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In an expansive study Johannes Brahms emerges from Jan Swafford's book is not a bearded eminence but rather an assemblage of contradictions. He grew up in grinding poverty and as a teenager was forced to play the piano in brothels. Recognized by his teachers as a stupendous talent, Robert Schumann proclaimed Brahms at only twenty-years-old to be the saviour of German music. Brahms spent the rest of his life living up to the that prophecy. He experienced triumphs few artists have enjoyed in their lifetime, yet lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world.
A New York Times Notable Book "This brilliant and magisterial book is a very good bet to...become the definitive study of Johannes Brahms."--The Plain Dealer Judicious, compassionate, and full of insight into Brahms's human complexity as well as his music, Johannes Brahms is an indispensable biography. Proclaimed the new messiah of Romanticism by Robert Schumann when he was only twenty, Johannes Brahms dedicated himself to a long and extraordinarily productive career. In this book, Jan Swafford sets out to reveal the little-known Brahms, the boy who grew up in mercantile Hamburg and played piano in beer halls among prostitutes and drunken sailors, the fiercely self-protective man who thwarted future biographers by burning papers, scores and notebooks late in his life. Making unprecedented use of the remaining archival material, Swafford offers richly expanded perspectives on Brahms's youth, on his difficult romantic life--particularly his longstanding relationship with Clara Schumann--and on his professional rivalry with Lizst and Wagner. "[Johannes Brahms] will no doubt stand as the definitive work on Brahms, one of the monumental biographies in the entire musical library."--London Weekly Standard "It is a measure of the accomplishment of Jan Swafford's biography that Brahms's sadness becomes palpable.... [Swafford] manages to construct a full-bodied human being."--The New York Times Book Review
This book is the first comprehensive collection of the letters of Johannes Brahms ever to appear in English. Over 550 are included, virtually all uncut, and there are over a dozen published here for the first time in any language. Although he corresponded throughout his life with some of the great performers, composers, musicologists, writers, scientists, and artists of the day, and although thousands of his letters have survived, English readers have until now had scant opportunity to meet Brahms in person, through his words, and in his own voice. The letters in this volume range from 1848 to just before his death. They include most of Brahm's letters to Robert Schumann, over a hundred letters to Clara Schumann, and the complete Brahms-Wagner correspondence. They are joined by a running commentary to form an absorbing narrative, documented with scholarly care, provided with comprehensive notes, but written for the general music lover--the result is a lively biography. The work is generously illustrated, and contains several detailed appendices and an index.
First published in 2011. Johannes Brahms: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer. The second edition will include research published since the publication of the first edition and provide electronic resources.
The Life and Times of Johannes Brahms by Jim Whiting Pdf
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg, Germany, to a family that lived in extreme poverty. Yet by the time of his death he had become one of the most financially successful classical music composers who ever lived. It wasn t easy. His family had to move several times while Hannes (as he was nicknamed) was still a boy. He had to go to work when he was just 13, playing the piano in rough waterfront taverns in Hamburg. Often he wouldn t come home until dawn. Brahms received his first big break when he was 20. The composer Robert Schumann called him a genius and a young eagle. Even then, it still took him many years to become famous. While he is most noted for his symphonies and concertos, it is likely that more people know him for his Cradle Song, better known as Brahms s Lullaby, which millions of mothers have sung to their young children to lull them to sleep.
An illuminating new biography of one of the most beloved of all composers, published on the hundredth anniversary of his death, brilliantly written by a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award. Johannes Brahms has consistently eluded his biographers. Throughout his life, he attempted to erase traces of himself, wanting his music to be his sole legacy. Now, in this masterful book, Jan Swafford, critically acclaimed as both biographer and composer, takes a fresh look at Brahms, giving us for the first time a fully realized portrait of the man who created the magnificent music. Brahms was a man with many friends and no intimates, who experienced triumphs few artists achieve in their lifetime. Yet he lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world. The Brahms that emerges from these pages is not the bearded eminence of previous biographies but rather a fascinating assemblage of contradictions. Brought up in poverty, he was forced to play the piano in the brothels of Hamburg, where he met with both mental and physical abuse. At the same time, he was the golden boy of his teachers, who found themselves in awe of a stupendous talent: a miraculous young composer and pianist, poised between the emotionalism of the Romantics and the rigors of the composers he worshipped--Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. In 1853, Robert Schumann proclaimed the twenty-year-old Brahms the savior of German music. Brahms spent the rest of his days trying to live up to that prophecy, ever fearful of proving unworthy of his musical inheritance. We find here more of Brahms's words, his daily life and joys and sorrows, than in any other biography. With novelistic grace, Swafford shows us a warm-blooded but guarded genius who hid behind jokes and prickliness, rudeness and intractability with his friends as well as his enemies, but who was also a witty drinking companion and a consummate careerist skillfully courting the powerful. This is a book rich in secondary characters as well, including Robert Schumann, declining into madness as he hailed the advent of a new genius; Clara Schumann, the towering pianist, tormented personality, and great love of Brahms's life; Josef Joachim, the brilliant, self-lacerating violinist; the extraordinary musical amateur Elisabet von Herzogenberg, on whose exacting criticism Brahms relied; Brahms's rival and shadow, the malevolent genius Richard Wagner; and Eduard Hanslick, enemy of Wagner and apostle of Brahms, at once the most powerful and most wrongheaded music critic of his time. Among the characters in the book are two great cities: the stolid North German harbor town of Hamburg where Johannes grew up, which later spurned him; and glittering, fickle, music-mad Vienna, where Brahms the self-proclaimed vagabond finally settled, to find his sweetest triumphs and his most bitter failures. Unique to this book is the way in which musical scholarship and biography are combined: in a style refreshingly free of pretentiousness, Jan Swafford takes us deep into the music--from the grandeur of the First Symphony and the intricacies of the chamber work to the sorrow of the German Requiem--allowing us to hear these familiar works in new and often surprising ways. This is a clear-eyed study of a remarkable man and a vivid portrait of an era in transition. Ultimately, Johannes Brahms is the story of a great, backward-looking artist who inspired musical revolutionaries of the following generations, yet who was no less a prophet of the darkness and violence of our century. A biographical masterpiece at once wholly original and definitive.
