Jan Swafford
Johannes Brahms
Knopf, 736 pp., $ 35
Johannes Brahms’s nightmare has come true, a century after his death: a mammoth biography that examines virtually every day of his life, every thought in his head. The composer burned many of his letters and asked his confidants to do the same. He despised the notion that a composer’s life could aid in understanding his music. “I wrote that requiem for my mother!” he once growled. When a volume of Beethoven’s correspondence was published, Brahms was aghast: “No one can do me less of a favor than to print letters of mine,” he wrote (in a letter that has survived). The Beethoven letters had done nothing but expose “features so unwelcome that it would have been preferable to be kept in ignorance of them.”
The biographer Jan Swafford will stand for no such ignorance of Brahms. He goes after his quarry with palpable glee. “It has been my aim to take him off the pedestal,” he writes, “to get behind the beard.” The “common illusion” that Brahms “epitomized the “purity” of music” must be dispelled.
Yet somehow, after 700 unsparing pages, this “illusion” is not dispelled. Brahms remains atop his pedestal. Music — certainly Brahms’s — is not autobiography, and no amount of psychological conjecture can make it so. And yet, a life can tickle a reader’s fancy for its own sake — as Brahms’s, rich and majestic, happens to do. After all, even idealistic young music students have been known to wonder, What exactly was the nature of his relationship with Clara Schumann (widow of the composer Robert and one of the finest pianists of the age)? More specifically, Did they or didn’t they?
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833, and it will come as no surprise, given music history, that his father was a professional musician. Johann Jakob Brahms was only a beer-garden player — not so elevated as Johann Beethoven or Leopold Mozart — but he usually earned enough to feed his family of five. He had no higher ambition for his elder son than that he grow up to play in the Hamburg Philharmonic.
Young “Hannes” quickly took to the piano and began to invent pieces of his own. When he was 13, he was sent by his cash-needy father to the bawdy houses by the waterfront, where he entertained the rough element with gypsy songs, quadrilles, and sailor’s ballads.
Swafford places great stress on this experience (which lasted less than a year), arguing that it accounted for “shadows” on Brahms’s consciousness and his complicated relations with women. He writes, in one of his typical psychoanalytic flights, “As with the poetry on the whorehouse piano, [Brahms] needed to create refuges in his mind. So he withdrew into a hall of mirrors where he could refract his identity.”
Swafford also dwells — obsessively, lasciviously — on Brahms’s looks, his “sheer attractiveness.” Over and over, he describes him as “a slight, girlish boy, . . . . fair and pretty as a girl,” with “maidenly features, . . . . forget-me-not eyes,” and “long blond hair” framing a face that was “girlishly pretty — virginal and innocent.” He suggests, with no basis whatever, that men in the taverns may have taken liberties with him. It is not the only instance in which Swafford reaches farther than his materials warrant.
The breakthrough year for Brahms was 1853, when he was 20 and set out to make his mark on the world. He first toured, as an accompanist, with the Hungarian violinist Eduard Remenyi and later joined with a far more important violinist, Joseph Joachim, who would become a lifelong friend and collaborator. (It was for Joachim that Brahms wrote his violin concerto, a masterpiece of that repertory.) When Joachim and Brahms performed for the music-besotted Georg V of Hanover, he pronounced the young man “little Beethoven.” Brahms was soon moving in the highest circles, where he encountered such luminaries as Liszt, whose freewheeling musical approach he rejected emphatically. (Brahms would later write, “My fingers often itch to do battle, to become the anti-Liszt.”)
In July of that year, Brahms’s parents wrote to inquire after their golden boy’s progress. Joachim answered for him: “His purity, his independence, . . . and the singular wealth of his heart and intellect find sympathetic utterance in his music, just as his whole nature will bring joy to all who come into spiritual contact with him.” It was a common observation about Brahms, who captivated practically everyone he met and who won a following that was madly loyal and adoring.
It was in September — still 1853 –that Brahms had his fateful rendezvous with the Schumanns. After hearing a sampling of pieces that Brahms had composed, Schumann said to him, “You and I understand each other.” That night, he recorded in his diary, “Visit from Brahms (a genius).”
Swafford, of course, supplies a base interpretation: Schumann, you see, ” was enchanted by Brahms at first sight,” because he “was so appealing to look at; there was something burning in his blue eyes that belied the delicate features and the shyness.” Swafford goes on to commit the worst outrage of his book, when he muses, “Was the older man attracted to Brahms? Was he bisexual?” He duly remembers Schumann’s “affairs with women and his passionate connection to Clara” but alleges that “he was still attracted to handsome and talented youths,” of whom “Johannes the Fair was the last . . . perhaps the most beautiful, certainly the most gifted.” This, about Schumann, than whom few men in history have ever been more woman-loving and -craving.
