Customer Reviews

Johannes Brahms: A Biography

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As I noted in the title of this review, this book is a great portrait of the man who was Brahms. The fact that he was a great composer is almost seconary. He had a fascinating life, with a great deal of personal intrigue, and a great unrequited love story spanning most of his adult life with Clara Schumann. As a musician, I appreciated the clear and understandable way that Swafford writes about the music of Brahms. His musical analysis is of sufficient depth for the me, and is not "dumbed down" material for the reader who is not musically trained. The best reason to purchase this book is the great and interesting man (and composer) who is examined. I highly recommend this book.

Swafford's Brahms biography is certainly readable, and the author displays great sympathy with his subject. The problem with this book is that the author perpetuates-- even exaggerates-- a picture of Brahms that is now under serious revision. I don't know if Swafford is entirely to blame, as it is difficult to know to which documents he had access at the time of his writing. But recent work by Kurt Hoffman, and Styra Avin's edition of Brahms's letters show that the usual conception of Brahms's childhood as poverty-stricken and neglected is very inaccurate; and Swafford takes off from this picture of a pitiful childhood as a central principle in Brahms's life, relationships, etc. Hoffman has shown that Brahms could not have played the piano in brothels as a boy, yet Swafford paints us a lugubrious picture of young Brahms possibly suffering sexual trauma at the hands of both the prostitutes and their patrons. Avins's translations of Brahms's letters show us that Brahms had a warm and affectionate relationship with his parents, who did depend upon him to augment the family income, but knew when enough was enough for the boy, and did their best to give him a good education, plenty of diversion and rest. Avins's book has an illustration of Brahms's exquisite handwriting at age nine, which clearly shows that he had been meticulously schooled. Swafford's book is clearly a labor of great love, but _caveat emptor_.

If you have ever read Maynard Solomon's biographies of Mozart and Beethoven, and enjoyed them, you will definitely like Swafford's biography of Brahm's. The styles have a lot in common. Both authors write mostly with the lay reader in mind, so even someone like me who doesn't have any background in music can still enjoy the books. Both authors are interested in psychological reasons for behavior and, in my opinion, make convincing arguments concerning certain personality traits of these great musicians. However, both authors are also aware that some of the people that read these books are knowledgeable about music, so there are brief sections that get into technical analysis of the music. Solomon did this by including short chapters scattered throughout his book, devoted solely to musical analysis. Swafford chose to incorporate his musical analysis within the general flow of the book, a few paragraphs at a time. As a lay reader, I liked Swafford's approach better. Since I pretty much didn't understand the technical aspects, it was less boring to have this stuff just a little bit at a time! Swafford's book has two great strengths, besides the fact that he writes beautifully. He goes into detail concerning Brahms relationship with Clara Schumann, a friendship which lasted for approximately 40 years. The second strength is that piece by piece he builds up a picture of Brahms the man so that by the end of the book you will feel that you knew Brahms. The picture is well-rounded, too. Brahms could be rude and arrogant but he also could be sensitive and humble and generous. He also had a tremendous sense of humor. He was very witty, both in his conversation and in his correspondence. He was also a great practical joker. Swafford relates a story about the time Brahms went to lunch with a friend, who happened to be a Beethoven scholar. Brahms, before the lunch, had taken a popular song of the day and written it out in musical notation, but he did this imitating Beethoven's handwriting. He made arrangements for the fellow that waited on them in the restaurant to wrap up the scholar's takeout lunch in the "Beethoven" score. Brahms was quite amused when he saw the expression on his friend's face as he unwrapped his lunch and without saying a word, carefully folded up the score and just put it in his pocket. He probably thought he had made a great discovery until he got the score home and actually got to read the music! This was easily one of the best books I read last year and I have no hesitation in recommending it to anyone who loves good biography, even if you don't know anything about music!