A Guide to the Solo Songs of Johannes Brahms by Paul Stark Pdf
"The song translations by Stanley Appelbaum are excellent. Stark's commentaries are concise, intelligent, highly readable . . . Laymen and specialists alike will find [this book] a useful reference book to have on their shelves." —Fontes Artis Musicae "This book would be a warmly welcomed addition to the library of any lover of art song." —American Music Teacher "It is informative, insightful, illuminating, an invaluable resource for singers, teachers, coach-accompanists, highly recommended for anyone having anything to do with Brahms lieder." —Journal of Singing "Stark's understanding and affectionate discussion of the relationship between music and text draws the reader to examine more of Brahms's songs." —Choice Lucien Stark analyzes in detail more than 200 solo songs by Brahms and gives us translations of the texts. For performers, students, and teachers, this is a treasure-house of information and insight about a rich and varied repertoire.
This biography of Brahms is generally regarded as the finest study of the composer ever published in any language. It is based upon the great body of material in the archives of the Viennese Society of Friends, for which Dr. Geiringer was curator from 1930-1938, and which contains more than a thousand letters written by and to Brahms. These letters, exchanged with family and with his famous contemporaries, reveal his loneliness, grim humor, loyalty, painful shyness, and enthusiasm for the music of Beethoven and Schubert-moods that the self-effacing composer did not publicly display. Divided into sections on Brahms's solitary, scholarly existence and his fruitful composing career--including examinations of rare first drafts--the biography relates how crises in Brahms's personal life were translated into his music, and how he often managed to ignore or suppress them.
"Essential to the composer's method of song-writing was a harmony between musical form and poetic text. Sams takes us right to the heart of that creative method and helps to explain how and why a particular part of the text matches a particular piece of music. He includes a list of the motifs employed by Brahms to help show how the mind of the composer worked when seeking apposite music for the imagery of the poem."--BOOK JACKET.
Recollections of Johannes Brahms by Albert Dietrich,J. V. Widmann Pdf
Johannes Brahms studied the piano from the age of seven and theory and composition (with Eduard Marxsen) from 13, gaining experience as an arranger for his father's light orchestra while absorbing the popular all zingarese style associated with Hungarian folk music. In 1853, on a tour with the Hungarian violinist Reményi, he met Joseph Joachim and Liszt; Joachim, who became a lifelong friend, encouraged him to meet Robert Schumann. Fundamentally reserved, logical and studious, Brahms was fond of taut forms in his music, though he used genre distinctions loosely. In the piano music, for example, which chronologically encircles his vocal output, the dividing lines between ballads and rhapsody, and capriccio and intermezzo, are vague, such terms refer more to expressive character than to musical form. As in other media, his most important development technique in the piano music is variation, whether used independently (simple melodic alteration and thematic cross-reference) or to create a large integrated cycle in which successive variations contain their own thematic transformation (as in the Handel Variations).
The Music of Johannes Brahms by Bernard Jacobson Pdf
For too long Brahms has been considered a "heavy" or "thickly textured" composer. The author, who has made a special study of his music, shows how, once this misconception has been exploded, there are few obstacles left in the way of understanding this most misunderstood of romantic composers. Brahms's music looked both forward to the present day and backward to the early Polyphonists from its standpoint in the nineteenth century. Ranging freely across his entire output, the author discusses Brahms's rhythmic vitality, his symphonic thought, and individual approach to scouring. A meticulous and fastidious worker who destroyed more than he allowed to be published, Brahms the man was as complex a character as his music. The author provides an effortless guide to the many, frequently hidden, beauties of his works.
Johannes Brahms and Klaus Groth by Peter Russell Pdf
The relationship between the composer Johannes Brahms and the poet Klaus Groth was a very special one, and one that deserves greater recognition. Peter Russell has made careful selections from the 89 letters between the two that illuminate the personalities, lives and works of both men. Alongside the letters, Russell provides a substantial commentary that includes analyses of Brahms's music and critical assessment of Groth's poems.