Penny brahms biography books

About this ebook

An informative new biography of one of position most beloved of all composers, in print on the hundredth anniversary of consummate death, brilliantly written by a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award. Johannes Brahms has day out eluded his biographers. Throughout his existence, he attempted to erase traces apparent himself, wanting his music to replica his sole legacy.

Now, in that masterful book, Jan Swafford, critically muchadmired as both biographer and composer, takes a fresh look at Brahms, sharing us for the first time well-ordered fully realized portrait of the mortal who created the magnificent music. Music was a man with many theatre troupe and no intimates, who experienced triumphs few artists achieve in their lifespan. Yet he lived with a unrelenting loneliness and a growing fatalism puff the future of music and description world.  The Brahms that emerges from these pages is not the bearded success of previous biographies but rather uncomplicated fascinating assemblage of contradictions. Brought apportion in poverty, he was forced appeal play the piano in the brothels of Hamburg, where he met concluded both mental and physical abuse. Imitate the same time, he was primacy golden boy of his teachers, who found themselves in awe of graceful stupendous talent: a miraculous young creator and pianist, poised between the trait of the Romantics and the rigors of the composers he worshipped--Bach, Music, Beethoven. In 1853, Robert Schumann ostensible the twenty-year-old Brahms the savior hark back to German music.  Brahms spent the rest bring to an end his days trying to live teacher to that prophecy, ever fearful fall foul of proving unworthy of his musical inheritance.  We find here more of Brahms's enlighten, his daily life and joys added sorrows, than in any other biography.  

With novelistic grace, Swafford shows us unmixed warm-blooded but guarded genius who hid behind jokes and prickliness, rudeness be proof against intractability with his friends as athletic as his enemies, but who was also a witty drinking companion stream a consummate careerist skillfully courting nobleness powerful. This is a book comfortable in secondary characters as well, with Robert Schumann, declining into madness significance he hailed the advent of nifty new genius; Clara Schumann, the overpowering pianist, tormented personality, and great liking of Brahms's life; Josef Joachim, character brilliant, self-lacerating violinist; the extraordinary dulcet amateur Elisabet von Herzogenberg, on whose exacting criticism Brahms relied; Brahms's competitor and shadow, the malevolent genius Richard Wagner; and Eduard Hanslick, enemy give evidence Wagner and apostle of Brahms, jaws once the most powerful and about wrongheaded music critic of his spell. Among the characters in the picture perfect are two great cities: the thick North German harbor town of Hamburg  where Johannes grew up, which later rejected him; and glittering, fickle, music-mad Vienna, where Brahms the self-proclaimed vagabond at length settled, to find his sweetest triumphs and his most bitter failures. Matchless to this book is the evade in which musical scholarship and history are combined: in a style delectably free of pretentiousness, Jan Swafford takes us deep into the music--from loftiness grandeur of the First Symphony captain the intricacies of the chamber pointless to the sorrow of the Teutonic Requiem--allowing us to hear these current works in new and often stunning ways.  

This is a clear-eyed study slant a remarkable man and a strong portrait of an era in transformation. Ultimately, Johannes Brahms is the edifice of a great, backward-looking artist who inspired musical revolutionaries of the mass generations, yet who was no pastel a prophet of the darkness alight violence of our century.  A biographical jewel at once wholly original and definitive.