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By Root 1284 0

day of his death but persisted through the Modernist century. Yet during that period, as millions took up his music, Brahms remained an oddly isolated figure, appearing irrelevant not only to Modernism but to his own time—especially in comparison to his mentor Schumann and his rivals Liszt and Wagner. In contrast to those three, Brahms destroyed many of his personal records and never wrote a word of aesthetics or criticism or direct comment on his own or anyone else’s music. His first foray into public musical politics, one embarrassing page in length, was also his last. Thereafter he wielded his influence behind the scenes, letting others fight it out onstage.

As a result, his story has remained shrouded, his art hard to place, his influence ambiguous, his person indistinct. At the same time his music, which unites magisterial perfection with lyrical warmth, a monumental style with whispering intimacy, lay in the hearts of listeners everywhere. Beyond the overwhelming presence of his music in the repertoire, his reputation has largely run in the course critics laid out in his own lifetime: Brahms the conservative, the abstractionist, the great unifier of Classical and Romantic streams. Beyond that have been the millions who love his music, and the musicians who admire it the way a bricklayer admires a straight, sturdy wall.

It is important to realize that Brahms has existed that way in history because he wanted to. Rather than avoiding biography, he attempted to keep his future biographers on a short leash. From an early period in his fame he realized that strangers might be interested in what he wrote in a letter, so he guarded his pen. Most of his personal papers, unpublished manuscripts, musical sketches, receipts, musings, juvenilia, everything in reach, he either tossed out or burned or committed to the nearest river. His maid was required to leave the lid of his wastebasket open at all times; it was his most important item of furniture.

It was not because he cared nothing for history that Brahms attempted to obliterate the record of his life. It was very much the reverse: he was in awe of history. To a degree perhaps beyond any composer up to his time—and like most to come—he was obsessed by the past. He was personally involved with the development of musicology in his era, and counted among his friends several of the figures who shaped that new discipline. He owned an important private collection of composers’ manuscripts, including their sketches and letters. Which is all to say: this eager student of history did everything he could to eradicate his own.

Yet he failed. Through carelessness, accident, perhaps here and there by design, a significant number of letters and a few sketches and juvenilia escaped annihilation. He failed also because one cannot put words together, no matter how discreetly, without revealing something to somebody who can read between the lines, especially when those lines are held up against the background of events. And he failed because now and then alcohol loosened his tongue, and in the decades of his fame there were people waiting to write down everything he said.

As a biographer, I can only be happy that Brahms failed in his efforts to restrain biographers. At the same time, as a composer myself, I have to admire him for the attempt. Brahms wanted the story of his music to be the story of his life. He did his best to live the same way, struggling relentlessly to escape the consequences of life and love. He wanted his biography to be the shining edifice of his music, and beyond that a brief and edifying story of exemplary service to art.

But biographers are devious, and sooner or later the attempt to hide behind his music in his life and in history becomes, of course, a theme of his biography. If in part that struggle was idealistic and exemplary, it was also temperamental. Brahms lived behind barricades of silence, jokes, sarcasm, flight, anger, and music. He hid also behind the flowing beard, the forget-me-not eyes, even behind the genius and generosity and fame. He studied Beethoven