I read Jan Swafford's monumental 1997 biography of Johannes Brahms (1833 --1897) after reading his biography of the American composer Charles Ives and after reading the 1991 biography of Brahms by Malcolm MacDonald. Swafford has written an outstanding biography of Brahms and a through, perceptive consideration of his music. But greater than either of these accomplishments, his book brings Brahms and late ninetheenth century Vienna to life. Swafford has given a great deal of thought to Brahms, and his book helped me think about the nature of creative gifts, about the relationship between love and calling, and about many matters that are much broader than either biography or music.

Swafford gives a great deal of attention to two formative experiences of young Brahms: 1. his childhood of poverty in Hamburg where he played as a pre-adolescent in dives frequented by prostitutes and sailors (this account has been questioned by some writers) and 2. Robert Schumann's article about Brahms at the age of 20, heralding the young man as the heir to Beethoven and predicting a brilliant future for him.

Swafford's book emphasizes Brahms's difficulties throghout life in forming a lasting, sexual relationship with a woman other than prostitutes. Brahms exhibited to sort of behavior towards women frequently described in terms of "The Virgin and the Whore." Brahms could only be physically intimate with women he did not respect. Thus, Brahms ultimately rejected the romantic opportunities that came his way in the persons of Clara Schumann and Agathe von Siebold, among other women. He withdrew into a protective shell when friendships with women threatened to become romantic. Yet women were the greatest source of inspiration to Brahms as a composer. He poured into his music what he denied himself as a man. A crusty figure, Brahms was difficult to know intimately, particularly by women.

The article by Robert Schumann made Brahms famous from the age of twenty before he had done much. Great things were expected of Brahms, but Schumann's praise burdened the fledgling composer with the fear that he would disappoint Schumann's hopes in him. Brahms worked slowly and became an astonishing musical craftsman; but he felt he had to justify Schumann's confidence as well as meet the standards of the great composers of the past, especially Beethoven.

There is a wealth of discussion in this book of Brahms' relationships with both Clara and Robert Schumann, their daughter Julie, the violinist Joachim, the critic Hanslick, Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler, and many others. The book is set in the last years of liberal Vienna, and Swafford poignantly draws the relationship between Brahms's music and the rise of irrationality, anti-semitism, and violence that would soon plague the Twentieth Century.

I found Swafford's discussions of Brahms music highly insightful. It is less detailed, perhaps, than Malcolm MacMacDonald's study which discusses virtually every work of Brahms; but there is ample material here to form a basis for an exploration and appreciation of Brahms's music. Brahms' romanticism and his musical formalism and learning are well-explored and tied in with a consideration of his major works. Swafford's most thorough musical discussions are of the four symphonies, and he tends to move quicker over Brahms's songs. (This was also the case in Swafford's book on Ives.)

I felt I got to know Brahms, in spite of himself, in this book. Brahms devoted himself wholeheartedly to his art, and in the process lost a great deal of the value of human love and human sexual closeness. It was and remains a difficult exchange. More than encouraging the reader to get to know and love Brahms's music, Swafford's biography will help the reader think about and try to compassionately understand people.

For most of us, Geiringer is "the" Brahms biography and, admittedly, it is still unsurpassed. However, Swafford has done a superb job of giving us Brahms' life with the smooth narrative of a novel. Each page and chapter flows gracefully into the next as a Brahms adagio between an allegro and a scherzo. Some reviewers have cited too much detail. It only lets us know our subject all that much better. And, for that, so much the better. If Swafford has a failing, it is a lack of musical analyses of the music but, let me add, that, while he quotes few musical passages, his discussion of the major works will win Brahms new admirers. The rest of us can return to our scores. And I think Swafford is right. He appeals to a broad, rather than a select, audience but please don't misunderstand that to mean he is of little interest to the musicians. Far from it! His discussions of the gestation and creation (something not easy for Brahms) of the major works reads like a detective novel. I congratulate Swafford on a splendid biography, the only modern one that can stand alongside Geiringer, and recommend it to all music lovers.

