(Born at Hamburg, May 7, 1833; died at Vienna, April 3, 1897)

Those who like to know about composers as human beings rejoice in the knowledge that Beethoven was irascible, the despair of his landladies, given to rough joking; that Haydn was nagged by his shrew of a wife and fell in love in London with a widow; that Mozart was fond of punch and billiards; that CÉsar Franck’s trousers were too short. There are many anecdotes about the great, some of them no doubt apocryphal.

In the excellent biography of Brahms by Walter Niemann[17] there is an entertaining chapter entitled “Brahms as a Man.”

He was not fussy in his dress. At home he went about in a flannel shirt, trousers, a detachable white collar, no cravat, slippers. In the country he was happy in a flannel shirt and alpaca jacket, carrying a soft felt hat in his hand, and in bad weather wearing on his shoulders an old-fashioned bluish-green shawl, fastened in front by a huge pin. (In the ’sixties many New Englanders on their perilous journeys to Boston or New York wore a shawl.) He preferred a modest restaurant to a hotel table d’hÔte. In his music room were pictures of a few composers, engravings—the Sistine Madonna among them—the portrait of Cherubini, by Ingres, with a veiled Muse crowning the composer—“I cannot stand that female,” Brahms said to his landlady—a bronze relief of Bismarck, always crowned with laurel. There was a square piano on which a volume of Bach was usually standing open. On the cover lay notebooks, writing tablets, calendars, cigar cases, spectacles, purses, watches, keys, portfolios, recently published books and music, also souvenirs of his travels. He was passionately patriotic, interested in politics, a firm believer in German unity. He deeply regretted that he had not done military service as a young man. Prussia should be the North German predominant power.

A Viennese musician once said that whenever he heard one of Brahms’ symphonies he was inclined to prefer it to the other three; but he was a passionate Brahmsite. The second has a freshness and a spontaneity that are perhaps not found in the others, though the third presses it hard in these respects; but there is a rugged grandeur in the first that puts it above the others.

Professor Schweizerhoffsteinlein, the celebrated Wagnerite, once said: “To me, however many movements there are in an orchestral work of Johannes Brahms, to me—hear me once—there are only two: he makes the first, and I make the second.” But the eminent professor was no doubt unjust toward Brahms, in his clumsy ponderous way.

The sensuousness of Brahms is cerebral; it might be called Platonic. There are various kinds of sensuousness in music, as in human life. Some years ago JosÉphin PÉladan, the fantastical Sar of dark corners, likened the music of Brahms to a gypsy woman dancing in tight-fitting corsets. He detected “latent heat beneath the formal exterior.”