Johannes Brahms_ A Biography - Jan Swafford [5]
In other words, an artist’s work distills everything an artist is, interacting with the nature of the art as guided and interpreted by the culture. The particular traditions are mutable, cultural; the nature of the interaction is universal. Thus the significance in the arts, tangential but persistent, of biography. The art is the vital thing. Everything else—biography, technical analysis, theory, psychology—is a prism that can turn up matters of value, but cannot encompass the art.
THE FAMILIAR PORTRAIT of Brahms has been of a creator whose work stands on its own abstract integrity. In contrast, everyone who knew him understood that his earlier music used hidden symbols to represent his life and the people in it, and that throughout his life he turned his sorrows and joys into music. Clara Schumann wrote of one work: “This piece seems to me neither more nor less than the expression of his own heart’s anguish. If only he would for once speak as tenderly!” Max Kalbeck exclaimed over the ebullient opening of the G Major Quintet, “Brahms in the Prater!” and Brahms replied, “You’ve got it!”
Still, during the last decades as the personal experiences adumbrated in Brahms’s music have been rediscovered, some writing on the arts has swung toward a position that can distort the nature and purpose of art. To put it in the context of my subject: A common illusion of the past was that Brahms epitomized the “purity” of music, an abstract perfection nearly free of personality, biography, and setting. A common illusion of the present is that art is little but setting, autobiography, hormones. This is the post-Marxian, deconstructed, pop-psychology version of the artist, whose archetype is Andy Warhol: an art pursued for the purpose of getting rich and powerful and famous, and so mainly of interest in what it tells us about this celebrity who so seduces and deceives us.
As I hope to show, Brahms refutes those assumptions, the clichés both of his own time and of ours. Out of the highest idealism, and at the same time hardheadedly and without illusions, he created a body of work at once remote and personal, atavistic and of an age and prophetic. In the process he employed his own life and feelings, without depending on them any more than on his superb craftsmanship. Much current biography looks at art for what it tells us about the artist, which is to say: about the Celebrity. From my own experience as an artist, I say that while doing art may help put its creator’s feelings to rest, when it comes to the work those feelings are one tool among others.
In other words, I don’t believe the meaning of art lies in autobiography. Autobiography is the part of the artist’s tool-chest that grounds the work in the reality of life and feeling—something necessary and incapable of being faked. Autobiography is the foundation in breathing life that every art requires. But it is only a foundation, not the purpose or point. A great work is great in large part because of what it tells us not about the artist but about ourselves and the world we inhabit, including the world of sounds. The more an art speaks to our selves whoever we are, and our world wherever we are, the more “universal” it is. Accordingly, I will be concerned here not so much with what Brahms’s art tells us about his life and times, as what his life and times tell us about his art, which is as nearly universal as anything Western tradition has produced.
So while