Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

[Scion7]

no, the Brahms household was definitely not "middle-class":

[Florestan]

Leonard's book is 80 years old. Here's something much more recent (2014)

Brahms was born on May 7, 1833, in the crowded old quarter of Hamburg known as the Gängeviertel, the Neighborhood of Narrow Lanes. Eight months later his family moved. His formative years were spent in a small house at 29 Dammtorwall near the Alster Basin (Hamburg's inland lake), within walking distance of one of his father's major places of work. Eventually the Gängeviertel became a notorious slum – and since this was its condition when his important early biographers visited it, they all, without exception, came to the faulty conclusion that they were seeing the neighborhood where Johannes grew up. They were also unaware that the family had moved so soon after his birth. Everyone since has copied this point of view until, starting in 1983, a wave of modern scholarship unearthed a host of specific documents which are the foundation of the updated story you are reading here.

Brahms' mother was Christiana Johanna Brahms née Nissen (1789-1865), respectable but somewhat sickly and lame, descending from a family of ministers and schoolteachers whose station in life had been greatly diminished by the upheavals of the time. Her letters to her famous son display a generous nature and a fund of common sense, couched in untutored but expressive language. She had lived through some very lean years (Napoleon's brutal siege of Hamburg) and knew how to stretch her money, which was a lucky thing because life with Johann Jakob was not easy. Money was indeed always in short supply. To supplement his income, Brahms' father Johann Jakob had a variety of schemes: he bought lottery tickets, raised rabbits, then chickens, ducks, and doves in the back courtyard. It all cost money and it all failed. The family moved frequently – too frequently for Frau Brahms' wishes, and in her view Johann Jakob bought furniture and musical instruments the family neither needed nor could afford. Nevertheless, the Brahms family lived above, not below, the poverty line. We know how much his parents spent to educate their boys, and how much rent they paid for their apartment. Those two items alone add up to more than the annual wage for all but the most skilled workers of the day.

Both Johannes and his brother Fritz attended a good, up-to-date middle-class school, side by side the sons of physicians, lawyers and well-to-do landowners and business men, and both received their diplomas at age 14. They studied Latin, French, English, natural sciences, history, mathematics, and gymnastics, a sport Johannes practiced occasionally until he was about 30 – hence the muscular shoulders so many have described. There was food on the table, even special food for holidays. Their respectable working-class neighborhood was home to other lower-middle class people, including those who are today classed as professionals: among Brahms' neighbors were a number of musicians, including his first piano teacher.

We can dispose of the brothel myths, too. Brothels in Hamburg were legal and regulated by law. Music was not permitted in them. (Too much of an incitement?) Children between the ages of 10 to 18 were not allowed entry, under penalties to the brothel owners that included stiff fines and imprisonment. (Did I ever think I would be reading up on Hamburg's brothel laws?!) So the stories of the young Brahms being hauled out of bed at night for brothel gigs are simply absurd, even ignoring the fact that parents who were willing to spend precious cash on primary school education, at a time when schooling was not mandatory, were hardly likely to expose him to such sordidness.

https://www.local802afm.org/allegro/articles/the-working-musician/

[vers la flamme]

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I would like to see some evidence from the deniers beyond "how absurd, it's illegal" As if children from well off families never broke the law.

[Madiel]

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I would like to see some evidence from the deniers beyond "how absurd, it's illegal" As if children from well off families never broke the law.

The above is rather more than that. It's also that playing music in a brothel is not something he could have been doing.

It's one thing to say that people break laws. It's quite another to say that Brahms got his career started doing something on a regular basis when both he AND the something are incompatible with what his known about the situation at the time. Including that brothels were legal and wouldn't want to jeopardise their licence.

Frankly, the evidence you want is called Occam's Razor. The simpler explanation is that the story is false. The story being true is far more complex.

[Scion7]

Leonard's book is 80 years old.

That hardly matters - it is still one of the go-to books; that aside, many, many other bios all support the same thing.  The newer revisionist theories are just so much rubbish.

[Florestan]

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I would like to see some evidence from the deniers beyond "how absurd, it's illegal" As if children from well off families never broke the law.

The discussion it's not about whether some spoiled brat from a well-off family broke the law by visiting brothels. On the contrary, it's about whether the Brahmses were so poverty-stricken that they had to send little Johannes to play piano in brothels in order to supplement their meager income (in which case the one breaking the law would have been not a well-off brat, anyway, but the owner of the brothel and, possibly, Brahms' father as well). Circumstantial evidence (the only type available) points to a negative answer.

[Scion7]

Circumstantial evidence (the only type available) points to a negative answer.

Incorrect. We'll take Brahms' own words every time. And research done by other scholars.

[Opus131]

As far i remember, he wasn't sent to brothels, but pubs and harbor places where sailors congregated. I always assumed the sailors brought the prostitutes with them, or the prostitutes hanged around such places waiting to catch sailors.

Admidetly, i haven't read Swafford biography in 15 years so i may not remembering right but i don't remember him mentioning brothels as such.

It's also unclear what kind of negative experience he suffered there and whether it was confined to his exposure to ill reputed women. He may have been threatened by the sailors at some point, or bullied by them etc.

[Madiel]

Incorrect. We'll take Brahms' own words every time. And research done by other scholars.

And yet you dismiss scholars out of hand just because they're more recent.

With that kind of attitude, how is any error ever corrected? Must we forever state that Mozart wrote symphonies that more "recent" research (older than me in some cases, but 20th century rather than 19th) shows he did not write, just because that's what someone said FIRST?

"Custom without truth is the antiquity of error." You want old statements, Cyprian wrote that nearly 2000 years ago.

[Opus131]

Well, maybe it's the new scholars who are introducing an error.

I think i'd like to see their arguments or their evidence first before i decide they have greater authority over past scholars just because they came later.

