Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Did the Young Brahms Play Piano in Waterfront Bars?

Did the Young Brahms Play Piano in Waterfront Bars? 19 TH CENTURY MUSIC Did the Young Brahms Play Piano in Waterfront Bars? JAN SWAFFORD The story has been told for a hundred years: how in his early teens Johannes Brahms was forced by his family’s poverty to play piano all night in sailors’ dives called Animierlokale (roughly, “arousal pubs”) on the Hamburg waterfront. There, the story goes, he was molested by the waitress/prostitutes in attendance and from the experience reaped a lifetime of rage, anguish, and misogyny. The boy’s pay for a night’s work was a miserable “twee Dahler un duhn”: two thalers and all you can drink. Sometimes he could only make it home at dawn by staggering from tree to tree.1 The effects on his health were grave, although he recovered to enjoy a lifetime of good health. The effects of Karl Geiringer, Brahms: His Life and Work (New York, 1981–82), p. 20. Brahms personally related this story to his Hamburg friend Klaus Groth. The Vienna-born and -trained Geiringer was once librarian of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the hub of Viennese Brahmsians; he fully endorsed the Lokale story. the Lokale on his spirit, however, were devastating and indelible. Brahms’s biographer Max Kalbeck painted a sentimental http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png 19th-Century Music University of California Press

Did the Young Brahms Play Piano in Waterfront Bars?

Swafford, Jan
19th-Century Music , Volume 24 (3) – Apr 1, 2001
Download PDF
8 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-california-press/did-the-young-brahms-play-piano-in-waterfront-bars-bZPkU02lB6
Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
Copyright © by the University of California Press
Subject
Research Article
ISSN
0148-2076
eISSN
1533-8606
DOI
10.1525/ncm.2001.24.3.268
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

19 TH CENTURY MUSIC Did the Young Brahms Play Piano in Waterfront Bars? JAN SWAFFORD The story has been told for a hundred years: how in his early teens Johannes Brahms was forced by his family’s poverty to play piano all night in sailors’ dives called Animierlokale (roughly, “arousal pubs”) on the Hamburg waterfront. There, the story goes, he was molested by the waitress/prostitutes in attendance and from the experience reaped a lifetime of rage, anguish, and misogyny. The boy’s pay for a night’s work was a miserable “twee Dahler un duhn”: two thalers and all you can drink. Sometimes he could only make it home at dawn by staggering from tree to tree.1 The effects on his health were grave, although he recovered to enjoy a lifetime of good health. The effects of Karl Geiringer, Brahms: His Life and Work (New York, 1981–82), p. 20. Brahms personally related this story to his Hamburg friend Klaus Groth. The Vienna-born and -trained Geiringer was once librarian of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the hub of Viennese Brahmsians; he fully endorsed the Lokale story. the Lokale on his spirit, however, were devastating and indelible. Brahms’s biographer Max Kalbeck painted a sentimental

Journal

19th-Century Music – University of California Press

Published: Apr 1, 2001

There are no references for this article.