jews. The depth of Jewish memory the violin could throw open . . . had no limit. . . every plaintive melody even in Beethoven or Mozart was “Jewish” . . . all slow movements fell into a single chant of der heym [the homeland — “Russia” — to which the immigrants could not return] and of the great Kol Nidre [the opening prayer of Yom Kippur] sung in the first evening hours of the Day of Atonement.
Kol Nidre sung by the great operatic tenor Jan Peerce. If I recall correctly, this LP was in my mother’s collection.
My mother’s respite from the long days of factory work was her season subscription to the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. No one would go with her — her co-workers preferred rock and roll — so she went alone. She was deathly afraid of heights and had to drag herself hand over hand up the railing to the cheapest section in the balcony, the only seat she could afford. But once the orchestra struck up, it was abundantly worth it.
I seem to have inherited this connection to music. My oldest brother (also a musician) says I was an unusual child: after coming home from school, I would rifle through my mother’s LPs, place the stereo speakers shoulder width apart on the floor, put a pillow between them, and lie there for hours, listening mostly to Brahms.
Like my mother, I never became a proficient pianist. I was a singer. My undergraduate piano professor, Gena Raps, believed that if I applied my innate musicality to a diligent study of technique, I could win the college’s concerto competition, but I didn’t even bother entering; I knew I had neither the chops nor the single-minded dedication that might have inspired me to attain them. Professor Raps, who was a connoisseur of the kind of musical sensitivity that can’t be taught, wrote on an evaluation: “Julia spends too much emotion away from the keyboard.”
I recently discovered that Gena Raps had made a recording of some of Brahms’s late piano works, and I listened to it eagerly. She has always had a beautiful way of playing into the piano, a kind of quiet emotional austerity that reveals a deep understanding of the composer’s intentions, and this understanding is in full force in her late Brahms recording. I listened with interest to one of my favorite pieces from my lying-between-the-speakers days, the Intermezzo op. 117 no. 1 in E-flat Major.
Brahms, who was known as the champion of musical conservatism and the nineteenth century’s greatest apologist for “absolute music” — i.e., music that has no inherent extra-musical narrative, but is simply “about” music itself — inscribed in the score an excerpt from a Scottish ballad, “Lady Bothwell’s Lament,” translated into German by Herder:
Schlaf sanft mein Kind, schlaf sanft und schön!
Mich dauert’s sehr, dich weinen sehn.
Baloo, my babe, lie still and sleep;
It grieves me sore to see thee weep.
Brahms had no children. He called the Op. 117 Intermezzi “cradle-songs for my sorrows.” And the Intermezzo no. 1 is a gently-rocking quasi-lullaby in 6/8, which, after starting with a simple, chorale-like tune of extreme tenderness, disintegrates into fragments. The tune is lost, the melody becomes unsingable, and the chords into which it’s broken down search gropingly for a resolution. When it finally comes, Brahms adds a particular poignancy with the repetition, bell-like, of high E-flat as a descant. The cradle-song’s gentleness is now imbued with resignation, with the sense of what Alfred Kazin called the “reminiscence of a reminiscence.” Gena Raps plays it with a refreshing briskness and lack of sentimentality, and a simple directness that, to me, is infinitely more moving than a more lushly Romantic and overtly emotional rendering would be.
6/8 is not just the rhythm of the cradle. It is also the rhythm of the waves, the sea, perhaps even of the womb. I wonder what it’s like to play this piece as a mother, and not as the pianists I grew up hearing, like Glenn Gould, Wilhelm Kempff, did; perhaps if I had done as Gena suggested and worked harder on my piano technique, I would know. In any case, her performance of Op. 117 no. 1 radiates a kind of matter-of-factness and acceptance of loss that all mothers will, at one time or another, experience.
Perhaps even Brahms himself could not write absolute music. This brief Intermezzo — even the title suggests that it’s merely a temporary resting place on the way to somewhere else — is one of his many pieces written in triple meter, reminiscent of the flow of waves; he may be invoking the rhythms of the North Sea, on whose shores, in the rough waterfront town of Hamburg, he was born in abject poverty. Brahms left school at the age of 13 to help his family make ends meet by playing piano in what the great music theorist and pianist Charles Rosen describes as “the bawdy houses by the waterfront, where he entertained the rough element with gypsy songs, quadrilles, and sailor's ballads.”
