Mr. Mayor, Mr. President, Ladies and
Gentlemen who are gathered here in celebration,
Allow me to speak of Johannes Brahms the man, as his
works speak for themselves, have long become common knowledge not only in Germany but worldwide and
therefore require no commentary.
[Let me speak] of the shyness, humor and
sensitivity of this Hamburg citizen and of the nobility of character of this simple
musician's son, which expressed itself in pride and modesty, and of his mastering a
life in which coincidence, love and solitude intersected in the most magical
ways.
There is no sentiment among the German people, no tender yearning and no
deliberate privation that has not been consolidated and romanticized in the face and
the vision of the man we are celebrating today. Johannes Brahms is a great son
of the city of
Hamburg, but beyond that he is a true son of Germany. The portrait of
him as a young man, which shows an expression of Hölderlinesque purity and
romantic reflection that seems caught in a dream, is just as German as the later
caricatures of the pudgy elderly gentleman who hides his great kindness behind a big
bushy beard and who prefers to joke with those he holds dear as if they were
children so that he can avoid revealing the emotions flowing dramatically and
earnestly, lovingly and melancholy into the heart of the world.
In England, “planta genista,” the scrubby, gray-green common broom
with its golden yellow flowers, features on the crest of a royal house, the
“Planta genet;” in Germany
planta genista is still called “Brahm” where it
grows naturally, in the regions of Dithmarschen and Holstein. And “Brahms,” or
actually “Brahmst,” with a “t” at the end, means “son of the heath.” Thus the
landscape that becomes the primal source of this North German master's strength is
already embedded in his name.
Descended from an old family of farmers, his
likable kindness often swings into rudeness, which is nothing but a cloak the aging
man drapes around himself because he essentially remains helpless against the world
and its people. […]
His shyness of other people always
stood in his way. Whenever he could, he would avoid unexpected encounters, and the
more famous he became, the more mischievous he got. One day as he was leaving his
apartment in Vienna,
he met a young man downstairs at the gates. “Does Master Brahms live here?,” the
stranger inquired. “Certainly, Sir, on the third floor,” Brahms replied with particular
kindness and fled as fast as he could. Was that Hamburg in his
blood?
It is moving how this son of Hamburg has courted and
struggled for the love of his home town, how he keeps coming home, always hoping that the place
where he belongs will give him an opportunity to work there, and how the angels
eventually carried him, disappointed, to an entirely different place, to the more
tender gardens of Vienna, where his genius could unfold its inherent grace to its
full bloom, for the best men of this time had been gifted with gracefulness despite
their martial full beards, and behind the wildest manes there often were children's
eyes looking devoutly and starry-eyed out at the world. This also explains the
unending love for folk songs that has inspired these heirs to Romanticism. It is not a sign of
resignation when the penultimate major work that Brahms publishes as he is
nearing his end consists of seven volumes of folk songs, in fact it is a confession
of faith. The folk song, the clarinet, the love for which Mühlfeld had awakened in him,
and the biblical text of the solemn vocals all conclude the masterpiece of a life
which the bearer of this life had imagined very differently.
He would have
liked, as he said, to have been a decent, bourgeois man, he would have liked to
marry and live like others. “Now I am a vagabond,” he grumbles about the injustice
of the world that denied him the permanent employment he longed for; but despite
this longing for a home and a hearth the happiness he sacrificed became a boon to
his oeuvre. […]
In the context of the 1933 “Reichs-Brahmsfest” rumors had emerged that the Hamburg composer was of Jewish descent (his last name was supposed to have been derived from “Abrahamson”). Peri Arndt, Das Gerücht über Brahms’ jüdische Abstammung, in: Arbeitsgruppe Exilmusik am Musikwissenschaftlichen Institut der Universität Hamburg (ed.), Das „Reichs-Brahmsfest“ 1933 in Hamburg. Rekonstruktion und Dokumentation, Hamburg 1997, pp. 119–120. Whether Berger knew of these rumors is not known, interestingly though, he also discusses the origins of the Brahms family name in his speech.
Ludwig Berger, About Johannes Brahms the Man. Commemorative Speech Given at a Celebration Hosted by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg on the Occasion of Johannes Brahms’ 125th Birthday on May 7, 1958, Hamburg (translated by Insa Kummer), edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History, <https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-191.en.v1> [October 14, 2024].