Johannes Brahms: A Biography - Softcover

Swafford, Jan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0333725891 ISBN 13: 9780333725894

Publisher: Macmillan, 1999

Synopsis

In an expansive study Johannes Brahms emerges from Jan Swafford's book is not a bearded eminence but rather an assemblage of contradictions. He grew up in grinding poverty and as a teenager was forced to play the piano in brothels. Recognized by his teachers as a stupendous talent, Robert Schumann proclaimed Brahms at only twenty-years-old to be the saviour of German music. Brahms spent the rest of his life living up to the that prophecy. He experienced triumphs few artists have enjoyed in their lifetime, yet lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world.

About this title

Review

"A mighty attempt to integrate [Brahms's] puzzling persona ... with the human reality [of] Brahms's music.... Absorbing".

-- THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

From the Back Cover

Proclaimed the new messiah of Romanticism by Robert Schumann when he was only twenty, Johannes Brahms dedicated himself to a long and extraordinarily productive and creative career. In this book, Jan Swafford sets out to reveal the little-known Brahms: the boy who grew up in mercantile Hamburg and played piano in beer halls among prostitutes and drunken sailors; the fiercely self-protective man who thwarted future biographers by burning papers, scores, and notebooks late in his life. Making unprecedented use of the remaining archival material, Swafford offers richly expanded perspectives on Brahms's youth, on his difficult romantic life -- particularly his longstanding relationship with Clara Schumann -- and on his professional rivalries with Liszt and Wagner. Judicious, compassionate, and full of insight into Brahms's human complexity as well as his music, Johannes Brahms is an indispensable biography.

Edition details

• Publisher: Macmillan
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0333725891
• ISBN 13: 9780333725894
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 736