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An illuminating new biography of one of the most beloved of all composers, published on the hundredth anniversary of his death, brilliantly written by a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award. Johannes Brahms has consistently eluded his biographers. Throughout his life, he attempted to erase traces of himself, wanting his music to be his sole legacy. Now, in this masterful book, Jan Swafford, critically acclaimed as both biographer and composer, takes a fresh look at Brahms, giving us for the first time a fully realized portrait of the man who created the magnificent music. Brahms was a man with many friends and no intimates, who experienced triumphs few artists achieve in their lifetime. Yet he lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world. The Brahms that emerges from these pages is not the bearded eminence of previous biographies but rather a fascinating assemblage of contradictions. Brought up in poverty, he was forced to play the piano in the brothels of Hamburg, where he met with both mental and physical abuse. At the same time, he was the golden boy of his teachers, who found themselves in awe of a stupendous talent: a miraculous young composer and pianist, poised between the emotionalism of the Romantics and the rigors of the composers he worshipped--Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. In 1853, Robert Schumann proclaimed the twenty-year-old Brahms the savior of German music. Brahms spent the rest of his days trying to live up to that prophecy, ever fearful of proving unworthy of his musical inheritance. We find here more of Brahms's words, his daily life and joys and sorrows, than in any other biography. With novelistic grace, Swafford shows us a warm-blooded but guarded genius who hid behind jokes and prickliness, rudeness and intractability with his friends as well as his enemies, but who was also a witty drinking companion and a consummate careerist skillfully courting the powerful. This is a book rich in secondary characters as well, including Robert Schumann, declining into madness as he hailed the advent of a new genius; Clara Schumann, the towering pianist, tormented personality, and great love of Brahms's life; Josef Joachim, the brilliant, self-lacerating violinist; the extraordinary musical amateur Elisabet von Herzogenberg, on whose exacting criticism Brahms relied; Brahms's rival and shadow, the malevolent genius Richard Wagner; and Eduard Hanslick, enemy of Wagner and apostle of Brahms, at once the most powerful and most wrongheaded music critic of his time. Among the characters in the book are two great cities: the stolid North German harbor town of Hamburg where Johannes grew up, which later spurned him; and glittering, fickle, music-mad Vienna, where Brahms the self-proclaimed vagabond finally settled, to find his sweetest triumphs and his most bitter failures. Unique to this book is the way in which musical scholarship and biography are combined: in a style refreshingly free of pretentiousness, Jan Swafford takes us deep into the music--from the grandeur of the First Symphony and the intricacies of the chamber work to the sorrow of the German Requiem--allowing us to hear these familiar works in new and often surprising ways. This is a clear-eyed study of a remarkable man and a vivid portrait of an era in transition. Ultimately, Johannes Brahms is the story of a great, backward-looking artist who inspired musical revolutionaries of the following generations, yet who was no less a prophet of the darkness and violence of our century. A biographical masterpiece at once wholly original and definitive.… (more)
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Apart from that, there's the famous Brahmsians vs. Wagnerites divide that enlivened musical debate in the second half of the 19th century. Swafford has his fun with this, of course, but he also makes sure we understand that it was never quite as simple as that. Brahms himself was known to say positive things about Wagner's operas, and he owned a number of Wagner scores and knew them intimately. He often joked in later life that for an old man, the temptation to write operas was like the temptation to get married — he took care never to compete with Wagner on his own turf. There's also the bizarre way Brahms's (Jewish) former friend Hermann Levi became Wagner's preferred conductor after Hans von Bülow (whose wife had run away with Wagner) defected the other way to become the most respected interpreter of Brahms...
Even if his major works often took a while to work their way into the hearts of the public, Brahms was publishing a steady stream of stuff eminently suitable for middle-class people to play in their drawing-rooms or amateur choirs to sing, making him one of the first major composers to earn his living mostly from publications. Between the Wiegenlied ("Brahms's Lullaby") and the German Requiem, he pretty much offered a cradle-to-grave music service, with more Liebeslieder and Hungarian Dances than anyone could possibly want in between...
Swafford doesn't spend much time on this "mass-market" side of Brahms, but he does go into rewarding amounts of detail about the composition and reception of the symphonies, concertos and major chamber works. And that seems to be where this biography really scores: Swafford manages to make the mysterious and very technical process of composing music almost accessible for the non-musician. And that "almost" is only there because you do need at least a certain amount of background knowledge of music history and of basic concepts like forms and keys and time signatures to follow his explanations, without which you probably wouldn't be reading a book like this anyway.
The stress is on how Brahms built new and unexpected things on the existing structures of classical and romantic music: he was writing for a very informed public, and he took care to promote the wider understanding of music history, bringing out new editions of earlier composers and forcing the Viennese public to listen to Bach and Palestrina whether they liked it or not. Swafford credits Brahms with pushing through the switch in concert-hall repertoire from mostly contemporary programming — as it had been up to that point — to the canon-based programmes that still dominate things today. I suspect that's an exaggeration, but he obviously played a big part in making the listening public more aware that appreciating music implies knowing about where it comes from historically.
There are some minor things I don't like about the book: it's over-long, and Swafford repeats himself a lot when talking about non-musical background topics ("Ah yes, there's the "Antisemitism" theme from Chapter One again..."). And there's some carelessness about the use of idioms — it's not a good idea to fix in the reader's mind the image of Brahms putting failed works and early drafts "in the stove" to destroy them if you also talk about him putting pieces that need more refinement "back in the oven". But those are all very minor things, the point of this book is to talk about Brahms and his composition process and his relationships with his musical contemporaries, and that Swafford does extremely well.
Apparently this book caused some controversy in musical circles because of Swafford's embracing stories of JB as a young'n playing piano in tough Hamburg bars and whorehouses ... and running with this as a thing that underlay a good hunk of his otherwise difficult-to-fathom personality. Charles Rosen, who is cited several times in this text, took Swafford to task for this in no uncertain terms, and Swafford stuck to his guns. Was he right to do so? Hell, I don't know -- it does feel, superficially, to make a kind of intuitive sense.
I will be grateful to this book for steering me in the direction of specific pieces of Brahms' music. But I confess it was a chore to get through all 600+ pages.