[Madiel]

Well, maybe it's the new scholars who are introducing an error.

I think i'd like to see their arguments or their evidence first before i decide they have greater authority over past scholars just because they came later.

It's literally in this thread, quoted extensively. If you want to go to the archives in Hamburg yourself then knock yourself out, but don't pretend you haven't ALREADY been given the argument.

If you're going to dispute that prostitution was legal, or dispute that Brahms grew up in a different neighbourhood to the one he was born, what's your basis for disputing that?

NOBODY said it was just because they came later. It's because they found new things out. Can't you understand the difference?

[Florestan]

playing music in a brothel is not something he could have been doing

Let's assume that a brothel owner decided to offer his clients not only carnal pleasures but aural ones too, in spite of the law. This, in itself, is not implausible. What is implausible is that he have chosen the piano, a massive instrument difficult to bring to the house unnoticed and, moreover, difficult to hide in case of a police inspection, instead of the fiddle, the guitar, the flute or any other such small instrument which would have served the purpose just as well as the piano while having none of its inconveniences and risks.

Occam's Razor. The simpler explanation is that the story is false. The story being true is far more complex.

Indeed. The brothel theory stands on too many implausible assumptions.

[Florestan]

We'll take Brahms' own words every time.

I asked you before but you didn't answer. I ask you again: should we, or do you really, believe Brahms' own words that he would have given anything (anything, mind you!) in return for being able to write "An der schoenen blauen Donau"?

Besides, if a composer's own words always takes precedence over research, then we should believe Albeniz's own words stating that he studied with Liszt, whereas the truth is Albeniz never met Liszt, let alone studied with him (a claim which, by the way, was printed and reprinted in many bios of Albeniz, until it was proven false). Or, why not, we should believe Tchaikovsky's own words stating that Brahms was a mediocre composer.

And research done by other scholars.

Actually, what evidence does Leonard and others adduce for their claim?

[Jo498]

A main danger for the brothel owner having music would be his competitors who would likely tell the authorities to get him into trouble.

There is absolutely no reason to doubt the more recent research, especially as I still have not seen the quotation that Brahms claimed to have played in brothels. The phrase I recall (and I don't know how well this is attested) is that he could not respect women because of the impression he got in his youth. For which some impression from the streets of Hamburg or some contact at an age beyond childhood would be as good an explanation as playing in seedy pubs or brothels as a child.
(And it is clearly an exaggeration anyway because Brahms did respect Clara and many other women he knew.)
(I do have the suspicion that early-mid 20th century biographers might have been seduced by vulgar Freudianism to stabilize that rumor of the child playing in brothels)

[Scion7]

Florrie ... I'm not about to call someone a liar that I've never met, but only know from his letters and the reports of his friends, and have no basis to doubt him. This is a rabbit hole that won't be resolved - there are the traditionalists, and the revisionists.

[Florestan]

There is absolutely no reason to doubt the more recent research, especially as I still have not seen the quotation that Brahms claimed to have played in brothels.

Indeed. @Scion7, please adduce that quotation from Brahms "in his own words".

The phrase I recall (and I don't know how well this is attested) is that he could not respect women because of the impression he got in his youth. For which some impression from the streets of Hamburg or some contact at an age beyond childhood would be as good an explanation as playing in seedy pubs or brothels as a child.

Of course. In all probability Brahms never played the piano in brothels as a child. This doesn't mean he has never seen, or even used, prostitutes in his teens or youth. Prostitution was not confined to brothels only.

(And it is clearly an exaggeration anyway because Brahms did respect Clara and many other women he knew.)

AFAIK, he treated even the prostitutes themselves with respect, befriending them and offering them gifts besides and beyond the pecuniary price of the business.

[Florestan]

I'm not about to call someone a liar that I've never met

I've never met Albeniz yet he was clearly lying when he claimed he studied with Liszt. I've never met Colin Powell yet he was clearly lying when he claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I've never met Putin yet he lies all the time.

[Madiel]

The phrase I recall (and I don't know how well this is attested) is that he could not respect women because of the impression he got in his youth. For which some impression from the streets of Hamburg or some contact at an age beyond childhood would be as good an explanation as playing in seedy pubs or brothels as a child.

Yes. This is exactly the kind of thing where people take what someone actually said and reinterpret it in a way that is not accurate.

We have the TV show QI and the website Snopes, both pretty much dedicated to the way that people get the wrong end of the stick. The results can be comic** or tragic or anything in between. But it isn't at all hard to see how people could remember bits of what Brahms had said or what they knew about his youth - a bit about prostitutes, a bit about piano playing - and wrongly conflate it into an inaccurate claim.

Recently I had a big argument about how Otto von Bismarck never compared law-making to sausage-making, and how it took about 80 years to correct the mistake after someone wrote a book a generation or two later saying "I think it was Bismarck who said...". And the explanation from more recent research is clear: the author wrongly conflated an observation about laws and sausages that an American poet had made with an anecdote involving Bismarck and sausages. Generations have "remembered" Bismarck saying this because nobody remembers anymore who the hell John Godfrey Saxe is, and people clearly like the idea it was Bismarck in spite of the strong evidence uncovered, from the time that Saxe and Bismarck were alive, that it was Saxe.


** "You said you could fly one of these things!" "No I didn't; I just said you couldn't!" - Terry Pratchett

[Madiel]

I've never met Albeniz yet he was clearly lying when he claimed he studied with Liszt. I've never met Colin Powell yet he was clearly lying when he claimed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. I've never met Putin yet he lies all the time.

Maybe he just met a Liszt imposter. He was catfished!

[Madiel]

but only know from his letters

Which say what?

My problem here is that you keep referring to the man's own words without actually citing them. And my concern is that you, or someone else, is half-remembering them.