Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [1]
Introduction
A HUNDRED YEARS AGO as of this writing, on April 3, 1897, Johannes Brahms died in Vienna. The city gave him one of the grandest funerals ever seen in a place that loves extravagant funerals. Brahms was a prophet very much honored in his adopted country and even, belatedly, in his own. When he died the flags in the harbor of his native Hamburg flew at half-mast. It was an uncommon tribute from a mercantile, matter-of-fact town to an elusive master of an elusive art. North German Hamburg, and Vienna, which is like nothing but Vienna—the two cities marked the poles of his life and career.
“My God, what do you want?” Brahms exclaimed in later years to a friend who had tried to call him underappreciated. “I’ve gotten far enough!” Soon after, at the inauguration of a new concert hall in Zürich, he looked up to the ceiling to find likenesses of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. Two decades before that, in the wake of his First Symphony, one of the leading conductors in Europe had proclaimed the formula “the three great B’s of music,” the others being his companions on the ceiling in Zürich. 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 at 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. Gustav Mahler, the prophetic genius of the next generation whose early symphonies Brahms knew, could only say of his own achievement, “My time is yet to come.” He meant, “when I am dead.” In one way or another, most composers since Mahler have said the same. As far as Brahms was concerned, the heyday of his music was his own lifetime. His ultimate fear was that when his milieu fell apart, as was happening before his eyes, so would his audience. But still he knew that he had triumphed as few composers have ever done in their own era, and had done it under incredible conditions: introduced to the world at age twenty as the heir of Beethoven and the Messiah of music, having to grow to maturity with that sword hanging over him.
It is perhaps an inevitable human consequence and balancing-out that none of it made him happy. Given his personality, at once blustery and withdrawn, it is also inevitable that as the withering glare of renown turned on him, Brahms would retreat into himself, revealing less and less, placing the finely wrought mask of his music between himself and the world. Near the end of his life he exploded to old friends: “I have no friends!”
The world that he wanted to keep at bay included the necessary evil of biography. Early in his career he wrote Clara Schumann: “What would become of all historical research and biographies if undertaken with an eye to the susceptibilities of the subject?” In later years, he lectured a potential biographer in the opposite doctrine: “The chief consideration, in the selection of material for a biography of an artist or author, should be whether the facts in question were of a nature to make the artist, whom we love and honor in his art, also win our esteem as a man.” Material contrary to the honor of a great man, he had concluded, must be obliterated. So he destroyed by fire and water much of the record of his life that he could get his hands on.
Did he hope to avoid the predations of biography entirely? No, he was too realistic for that. If his work had any chance of survival, biography was part of the game. Did he have something terrible to hide? Perhaps terrible to him, perhaps not so unusual from the perspective of our time, perhaps nothing so terrible in any case. His craving for prostitutes, the only major peccadillo we know of in his adulthood, was nothing remarkable for a bachelor in his day in Germany and Austria.
Still, whatever his reasons for hiding from history, and however incompletely he succeeded, his attempt had its effects. The triumph of his music, contrary to his fears, did not begin to slacken from the