Johannes Brahms: A Biography by Jan Swafford - Vintage Books (1999)
Seconding the opinion of absolutely no one, I would like to state for the record that my favorite movie is Fantasia 2000. Admittedly, my loyalty to what can charitably be termed an ‘uneven’ performance has something to do with nostalgia—my grandmother’s VHS collection consisted of nothing but Disney and Michael Flatley: Lord of the Dance—but I think there may be something else fueling my prolonged fascination with malicious mop buckets and sultry hippopotami. Despite my background in English literature and my acknowledged enthusiasm for ‘hundred dollar words,’ a part of me secretly agrees with Victorian art critic Walter Pater’s claim that “all art aspires towards the condition of music.” Instrumental music is fertilizer for the imaginative mind. A screaming violin, a ponderous oboe, an impish flute; these instruments and the sounds they produce can initiate mental journeys that vary greatly person to person—a kind of Goosebumps ‘choose your own adventure’ for the intellectually refined. Classical music allows access to an internal world that is always present, but often ignored whenever daily concerns and obligations demand attention. At its best, symphonic music provides a more direct channel to the human heart than any other medium. Although I will always chase after the fleeting pleasure released upon discovery of the perfect sentence—the spine-tingling sensation I enjoy when I light upon the right word—I know that language is limited, especially when it is called upon to articulate complex human emotions like desire, pain, and guilt. Our words will never be specific enough to convey the depth of our emotional responses, and part of the latent anxiety we must cope with on a daily basis has to do with convincing ourselves that the people we love know what we mean when we say that we feel ‘sad’ or ‘happy.’ The fact that love and pain are subjective causes endless frustration because there is no way to prove that we are being understood on a fundamental level. When we listen to classical music, when we willingly enter a realm that is mostly inexplicable and does not try to be otherwise, we feel, for a brief moment, that at least one other person in the universe has felt what we feel. The relief that floods my body whenever I realize that a composer has captured the violent ambiguities of my own emotions, and has further provided me with evidence of a kindred spirit, cannot be replicated in books or paintings or films. Sound flows in a primordial vein that predates any attempt to communicate via visual representation in words and symbols. It doesn’t happen often, but this ‘pure’ reaction to symphonic music cannot be understated. When I listen to a perfectly composed piece of classical music, I no longer feel that I am alone.
Johannes Brahms: A Biography by Jan Swafford is both a biography and an introduction to musical theory. Having enjoyed classical music all my life, it is somewhat astonishing that I have never really noticed or understood the mechanical side of composition. Johannes Brahms, more than any other composer, embodied what it meant to create during a time of transition—at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the Modern era. He felt the urgency of one whose values and contributions are relegated to the past before his own demise. He was as calculating and formulaic as Bach and Haydn, and probably more so than mischievous Mozart and temperamental Beethoven. He scorned Liszt and and his progressive New German School, but respected and admired Wagner, who actively sought the annihilation of beauty and harmony in instrumental music. Brahms extolled the old forms, but he made them his own, and he broke them down in ways less violent, but no more revolutionary, than the politically verbose modernists ruling Vienna. Writes Swafford:
Brahms was born into the atmosphere of German Romanticism and, laboring in a long period of sporadically interrupted but still unprecedented peace and prosperity across Europe, turned that spirit to his own eclectic and history-haunted purposes—his singular integration of conservative and progressive, Classical and Romantic, atavistic and prophetic. By the night of his last concert in the Musikverein, history appeared already to have rushed past Brahms and left him at once victorious and irrelevant, stranded on his lonely promontory. In that year approaching the last turn of the century before the millennium, Europe was falling toward unimaginable catastrophe, and the arts toward the corollary of Romanticism: the ferment and fever called Modernism.