Shortly after meeting Brahms, Schumann, eager to become his champion, wrote a controversial essay, “New Paths,” in which he heraided Brahms as the messiah of music, come to rescue it from the clutches of Liszt and the dastardly, dangerous Wagner. The path Brahms was treading was in fact an old one –winding from Bach to Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. The essay made Brahms — only 20 and a long way from musical maturity — famous all over the continent and placed on him a tremendous burden. Swafford rightly perceives that Brahms’s vindication of Schumann is his towering achievement.
In early 1854, catastrophe struck: Schumann went irretrievably insane. With the composer confined to an asylum near Bonn, Brahms grew closer to Clara, protecting her, encouraging her, and watching over her seven children. Was he standing in for Robert, to whom he owed so much, or betraying him? For two years, while her husband lingered, Clara “existed in some limbo between wife and widow,” as Swafford puts it, and Brahms fell deeply in love with her. The letters they exchanged during this period are so achingly poignant that they are almost unbearable to read. The weighty, unspoken question was, What will happen once Robert goes? Swafford presumes to speak for Brahms when he writes, “He wanted him to get well; he wanted him to die.” When Schumann did die, in July 1856, Brahms did not marry Clara, and he would never marry anybody else – – in part because he could not find in another the ideal that, to him, was his friend’s wife.
Clara later wanted her children to know what Brahms had meant to her: “He strengthened my heart as it was about to break, he lifted my thoughts, lightened, when possible, my spirits.” She implored, “Believe all that I, your mother, have told you, and do not heed those small and envious souls who make light of my love and friendship, trying to bring up for question our beautiful relationship, which they neither fully understand nor ever could.” Swafford writes that, for Brahms, Clara was “some inextricable tangle of mother [she was 14 years older] and forbidden lover,” his “strange and eternal bride, his love and his art and his life.”
From the 1860s on, Brahms lived in the capital of music, Vienna, of which he was a prized citizen. He was that rare composer, honored and wealthy in his own time. Never once did he have to stoop to a commission; he produced a steady stream of music that sold briskly to an appreciative public. Swafford notes that “music lovers of every stripe began growing up between Brahms’s Lullaby and his Requiem, from the cradle to the grave.” He had difficulty in giving birth to a symphony, but when he did, it was awe-inspiring — the conductor Hans von Bulow promptly dubbed it “Beethoven’s Tenth.”
Brahms was also, Swafford shows, an excellent (if sometimes prickly) friend and a noble spirit. He corresponded prolifically — not only with Clara — and he constantly gave money to those in need, often anonymously. He was collegial with the high, gentle with the low. He pulled strings for the powerless, sat by sickbeds. Of the touching gesture, he was a master: After an estrangement from Bulow, he sent him a slip of paper containing only a few bars from Mozart’s Magic Flute; he knew that his friend would think of the words sung with the notes — “Dear one, shall I see thee no more?” Brahms’s sense of right and wrong seems to have been exquisite (except, now and then, in the field of romance). When an ex-love interest bequeathed him a large sum, he ordered it deposited — without a word — in an account belonging to her widower. A liberal and republican, he was so repulsed by the anti-Semitism flaring up around him, he snapped, “Next week, I’m going to have myself circumcised!”
In Brahms’s final years — the 1890s — he was alarmed by the modernism closing in around him. Richard Strauss was composing clangorous tone poems; Debussy was doing strange things in Paris; Stravinsky was preparing for his rebellion in Russia. Brahms, the conservatives’ hero, was the culmination of the grand tradition that had begun with Bach and was now expiring. The story goes that Brahms was walking along the river with the young conductor and composer Mahler. Brahms complained that, after him, there would be nothing left — he was the last. Mahler, pointing to the water, exclaimed, “Look, Doktor! There goes the last wave!” Brahms, a modest man who could take a joke, chuckled heartily.
In the first months of 1897, Brahms became too sick to work and took to his bed for the first time in his long, vigorous life. He leafed through scores of Bach, marveling at what the old giant had wrought. A bust of Beethoven sat nearby. Until the end, Brahms was uncomplaining, stoic. After he died on April 3, he was laid to rest in Vienna’s Central Cemetery, alongside Beethoven and Schubert. The world — not always fooled in musical matters — knew what he was worth.
Swafford, who apparently does some composing on the side, subjects us to an occasional, “From my own experience as an artist . . . ,” which grates. More seriously, his prose can be pompous when he wants it to be magisterial. But make no mistake: His life of Brahms, for all its numerous flaws, is a stupendous feat — of scholarship, of assemblage, of thought. It will no doubt stand as the definitive work on Brahms, one of the monumental biographies in the entire musical library. Yet if the Brahms-seeker has only an hour, he should listen to the Requiem. If 45 minutes, one of the symphonies. If a half hour, the Handel variations. If only five minutes, a ballade or an intermezzo. If even less than that, a ditty from the Deutsche Volkslieder. There he will find the truth about the composer.
Oh, about Brahms and Clara? Swafford guesses that they didn’t.
Jay Nordlinger, associate editor and music critic of THE WEEKLY STANDARD, last wrote about the composer Gerald Finzi.
