Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [3]
Over the course of the century since he died, however, Brahms’s attempts to manipulate history, though they tend to dissolve under close scrutiny, have indeed resulted in the kind of portrait he would have liked. On the whole, scholars have left him the lofty Master on the pedestal. Most of the important studies—including those of Karl Geiringer and Walter Niemann, and the recent one by Malcolm MacDonald—are divided between a brisk survey of his life and a lengthy examination of his work. Their assumption seems to be that there are not enough sources available for an intimate look at Brahms the man. And perhaps scholars have been a little overawed by the figure on the pedestal, and thus reluctant to read between the lines or illuminate the shadows.
In other words, biographers on the whole have left Brahms the privacy he wanted, have not attempted to draw him in light and shade, and have left the details to two exhaustive early works: the four volumes of Johannes Brahms, published in German over the years 1912–21 by his friend Max Kalbeck, and the two-volume Life of Brahms in English from 1905, by his piano student Florence May. Between those two writers the available facts are largely parceled out. Both authors knew Brahms close up, in the constrained way he allowed anyone to know him. Yet while both authors cover his life more dutifully than any later ones, neither study is satisfactory for a modern reader. Kalbeck’s is voluminous but inchoate, the details crowding out the big picture and the story. (Mainly for that reason, his volumes have never appeared in English.) Florence May, for all her labors and her insider’s understanding of the musician’s life, did not attempt to probe beneath the formidable veneer of her hero.
Meanwhile, as far as we have discovered in a hundred years, there are in the story none of what we Americans call “smoking guns”—no dramatic, revealing developments. Kalbeck remains the essential source, fleshed out largely by May, a row of personal memoirs, and the volumes of surviving letters. At the same time, this century has turned up no serious and sustained attempts to understand Brahms as a person, in the context of his art and his age.
My book is that attempt. On the hundredth anniversary of his death, as a testament from the New World to the Old, I have set out to paint the fullest portrait possible with the material Brahms and his observers left us, to place him in the context of his place and time, to relate his life to his music to the degree that the two can confidently be said to relate. I do that as Brahms’s music enters the period on the other side of the era we still call Modernist.
FOR MYSELF, only half-jokingly, I’ve called my project Brahms ohne Bart, “Brahms without beard.” In that respect I am building on current scholarship. Years ago I was startled to come across a portrait of the composer in his handsome, thin, smooth-cheeked thirties. Only later did Brahms become the familiar bearded bear. And only in the last decade or so have we begun to realize to what degree his music grew out of his life and feelings—especially his experiences in the years Vorbart, before beard. In the process, the once-common wisdom of Brahms the abstractionist has faded. As with most common wisdom, there is something to that, but it is only part of the picture.
If our age has begun to understand the searing experiences that lie beneath the magisterial surface of Brahms’s music, it becomes necessary to reexamine what we