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By Root 1307 0

Brahms never tried to be anything but a composer and performer, was a creature of the Austro-German musical mainstream, threw away much, and wrote music that, while it welcomes analysis, demands relatively little explanation. Brahms’s work, among the most widely beloved bodies of music ever composed, has stood every conceivable test of time (which is not to say it is beyond criticism, only that it does not need justification). It is Brahms the man and his context—especially in relation to Germany in the Romantic period, to Vienna as it approached the fin de siècle, and to his rival Richard Wagner—that have never been adequately examined.

As with all Brahms scholars, my mainstays have been Max Kalbeck and the volumes of the Briefwechsel, the surviving correspondence. I’ve made occasional but critical use of The Schumanns and Johannes Brahms by Eugenie Schumann, daughter of Robert and Clara, who observed the entire course of the relationship between Brahms and Clara Schumann and provides, in her discreet way, not only information but insight. Some of my sources have been translated into English, some not. When good translations were available for quotes, I used them (sometimes with revisions), otherwise I translated for myself. May’s Life of Brahms, nearly as thorough as Kalbeck’s but less intimate, was done independently and adds details that Kalbeck overlooked. Of modern biographies the classic is Karl Geiringer’s, first published in 1947, written from his experience as librarian of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and thus overseer of the largest collection of Brahms manuscripts and letters.

While one can’t commend the psychological insight of any of these three—Kalbeck is the only one who creates a figure who casts a shadow—they have long been fundamental to research and thinking about Brahms and likely always will be. For that reason none of the three is cited in the endnotes, except when a substantive quote is involved. From a basis in Kalbeck, the essential tales of Brahms’s life have been told many, many times. It is the implications and the setting that I have undertaken to fill in. There are in the endnotes occasional mini-essays on technical or other matters that did not fit in the text. These notes are meant to be browsed.

There are more of Brahms’s own words here than in any other study. I have tried to translate him, or revised previous translations, into more modern and idiomatic English. Most previous translations of his letters and words sound stiffer and more archaic than the German originals. To convey his oblique and ironical voice, I have used contemporary phrasing, contractions, and the like. This is especially important when Brahms is joking, as he often is, and often with a subtle grace and wit. The book is also full of letters and recollections of Brahms’s compatriots—among others, Josef Joachim, his oldest friend and collaborator, Clara Schumann, his great love and first of his muses, the legendary surgeon and musical amateur Theodor Billroth, and Elisabet von Herzogenberg, who for nearly a decade may have been the person Brahms most trusted for criticism (she has gotten grievously short shrift in previous biographies). I’ve made more use than any other biographer of the memoirs of composer, critic, and Brahms friend Richard Heuberger, in which we find the clearest record of Brahms’s preoccupation with Wagner and his despair over the state of music. The words of these and other figures form the dialogue of the story, a colloquy on art and life that went on for decades among those who were intimately involved with Brahms and his music.

My method as a biographer is to weave together the best and most relevant existing scholarship with my own research and conclusions. I hope this book will stand as an echo of Kalbeck’s and May’s early biographies, from a perspective on the other side of Modernism. I hope also to complement recent surveys of the music, especially Michael Musgrave’s The Music of Brahms, Malcolm MacDonald’s in Brahms, and Reinhold Brinkmann’s admirable book on the Second Symphony,