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By Root 1344 0

this is primarily a life of Brahms and the focus is on my man, his music lies at its center. Without the music, no point to the story. All the same, unlike many Brahms biographers I haven’t tried to include every piece he composed, and a biography is no place for ambitious new theories of the work. Rather, I examine all the major pieces and selected others, with the overriding goal of limning the biography of his art and its most salient terms—the terms in which Brahms thought about music, gleaned from the evidence of the music itself, from his surviving sketches, his words, and the responses of friends and critics. We shall see that thematic development, counterpoint, and form were the dominant technical terms in which Brahms and his age thought about music. I note that he had unique ideas about rhythm and meter and phrasing, which is something that entirely escaped the attention of his time. My musical examples are chosen mainly to illustrate particular aspects of his craft. Since the analytical literature on his music is extensive and I am writing for the listening public as well as for the profession, I have generally avoided technical language. There will be the occasional paragraph that is tricky for a nonmusician—I ask for a paragraph’s indulgence, now and then.

The personal echoes—the tool of feeling that worked together with the tools of thematic and contrapuntal and formal mastery—appear to come and go in his work. For someone so reserved, Brahms could be surprisingly forthcoming about the autobiographical elements. Eventually, though, he decided that the personal aspect excused nothing in the music; from then on he largely stopped talking about it. The point at which he seems to have reached that conclusion, paradoxically around the time of the profoundly autobiographical G Major Sextet, is as good a place as any to date the beginning of his full maturity. His songs, which he composed steadily from his teens onward, functioned at times (as with most composers) like a diary. That does not mean that every song is a diary entry. Whenever I examine the personal dimension of a piece, it is because Brahms left clues to that effect or the connection is inescapable. Just as often, especially in his maturity, he needed little more than the excitement of an idea, or of a particular performer, to inspire him. Un-Romantic, unpostmodern, but true.

I should mention that I began the book intending to explore the idea of Brahmsian lyricism as revealing the “feminine” side of a composer who on the surface, at least in his bearded age, was a cigar-smoking, salty-talking old bachelor and man’s man, egregiously if inconsistently misogynistic. (In fact a good deal of his life and work revolved around women, both his muses and probably the larger part of his audience.) During the writing, however, I found that having undergone a decade of obsession over gender in books and magazines and academic discourse—scholarly exegeses of “gay” and “straight” cadences in music, and theories of men and women speaking different languages and coming from different planets—I no longer have any sensible idea at all of what constitutes “male” and “female.” Are lyric melody and falling-away cadences feminine, and forte dotted figures and downbeat cadences masculine? Shameful stereotypes, surely! The future can deal with the “feminine” in Brahms, if the future is up to it. Besides, I’m more interested in the sexes in their messy relations than in their noble isolation.

THIS IS QUITE A DIFFERENT BOOK than my last, about composer Charles Ives. In large part, that is because as a historian I submit as humbly as possible to my subject and the nature of my material. I viewed Ives through an Ivesian prism, Brahms through a Brahmsian. One man was archetypically American, the other North German with a weakness for decadent Vienna. Besides being an idiosyncratic composer who constituted a kind of one-man milieu, Ives was a businessman and occasional philosopher, he rarely threw away anything, and his music demands much explanation and, in some degree, justification.