Jan Swafford. Johannes Brahms: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. xxii, 705 pp. ISBN 0-679-42261-7 (hardcover) Styra Avins, editor and annotator. Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters. Trans. Styra Avins and Joseph Eisinger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xxviii, 858 pp. ISBN 0-19-816234-0 (hardcover)

Abstract

Jan Swafford. Johannes Brahms: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. xxii, 705 pp. ISBN 0-679-42261-7 (hardcover). Styra Avins, editor and annotator. Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters. Trans. Styra Avins and Joseph Eisinger. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xxviii, 858 pp. ISBN 0-19-816234-0 (hardcover). Johannes Brahms, as composer, score editor, and letter writer, receives due diligence in two hefty volumes to his life and epistolary output. Jan Swafford's Johannes Brahms: A Biography and Styra Avins's Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters tell the story of Brahms's life with markedly different emphasis placed on his psychology, business acumen, family circumstances, and cultural formation. These two works offer contrasting first-person and third-person perspectives on Brahms's career. In extant letters, never divulges the full story of his manoeuvring within politicized music circles of nineteenth-century Germany and Austria. Nor do his letters entirely disclose the extent of his class-consciousness, his callousness, or his shrewdness. He repeatedly proclaims his distaste for answering correspondence, which he performs as chore, not as pleasure. His life happened away from his desk, while he was travelling, socializing, conducting, pacing, reading. He also burned many of his letters. In this regard, biography is essential for filling in the gaps left by Brahms's own omissions and suppressions of information. By the same token, his letters glint with autobiographical complexity that no biography, however complete, can duplicate. Swafford's Johannes creates heroic narrative for the slim, blondhaired, slum-child from Hamburg who, by the end of his life, conquered musical Vienna. Swafford frames Brahms's life with performance of the Fourth Symphony at the Musikverein on 7 March 1897. Already dying from liver cancer, earns the resounding admiration of the audience: ovation roared on and on until it became almost unbearable, for the audience and for Brahms (p. 4). Swafford narrates the same scene again at the end of his book to prove, after the wide periplus of Brahms's life and struggles, just how difficult the winning of admiration has been: At the end of the symphony the ovation roared on and on, hats and handkerchiefs waving all over the hall, men of the Philharmonic on their feet bellowing and waving along with the crowd. stood weeping quietly in the torrent of love the Viennese were giving (p. 618). The scene is indeed tear-producing, since died less than month later, on 3 April. Swafford acknowledges his debt to two of Brahms's early biographers. Both Max Kalbeck's four-volume Johannes (1912-21) and Florence May's Life of (1905) provide eye-witness information about their subject; Kalbeck and May knew personally. The legend of being hauled out of bed by his father to play piano all night at brothel derives from Kalbeck's biography. So, too, does the legend of Brahms's impoverished early life. Swafford, drawing on Kalbeck, skilfully interweaves the history of these indignities into psychological portrait rich in detail. This is an immensely readable biography, with the force and sweep of Victorian novel. Moreover, Swafford confronts Brahms's problems with women head on. As Swafford claims, Brahms's misogyny amounts to a refuge from women, especially refuge from the feelings they aroused in him-the sexual, but also the tender and devoted (p. 122). His retreat from Clara Schumann, his broken engagement with Agathe von Siebold, and his teasing but idle references to pretty girls strewn throughout his letters, reveal his tendency to glorify women-on the condition that they remain unavailable sexually. Love, to Brahms, was the corollary of frustration, yearning, musicality, suffering. His habit of frequenting prostitutes earned him reputation for accessibility: Streetwalkers affectionately called to him on the street and sought him out when they were short of cash (p. …