Like many artists before him, Brahms was obsessed with fate and the immortality of his music. He could sense that the Classical era was coming to an end and was desperate to preserve his name alongside those of Bach and Beethoven. Thus, he strove to eliminate the man behind the music. He burned letters, censored biographies, and destroyed any piece of music that did not live up to his own expectations. He aimed to be as ‘pure’ in the historical record as the pieces lauded by Walter Pater in his critical essays. Despite the examples set by Beethoven and Mozart, both of whom led scandalous and highly-publicized lives, Brahms firmly believed that a true artist was one who existed only within the realm of his music. A true artist never created anything less than perfect. He never degraded himself with fleshy infatuations or monetary concerns. He sacrificed all earthly comforts to become a slave to the engine of artistic creation. Thus, writes Swafford,
…his story has remained shrouded, his art hard to place, his influence ambiguous, his persona indistinct. At the same time his music, which unites magisterial perfection with lyrical warmth, a monumental style with whispering intimacy, [lies] in the hearts of listeners everywhere…It was not because he cared nothing for history that Brahms attempted to obliterate the record of his life. It was very much the reverse: he was in awe of history. To a degree perhaps beyond any composer up to his time—and like most to come—he was obsessed by the past.
Besides an intimate psychological profile of Brahms the man and the crumbling Austrian Empire as a whole, Swafford also takes care to demonstrate the breadth of Brahms’ contributions as a composer. This is what makes Johannes Brahms: A Biography both an interactive educational text, and an innovative treatment of biography as a genre. Swafford’s account is roughly chronological, but he somehow manages to intersperse lessons on musical theory throughout his text. As Johannes Brahms gains in experience; as he forms relationships with artists such as Robert Schumann, Antonin Dvorák, and Joseph Joachim; as he confronts the oncoming storm of Wagner and the New Germans; Swafford demonstrates the effects these diverse influences had on his music. Thus, although Brahms was careful to erase the details of his life, we can learn something about him by examining his compositions alongside the contextual circumstances in which they were created. In other words, by dissecting the volatile artistic and social disturbances reverberating in late nineteenth-century Vienna, in reading the letters his contemporaries wrote to each other about Brahms, we can begin to form a hazy outline of his person. This is perhaps why Swafford spends so much time scrutinizing the technical aspects of each piece—Brahms’ treatment of counterpoint, harmony, and symphonic resolution. Writing about his pieces and the conditions under which they were written is, in many ways, the best way to write about Brahms. Describing the monumental Third Symphony, Swafford Writes:
The very idea of ending a heroic, monumental work like this might have seemed unthinkable if Brahms had not done it here, with incomparable grace. Fragments of melody from the whole symphony seem to gather until they return us to where we began: with the opening melody of the work, Schumann’s theme. Now, though, it is resolved into its true nature as a conclusion, in a gentle F major that flutters downward to its resolution, and slips into silence. The winds that began the symphony by stepping away from stability into uncertainty now end the piece in a pure, long-sustained F major chord. It is the transformation of Schumann’s theme from searching and heroic, major wrenched to minor, to the peaceful valediction that is the abstract but no less moving “meaning” of this symphony.
Swafford’s obvious enthusiasm, and the admirable care he bestows upon each movement and measure, makes it easy to follow along on Spotify. In fact, one of the reasons it took me so long to finish this biography is because I stopped to listen to each piece Swafford describes in order to make the most of his analysis. In the process, I found that I was learning just as much about composition as I was about the life of Johannes Brahms. I finished this masterful text with a greater appreciation for the artists who manage to bring together numerous instruments and melodies into a nuanced and stratified whole. Johannes Brahms: A Biography is by no means an easy book to read—it is probably the most challenging biography I’ve read since embarking upon this project last Fall. But the rewards are great. I hear classical music differently now, and I love it more than ever. It touches me on a deeper level now because I understand the cost in mental labor it demands for its existence. Jan Swafford, whose accolades as a writer are surpassed only by his accomplishments as a composer, is a man who knows the role that music can play in nurturing and healing the human soul. Listen to the Third Symphony in F major—you won’t regret it.
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