I have never heard a piece of music by composer Jan Swafford, but if he composes as well as he writes, his music should be stimulating indeed. Some reviewers have called this book hard to put down, a page-turner. I found it so. Part of its interest lies in Brahms himself; any book that purports to shed even a bit of light on so enigmatic a figure would cause one to turn pages in hopes of illumination. But I can imagine, too, a very dull book about Brahms. Well, there are few dull pages among the 600+ in Swafford's biography. As is now de rigueur in good modern historical writing, Swafford creates a judicious blend of primary-source material and commentary thereon, along with a rich store of anecdotes told in his own fine, writerly voice.

Musical analysis is treated in such a way that the amateur musician, and even the musically challenged, will not be put off. In all cases, Swafford demonstrates well one of his chief theses--that Brahms was the most Janus-like of the great nineteenth century composers. He looked back all the way to Renaissance masters, assimilating their contrapuntal styles in ways beyond anything that Beethoven, Mendelssohn, or Schumann had done before him. Yet he so thoroughly anticipated the ambiguity of tonality and rhythm in twentieth-century music that Schoenberg could, long after Brahms's death, speak of "Brahms the Progressive."

But there is much more than musical analysis in this book. There is a thorough investigation of the many dualities in Brahms's nature: Brahms the generous, Brahms the curmudgeonly; Brahms the respecter of (intellectual and artistic) women, Brahms the misogynist; Brahms the romantic, Brahms the classicist; Brahms the sentimentalist, Brahms the cynic; Brahms the self-effacing, Brahms the monumentally egotistical. Swafford presents them all in their staggering incompatibility. And while Swafford himself admits that no one can ever quite hope to reconcile all these manifestations or indeed fill in the gaps in a life that the composer himself hoped to keep mostly a closed book, he comes close to making this great study in contrasts that was Brahms into a flesh-and-blood individual whose most mystifying acts seem almost comprehensible because we have seen him in action in similar contexts. By an exhaustive examination of the primary literature and shrewd speculation based thereon, Swafford builds a picture that convinces. He can't make us always like Brahms or even sympathize with him, but we come to understand him better through Swafford's portrait than we ever thought we could. That is some accomplishment.

Beyond this are the passages in which Swafford speaks of musical and indeed cultural history after Brahms. The epilogue to this book, in which the author traces Brahms's paradoxical legacy through the great century of change since his death, should be mandatory reading for all students of culture in the West.

Are there flaws? Yes. Some parts of the book show haste while others show careful crafting. In a work this large, that is to be expected. And Swafford overuses the word "magisterial." This may describe Brahms to a tee, but so, I hope, do a few other adjectives. Small gripes? Small indeed, given the wealth of insight and reading pleasure that Swafford provides here. I'm ready for his biography of Ives!

What a wonderful biography. Brahms' dealings with Clara Schumann, Joachim, and other friends is studied in fascinating detail through meetings and letters -- an intimate portrait of personal relations, desires and fears, quiet joys and resentments, etc., all as absorbing as a Henry James novel.

Meanwhile, Brahms' incomparable music is a life of its own, and we are treated to the master's views of it, as well as those of contemporaries and the author. The author's assessments seem to me almost unerringly valid. (Take, for example, his lofty praise of Gesang der Parzen, an underheard choral masterwork, or his concession that the Double Concerto, a concert standard, is on a less than inspired level.)

Add to this the author's occasional shift of focus to the Austro-German culture in which Brahms lived, in retrospect an even more remarkable time and place, where music was valued to a rare degree, and where ideas and events -- artistic, philosophical, political -- were poised to take momentous turns. Fascinating, even haunting, stuff, and all the more appropriate for discussion as these were issues about which Brahms had much concern in his later years.

Highly readable. This large tome fills in all the information on Brahms that your college Music History class left out. It has about all we are likely ever to know about the Brahms/Clara Schumann relationship.

The amateur psychologizing is not excessive, and the amount of musical analysis is about right for a biography.

Massive though this book is, it is not exhaustive. For instance, I would have liked more on Brahms' trips to Italy.

