Johannes Brahms: A Biography

Parts read like a fascinating high-class soap opera, with all the people in Brahms's life. But the great pleasure for me is all the insight into the numerous pieces of music and how they relate to the composer and his life. Do as I have, and read with your cell phone in hand, controlling access to a good streaming music service like Tidal. Then, as you read about some interesting piece, play it immediately on your stereo system with just a few keystrokes. (Or, if you are more modern than I, just tell Alexa to play it.)

This is a long book – 636 pages of text in small font plus a lengthy introduction. Except for the first 15-20 years of Brahms’s life and the last few years, we get to know Brahms often month-by-month (sometimes week-by-week) with rarely more than a three month hiatus in the narrative. But the book is also immensely enjoyable to read. Swafford manages to convey this massive amount of information in a well-written easy-to-follow form with numerous double-spaced breaks within each chapter. It is an easy book to return to after a break in reading and, what’s more important, it’s a book to which you want to return.One of the advantages of this detail is that we get to experience the depth of the long-term relationship between Brahms and Clara Schumann. Swafford uses the letters of Brahms and Clara extensively and it would be hard to find a biography of any major historical figure that gives a more poignant and powerful portrait of a long-term loving relationship. As Brahms himself said near the end of his bachelor life, Clara was his only real friend. He had many other people who would normally be counted as friends, e.g., Josef Joachim and Theodor Billroth, whom he knew for decades but with whom he eventually broke. Clara was unique. Swafford details their caring and often tumultuous relationship and how the two of them, after even some serious disagreements, always came back to each other.Swafford also goes into some detail about several of Brahms’s works as they appeared throughout his life including his four symphonies. Readers with some musical background will find these enlightening. But for readers simply interested in the history of Western music the book is a gold mine about Brahms’s creative process, how his personal life was entangled with his composing, and how Brahms fit into the “War of the Romantics” in 19th century music. The book chronicles from Brahms’s point of view the 19th century development of and (as Brahms himself put it) the decline of the long Western musical tradition. It gives much food for thought whether one agrees with Brahms or not.If the reader has the time to invest in this lengthy biography, he or she will find it a worthwhile and rewarding experience.

I cannot begin to tell you what a lovable man Johannes Brahms was. This thought came to me three quarters of the way through this excellent biography.Brahms, a curmudgeon with his friends, but only occasionally. Impatient with pushy fans, but rarely with simple acquaintances. Loving son. Devoted confidante of Clara Schumann over a span of forty years on and off the concert stage.A major part of his character is summed up in those statements.He began his career playing his own compositions in concert (he was an excellent pianist but not the best). Usually he appeared onstage with another performer, often with his close friend the violinist Joseph Joachim, or with Clara Schumann in two-piano arrangements of his works and those of Robert Schumann. Clara Schumann's technique at the keyboard was superior to his own as it was to almost everyone else's except Liszt's. He trusted her musicianship and listened carefully to her suggestions about his compositions as they were being created.More or less unsettled during his twenties and thirties, he changed with his forties, establishing himself finally in Vienna. There his needs were minimal, his demands almost non-existent: a tiny, cluttered bedroom and parlor on the fourth floor of an apartment house, meals in a coffee house, his laundry and dusting provided by the elderly landlady. This remained his home for the last twenty-five years. Yet these decades brought enormous fame, public affection, and financial rewards, his Hungarian Dances gaining worldwide popularity as did his Lullaby. The monumental works, too, were more and more demanded by serious audiences of every continent.This biography shows us a truly admirable human being whose moods were generally mild and fleeting, a man lacking in cupidity, devoted to his mother, reverential toward his father and generous to family members. Invariably kind to children. A man with few enemies and despising few people, chief among them Franz Liszt for his "meretricious" music and Anton Bruckner for being an inveterate attention seeker.His warmest attachment as a young man, and into old age, was first to Clara Schumann, and then to her daughter Julie, who, however, had no such interest in him and married elsewhere. This disappointment found expression and resolution only in music, the center of his emotional existence.His ambition was to create a body of work worthy to rank with that of Mozart and Beethoven. Yet he always recognized that public taste would move beyond the classical, beyond Mozart and Beethoven and himself. In his usual philosophical way he accepted the inevitable, that such masterpieces would never be written once he was dead. And they never were.For an understanding of the nature and life experiences of this commanding figure I recommend this biography. It flows easily and interestingly, sometimes with real humor.Someone like me, who knows nothing about music, not even the names of most instruments, can simply skip the many pages analyzing his works.But anyone who loves the Academic Festival Overture or his Hungarian dances (which he enjoyed composing as much as he enjoyed listening to that type of music in the Viennese cafes), or certainly anyone who admires his monumental compositions will appreciate this biography of a great man, the last of his kind "when music was in its glory."

A friend lent me this book, which I liked sufficiently to want to have my own copy. I am only 100 pages into it, but it is a very good read. The written style is easy, propelling the reader towards Brahms' maturity as the dominant figure in German classical music from the 1860s to 1890s. The book surveys this area with authority and scholarship. Well worth acquiring for Brahms enthusiasts, wanting to know more about his life and the music of this period.

i have forgotten reading this book.

A wonderfully readable and detailed history of one of the great C19 th composers full of detail but accessible to a novice students of Brahms' music and context.

Brilliant! Any musician worth their salt will love it.

Heavyweight biog, but worth staying with it. Full of personal glimpses, intriguing to a muso. Not entirely happy with American spelling though.