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'Johannes Brahms: A Biography' by Jan Swafford

In The Case Of Brahms, Music Makes The Man

Sunday, January 18, 1998

By Robert Croan, Post-Gazette Music Critic

	Johannes Brahms: A Biography By Jan Swafford Knopf $35.00

In his introduction to this lengthy, painstakingly researched study, Jan Swafford - a composer who has previously written a major biography of Charles Ives - differentiates between a brisk survey of a composer's life and an examination of his works.

Concentrating on the man, Swafford says his project has been ``Brahms without beard'' - the handsome, smooth-cheeked composer we see in portraits of Brahms in his 30s, rather than the more familiar ``bearded bear'' of his later years.

The works are included, and occasionally analyzed in brief, but they are referred to mostly in the context of Brahms' experiences.

At the start, Swafford explains Brahms' place in history:

``If Brahms was not the equal of Bach and Beethoven and knew it, he was the only composer of his generation writing chamber and symphonic music on their level of ambition, craft and originality, and he knew that, too. Among his prophecies was that in those respects he was the end of the line. Once again, in his terms, he was correct.''

Brahms, more than any other composer of his century, had a sense of history. In his music, he constantly referred to the forms and techniques of earlier times. In his personal life, however, he did everything to thwart historians, destroying letters, musical sketches and almost everything else that might preserve his image.

He was also shy, a loner despite his well-known relationship with Clara Schumann - before and after the death of her composer-spouse, Robert.

Swafford paints that relationship as essentially platonic, determined by several factors in Brahms' psyche that the author attributes to youthful sexual experiences in brothels, where Brahms made a meager living entertaining clients at the piano.

``He fell in love with virgins, he bedded with whores,'' Swafford tells us.

As for Clara, he put her on a pedestal that made it unlikely he could bring himself to think of her in real physical terms.

Robert, on the other hand, seems to have been bisexual, and the young Brahms may have been at some point an object of his desire. By the time Brahms entered the Schumann household, however, Robert was so far down the road to a mental breakdown that any significant relationship would have been all but impossible.

Brahms himself was always trying to prove his masculinity:

``He decided to lower his embarrassingly high voice by doing vocal exercises of his own devising, and to strengthen the vocal apparatus by the method of shouting above the din of Singverein rehearsals. The result of this regimen, besides annoying the singers, was to give himself a voice permanently hoarse and barking, while still rather high. ... Given his disappointing vocal endowment and physical size, Brahms would be forced to rely on cigars, alcohol, gruffness, racy jokes, and eventually on beard and girth, to furnish

him with manliness.''

Unfortunately, most of Swafford's writing is not this vivid. Much of the book is just dull, in part perhaps because Brahms' life was neither colorful

nor particularly interesting apart from his music.

The author reiterates many historical facts of the Romantic era – the artistic and personal differences between Brahms and Wagner, the critic Eduard Hanslick who elevated Brahms because he hated Wagner so much, and the effects of post-Beethoven trauma that caused Brahms to wait until he was 43 before completing his first symphony.

This may be the most complete and up-to-date study of Brahms the man, but it doesn't bring this composer to life as successfully as some earlier books - notably the one by Karl Geiringer - that concentrated on his musical development.

That, after all, is what Brahms was all about. In his life, it would seem, the music explains the man, rather than the other way around.