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Summary: review quotes from Cleveland Plain Dealer
Review: "The brilliant and magisterial book is a very good bet to supersede all its predecessors and become the definitive study of Johannes Brahms....It is thorough, well-balanced, superbly written, provocative, wide ranging and eminently fair...This is a wonderfully readable and immensely useful book"
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Summary: The ONLY Brahms biography!
Review: As a music major in college, I read lots of books on music, including many composer biographies. I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed Mr. Swafford's book on the life of Brahms. I am amazed at the thickness of the book, despite the fact that Brahms tried to discourage future biographies by destroying many personal items, such as letters and scores. Many musical biographies tend to focus more on the music than the composer. Swafford's book takes a very itimate look at Brahms the man and how it influenced his work.
The only shortcoming of this book is that it may be a little too academic for most readers. The reading is a tad difficult from time to time, but I still had fun with it.
If you are even remotely interested in Johannes Brahms, I suggest you buy this book because it is an excellent read, and you'll learn a lot! Also recommended is Jan Swafford's "Vintage Guide to Classical Music".
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Summary: A great portrait of a MAN, not a COMPOSER
Review: 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.
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Summary: A great portrait of a MAN, not a COMPOSER
Review: 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.
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Summary: Arguably the best Brahms biography yet
Review: 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.
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Summary: A Delight For Fans of Brahms
Review: 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.
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Summary: Terrific Book, This is THE book to read on Brahms!
Review: I have been reading and re-reading this book for months. I enjoyed some passages so much that I read them several times! I just love it! Swafford's writing style is terrifically engaging and I feel I have a close and personal understanding of one of history's greatest composers. This book has become a great inspiration for me.
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Summary: Terrific Book, This is THE book to read on Brahms!
Review: I have been reading and re-reading this book for months. I enjoyed some passages so much that I read them several times! I just love it! Swafford's writing style is terrifically engaging and I feel I have a close and personal understanding of one of history's greatest composers. This book has become a great inspiration for me.
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Summary: An engaging and refreshing new look at the old master.
Review: 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.
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Summary: Swafford's Brahms
Review: 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.
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