Swafford, Jan.  JOHANNES BRAHMS, A BIOGRAPHY.  NY:  Knopf, 1997.  699pp.

In terms of bringing its subject to life, this is one of the most
satisfying biographies I have ever read.  As a biography of a composer,
it benefits from having a composer as its author.  As a modern biography,
it avoids both "pathography" and putting its subject on a pedestal, even
to make him an "easier target," as Swafford puts it in the preface to an
earlier biography, of Ives.  Swafford has taught me many things I have not
known, and some I have wondered about, since I read Karl Geiringer's
biography of Brahms long ago.

One of the cliches of 19th century musical history is the hostility
between the Brahmsians and the Wagnerites.  As far as Brahms himself is
concerned, this is a myth.  He actually regarded Wagner's music highly
and sent a note of sympathy on the occasion of Wagner's death.  He also
thought highly of some of Mahler's music, most notably the scherzo of the
Resurrection symphony.  It was the music of Liszt and Bruckner that Brahms
couldn't stand.  There was no sympathy between Brahms and Tchaikovsky
either.  Brahms did have a lifelong liking for popular music, including
gypsy music and German folk music.

In spite of his conscious efforts to write for a middle class audience,
Brahms' music was considered difficult.  The Leipzig audience, in
particular, disliked his music--it wasn't enough like Mendelssohn's.  The
premiere of the First Piano Concerto there was a particular disaster, both
musically and for Brahms' personal life.  (I will come back to that.)

It is well known that Brahms wrote no operas, but less well known that he
wanted to write them and long sought a suitable libretto.  He considered
setting Gozzi's King Stag and Love for Three Oranges.  One reason he did
not do so was the inhibiting shadow of Wagner.  Just as he felt constraint
in writing a symphony because of the burden of living up to the models
Beethoven provided, Brahms was not about to look ridiculous in comparison
with Wagner.  He also had to live up to Schumann's predictions of great
things for Brahms.

As a composer, Brahms generally worked out his compositions slowly in his
head--he had an exceptional musical memory--before writing them out, and he
destroyed most of the sketches he did produce, along with some completed
works, notably a second violin concerto and a second double concerto,
because the initial public reaction to the first ones was not encouraging
(he also destroyed much of his correspondence--though less than I had
understood to be the case--evidently some people including Clara Schumann
held out on his requests for return of his letters.) Swafford provides
considerable musical analysis, with musical examples, particularly of
Brahms' major chamber music.  Again, it is well known how long Brahms
waited to write for orchestra.  One indication of his becoming successful
at orchestral writing was the change in attitude of the players of the
Vienna Philharmonic at the time of the Haydn Variations.  They had not
concealed their disdain for one of Brahms's serenades they had to play, and
on that occasion Brahms told them that if they were looking for another
Beethoven that those days were gone forever, or something to that effect.
But they were quite friendly for the rehearsals of the Haydn Variations,
which was an immediate success, and after that Brahms wrote regularly and
successfully for orchestra.  Brahms seems to have been a good conductor.
He was originally also a good concert pianist, though not in Clara
Schumann's class, but as he did not like to practice his later performances
suffered.

As a person, Brahms was not known for his tact, and his friends, like
Joachim and Clara Schumann, had a great deal of prickly bruskness and
withdrawal to put up with over the years.  He also seems to have been
one of those people to expect their friends to read their minds.  Even
after many years, Clara felt she did not fully know him.  The most
egregious instance of public tactlessness was an expression of outright
German chauvinism in Denmark after Bismarck had annexed Schleswig-Holstein,
and this at a festive occasion.  He also shocked his friends on one
occasion when he baited Goldmark for having written, as a Jew, a setting
of a Christian text.  He appears to have taken strong exception to the
rabid antisemitism of Karl Lueger's Vienna, late in the century, however.
Swafford quotes him as saying, presumably as a sardonic commentary on this,
that he was about to have himself circumcised.

A positive side of Brahms' character was his generosity with money once he
had some to give.  One extraordinary incident shows his humanity.  A fire
broke out in the apartment building where he lived and, rather than rescue
an important music manuscript he joined the fire brigade in an effort to
save the home and shop of a carpenter, whom he then helped financially to
recover.  (A friend did run up for the manuscript, after failing to
persuade Brahms to get it.)

One of the things I've most wondered about Brahms personal life--aside
from prurient curiosity about the nature of the relationship between him
and Clara Schumann--which they ensured is forever going to remain unknown
and none of our business--is why Brahms never married any of the women he
loved and courted, particularly Clara.  After reading Swafford, I think I
know; at least I understand better than I did.  There are at least three
or four reasons.  First of all, when he was young, he just plain couldn't
afford it.  He had lived in the Schumann household during the time Robert
was institutionalized, and it seems clear that he and the considerably
older Clara loved one another.  (Interestingly, Johannes' mother had been
much older than his father.) But when Robert Schumann died and they might
have married, Brahms backed off and moved away.  There were all those
children that he was in no position to support in the expected bourgeois
fashion.  And Brahms was unemployed.

He was to be passed over repeatedly for the music directorship in his
native Hamburg, which would have established his career and given a him
secure income; this was a source of great bitterness to him.  (When it
finally was offered, when he was old, he turned it down.  Swafford thinks
he wouldn't have stayed, anyway.) I had always assumed that Clara refused
Brahms, but Swafford's reading of the available evidence strongly suggests
that Clara was quite upset by Brahms' withdrawal.  Later Brahms became
engaged to a singer his own age, but backed out of the engagement after the
failure of his D minor concerto.  He said to someone that he couldn't bring
failure home to a wife.  He also felt that he simply had to be free and
unencumbered in order to compose.  Finally, Brahms was highly conflicted
about women, and this is the one bit of psychologizing that Swafford does.
Brahms was one of those men who divided women into virgins and whores.
His experience with the latter began in pre-adolescence in Hamburg when
he earned money by playing in waterfront brothels (where he also learned
he could read novels or poetry while playing the piano, an amazing
achievement.) In Vienna, prostitutes he knew, and who found him kind,
greeted him on the street.  (Swafford's main source for this is The Unknown
Brahms, by Schauffler, who knew Brahms' contemporaries in Vienna.) At any
rate Brahms evidently was unable to establish intimacy with respectable
women.  He kept falling in love with them though, and evidently they with
him.

Swafford's documentation could be more ample; it consists mainly of simple
citations, and much of it to secondary literature.  He is extraordinarily
good at close reading of the available texts, however, though one may
sometimes wonder if his great empathy crosses the line to imaginative
reconstruction.  In any case, this biography is an exceptionally good read.

Jim Tobin