johannes brahms a biography jan swafford

With novelistic grace, Swafford shows us a warm-blooded but guarded genius who hid behind jokes and prickliness, rudeness and intractability with his friends as well as his enemies, but who was also a witty drinking companion and a consummate careerist skillfully courting the powerful. We find here more of Brahms's words, his daily life and joys and sorrows, than in any other biography. Brahms spent the rest of his days trying to live up to that prophecy, ever fearful of proving unworthy of his musical inheritance. In 1853, Robert Schumann proclaimed the twenty-year-old Brahms the savior of German music. At the same time, he was the golden boy of his teachers, who found themselves in awe of a stupendous talent: a miraculous young composer and pianist, poised between the emotionalism of the Romantics and the rigors of the composers he worshipped-Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.

Brought up in poverty, he was forced to play the piano in the brothels of Hamburg, where he met with both mental and physical abuse. The Brahms that emerges from these pages is not the bearded eminence of previous biographies but rather a fascinating assemblage of contradictions. Yet he lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world. Brahms was a man with many friends and no intimates, who experienced triumphs few artists achieve in their lifetime.

Now, in this masterful book, Jan Swafford, critically acclaimed as both biographer and composer, takes a fresh look at Brahms, giving us for the first time a fully realized portrait of the man who created the magnificent music. Throughout his life, he attempted to erase traces of himself, wanting his music to be his sole legacy. Johannes Brahms has consistently eluded his biographers. An illuminating new biography of one of the most beloved of all composers, published on the hundredth anniversary of his death, brilliantly written by a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Johannes brahms a biography jan swafford