Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [4]
While avoiding unsupported speculation or psychologizing, I have tried to show the human reality behind Brahms’s music—not only the individual reality of my subject, but the reality of being a musician at the summit of his trade in the nineteenth century, in a time of relative peace in Europe, of middle-class prosperity and concomitant passion for music, in a time when music was called, in Walter Pater’s celebrated phrase, “the art to which all other arts aspire.” That encapsulated the nineteenth century’s view of tonal art, which was only natural given the unprecedented power of the work that had emerged, much of it from Vienna, during the previous century and a half.
Brahms composed for himself first, for a few close friends second, and for the bourgeois audience third. This was his approach in assessing his work: What do I think? What will he think? What will she think? What will they think? So in writing I asked, What did it mean to be a musician in nineteenth-century Europe? What were the struggles, the pressures, the expectations of musicians? What were the terms in which Brahms thought about his own and other music? What were the terms of his friends, who included some of the finest performers and most sophisticated amateurs of the day? What were the terms of his critics and of the music-loving, middle-class public? How did those terms intersect and diverge? How did these various groups talk about music, when music was in its prime?
In many ways the process of becoming a first-rank musician then was much the same as in any other age, a matter of unrelenting discipline, of ambitious parents and teachers working with an extraordinary talent, of endless hours in lonely rooms while the world outside pursues the normal course of life. What does that do to one’s psyche, and to one’s relations with the world outside music? How is that inflected by growing up when music, for the first time, was dominated by the looming presence of almost mythical creative giants: Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert? Added to those inspirations and intimidations, what happens to a hypersensitive prepubescent boy who is required to play the piano all night in cheap dives?
To get behind the beard I’ve had to read between my subject’s words and deeds, to hold them up to the story and the other characters. In a much-cited letter Brahms wrote his great muse: “Passions are not natural to mankind, they are always exceptions or excrescences.… The ideal and the genuine man is calm both in his joy and in his sorrow. Passions must quickly pass or else they must be hunted out.” This has always been called the credo of a reticent North German who indeed tried (only sometimes successfully) to hunt out his passions and destroy them. That is, however, only one dimension of Brahms’s words. Also crucial is that they were written to a woman of genius who was in fact prone to hysteria, and one, moreover, whom he had in effect just thrown over. For a full understanding of what this famous letter reveals about both characters, we need to examine all these facets. Likewise it is only between the lines of letters and diaries, wisps of reminiscence, intersections of places, events, and compositions, that we can trace the long, sad passion of the aging Brahms for a young woman, and how it affected his relationship with her mother.
Naturally the story of an artist includes the story of the work, but the relation between the two is not simple. An artist’s