Brahms and the Cello
A boy sits in a small room of a small house in Hamburg practising the cello, the distracting sounds of family life ever-present around him. He is ten years old, and already an accomplished pianist. In fact, he has recently played the piano in a concert in which all the other performers were adults, colleagues of his father. The boy played in Beethoven's Quintet for Piano and Winds Op. 16, and in one of the piano quartets of Mozart. He also played a solo etude by the fashionable and flashy Henri Herz. The concert was arranged to raise money for the education of this remarkably talented child.
The father is a professional musician with good contacts in his city. He plays many instruments: flute, violin, viola, flugelhorn, and double bass. Where he grew up, in the flat farmlands of Holstein to the north of Hamburg, becoming a musician meant apprenticing to a qualified musician and learning to play a whole range of instruments. The father completed his service, and is now the proud possessor of a signed certificate of apprenticeship. In his understanding of the word, therefore, a musician is a man who can provide music for any occasion, as called for. That is why his little boy is now learning to play the cello. Although at age seven the child succeeded in convincing the reluctant father to let him have piano lessons, he has not succeeded in convincing him that playing the piano will be sufficient to put bread on his table in the future: he must learn other instruments. His brother will be taught to play the violin and the flute. For him, it will be the cello, and the horn.
The little boy's name is Johannes Brahms. He will study the cello for a few years – I'm guessing three – but he won't have to continue for too long because his cello teacher is going to run off with his cello and that will be the end of the lessons.
This story is neither invention nor poetic license. We have the facts on the best possible authority: a long letter from Brahms’s mother to him written in the week before she died, and Brahms’s own remarks both to Julius Klengel and to a friend, the Viennese musician/journalist Richard Heuberger. Heuberger jotted down his conversations with Brahms in his diary, planning perhaps to publish them one day. The letter from Brahms’s mother was not published until 1985, and is only recently translated into English in my Johannes Brahms, Life and Letters. Klengel’s memoirs resulted from a visit by Brahms in Leipzig, in the course of which Brahms told Klengel he had studied the cello and advanced so far as to play the Romberg concertos. Klengels’s little memoir is buried in the fourth volume of the massive biography of Brahms by Max Kalbeck (Johannes Brahms, 4 volumes, four editions, Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft 1908-1921). It exists only in German and has been generally ignored. Heuberger’s memoirs were not published until 1971 - Brahms was livid when he learned that Heuberger had kept notes, and made him promise not to publish - and are also only in German. One cannot therefore be too surprised that for most people, learning that Brahms played the cello is still a surprise.