The Rosen quote is from his savage review in The New York Review of Books of the most comprehensive Brahms biography to date, published in 1997 by composer Jan Swafford. Rosen elaborates:
Swafford places great stress on this experience (which lasted less than a year), arguing that it accounted for "shadows" on Brahms's consciousness and his complicated relations with women. He writes . . . “As with the poetry [books that the young Brahms propped up on the music desk of the whorehouse piano to relieve his boredom as he played all night, Brahms] needed to create refuges in his mind. So he withdrew into a hall of mirrors where he could refract his identity.” Swafford also dwells — obsessively, lasciviously — on Brahms's looks, his "sheer attractiveness." Over and over, he describes him as “a slight, girlish boy .. . . fair and pretty as a girl,” with “maidenly features . . . forget-me-not eyes,” and “long blond hair” framing a face that was “girlishly pretty — virginal and innocent.” He suggests, with no basis whatever, that men in the taverns may have taken liberties with him.
Swafford took issue with Rosen’s review, and The New York Review of Books devoted a subsequent Letters section to the two men’s spat. Swafford defended himself:
To the Editors:
Since I’m of the generation of musicians who were struck by the revelation of Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style and by the illuminating ideas of his books since that one, I’m sorry to have had to dodge some potshots from him in regard to my book Johannes Brahms: A Biography [NYR, October 22, 1998].
. . . In taking me to task for holding to the old story that the teenaged Brahms played in waterfront bar/brothels, Mr. Rosen is following mainstream academic opinion. . . . [However, what Rosen calls] the “myth” of the bars originated . . . with Brahms himself. He related the story all through his life to any number of people, telling friends that it wrecked his relations with women, telling Clara Schumann (as her daughter recalls it) that “he saw things and received impressions that left a deep shadow on his mind” . . . Brahms told the truth about the bars, as he generally did about everything else.
In my book I take Brahms at his word: he played in sleazy waterfront bars as a teenager, was sexually abused by prostitutes there, and the experience traumatized him. It was because of the depth of trauma he spoke of that I added a speculation, contained in the passage Mr. Rosen cited: perhaps Brahms was abused by sailors as well. Mr. Rosen and another critic have tacitly accused me of adding that detail for sensational effect. (Others have accused me of timidity in regard to Brahms’s sex life, so I break even.)
I thought a long time about that sentence concerning the sailors, and left it there for two reasons. First, there is the trauma Brahms spoke of, the “deep shadow on his mind.” This heartfelt statement is hard to understand if he were abused only by prostitutes, because Brahms frequented brothels from his teens on. Why would the ordinary activities of the places remain so terrible in his memory? (Brahms was, in fact, tough as nails.) Second, the bars were frequented by sailors fresh off the sea. What was to stop the worst of them from abusing a beautiful boy who was entirely at their mercy?
To which Charles Rosen replied:
I will be very interested if Professor Swafford’s forthcoming article presents real evidence that little Brahms was molested by prostitutes. Even if the challenged opinion that the cafés he played in as a child were brothels is accepted, the rest is speculation. The secondhand evidence is that he said he “saw things and received impressions.” Any port city like Hamburg may present scenes that might shock a child. Swafford leaps from this to an assertion that what Brahms saw was things being done to him, the impressions received were prostitutes’ hands on his young private parts. This is how he takes Brahms at his word. . . .We need a further speculative leap: How about sexual abuse by sailors?
Clara Schumann; Johannes Brahms
We’ll never know the truth, and I’m not convinced that it’s important. Brahms never married, and was at one time deeply in love with Clara Schumann, the wife of his mentor Robert, a love that seems to have been reciprocated, though when Robert died in 1849 and Brahms and Clara were free to marry, they did not. They remained lifelong friends and confidantes and agreed to burn most of their correspondence, so, far more than whether the young Brahms was molested by sailors, scholars have wondered about the depth and extent of the Brahms-Clara Schumann relationship.
But the poet Lisel Mueller, also a daughter of Hamburg, perhaps explains it — and the Intermezzi — best:
ROMANTICS
Johannes Brahms and
Clara Schumann
The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth-century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.
"leaving us nothing to overhear." Oh that line pierces to the heart! I love it.
What a beautiful essay, Julia. Thank you so much.
Julia,
What a wonderful and beautifully written tribute to the memory of your mother, her motherless childhood, the powerful connection between Jewish history, culture and sensibilities to Music, the powerful Maternal role it played in your upbringing and finally to Brahms himself.
It was very moving.
Thank you so much for sharing.
Mary Cleary Lewis