One of the reasons I read biography is to learn about the era, not just the person. This book gives much of the flavor of mid/late 19th Century musical life in Germany and Austria.

I must confess I bought this book on a whim. As a professional musician and educator, one who was familiar with Geiringer's classic biography and the newer one by McDonald, I was surprised at the fresh look that Swafford was able to place on Brahms and his times.

Particularly enlightening is the ongoing relationship between Brahms and Clara Schumann, which has never been fully explored, mostly due to Brahms himself. Swafford's account, reinforced by careful documentation, is most helpful in revealing traits of character and personality of these two seminal musicians of the nineteenth century.

Another great strength of this book is the attention Swafford pays to the political and social environment of Hamburg in Brahms' youth, and of imperial Vienna while Brahms was living there. His account provides a natural link to the "fin-de-siecle" world of Mahler and Schoenberg.

Swafford's concluding summary at the end of the book, far from being extraneous, is particularly insightful, and a thoughtful reflection on the life and legacy of this most significant artist. I will never listen to or perform Brahms again the same way after reading this book. I would also unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone interested in this period of history.

This is perhaps the finest biography that I have ever read. It evokes so well the atmosphere of Hamburg in Brahms' youth (which added to what I had read of an earlier period in 'Anton Rieser' by Moritz) and later of Vienna. It has so many friends - other composers and musicians, and then there are the pieces of music that are so familiar to modern music lovers - the serenades, the symphonies, the Requiem, the songs and chamber music, the concertos. Any sense I had that Brahms was less productive than the great giants he saw looming behind him - Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert - was altered when I read that he had destroyed many of the works he was dissatisfied with, as well as a lot of biographical material, such as letters. Fortunately some resources remain and Mr Swafford uses these continuously.

Brahms was a man as well as a composer/musician and I greatly admired the gentle way Mr Swafford narrated the story of the relationship of Brahms to the women he was so attracted to, but kept at arms length - especially, of course, and tragically Clara Schumann. For me there was a secondary biography here - that of Clara Schumann. She was such a courageous woman to sustain the friendship and the stream of musical advice that Brahms so needed, after Brahms had rejected following the death of Robert Schumann. In my experience, few women are capable of sustaining such a friendship in the face of their own emotional disappointment. Mr Swafford describes Brahms' behaviour without any hint of criticism or speculation - the facts speak sufficiently for themselves. Another aspect of this biography is the explanation of the schism in music caused (precipitated?) by Beethoven's musical experiments - a symphony with a program (the 'Pastoral') and one with words (the 'Choral'). Berlioz took Beethoven's lead and wrote an especially influential programmatic symphony (the 'Fantastique') as well as less successful symphonies with vocal elements (such as 'Romeo and Juliet'). This was taken on enthusiastically as the new wave - emotional rather than academic music. Liszt and Wagner were the great leaders in Germany of this modern school. In the meantime there was a reargaurd action lead by Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann to try and retain the historic development of music and reject radical change (Mendelssohn's revival of interest in the music of JS Bach is an example of this). Brahms arrived in this schism and was immediately championed as the future of music by Robert Schumann - was this the cause of Brahms' rejection of women - a sense of duty to Schumann's prediction?

Like all biographies that are chronologically described there is always a deep sense of sadness as we read of the end of life. But after the gruelling and sad description of Brahms later life and death, Mr Swafford ends the biography with an essay that explores Brahms place in history and explores why we still enjoy the music despite the general decline in musical appreciation that Brahms could see coming. Was Brahms the end of the historic development line in music? Did Liszt, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler and Richard Struass win the battle of the schism? It seems that Brahms' music was fostered by his political wisdom (despite some personal abrasiveness), but if that were the case the music would have disappeared along with that of all the composers Brahms admired (with the exception of Dvorak).

But there is another school of music - that of Scheonberg, a composer whom I have grown to admire recently more than I would have expected twenty years ago. But Brahms and Schoenberg? It's an interesting speculation and Mr Swafford does reflect on it with an insight that adds measurably to the biography.