Jan SwaffordReviews

This large (600+ pages as well as appendices, footnotes) is a comprehensive and scholarly biography; the reader needs to be prepared to put in the work to appreciate it fully. I was unable to understand the sections of musical analysis, even though they look to be at fairly basic level. That still left a large but well focussed text which takes one through every year of Brahm's life and his sprawling relationships with other composers, singers, critics, etc. It's an interesting search through a complicated personality who had many friends but whose behaviour towards them was often appalling. Swafford is American, and the non-American reader must be prepared for a somewhat cosy and American way of writing. He is plainly on Brahms' side (not always the case with biographers) and the book is written with affection but not sycophancy. If you have the time and interest, read it.

There is a lot here to like, so why am I only giving this ... large ... book 3.5 stars? Well, shoot, who knows about stars anyway -- it's all subjective, right? Anyhoo, I came away from Swafford's bio feeling like I had read a big lumpy book about a big lumpy man. With someone as ... crusty as JB was, it would have been nice to have had a biography that skipped about -- not lightweight, mind, but light-handed. That's not Swafford.

Apparently this book caused some controversy in musical circles because of Swafford's embracing stories of JB as a young'n playing piano in tough Hamburg bars and whorehouses ... and running with this as a thing that underlay a good hunk of his otherwise difficult-to-fathom personality. Charles Rosen, who is cited several times in this text, took Swafford to task for this in no uncertain terms, and Swafford stuck to his guns. Was he right to do so? Hell, I don't know -- it does feel, superficially, to make a kind of intuitive sense.

I will be grateful to this book for steering me in the direction of specific pieces of Brahms' music. But I confess it was a chore to get through all 600+ pages.½

This is another book that caught my eye in the new books area of our city's main library. One of those books that you take off the shelf and immediately know you have to read. It isn't like I am unfamiliar with classical music or composers but when I read the cover blurbs and a little bit of the introduction I knew I would find a lot to learn in this book.

In the introduction, Swafford suggests listening to the pieces he recommends as he talks about the individual composers and their pieces in his essays. I did just that but realized about halfway through the book that there would be no way to finish it without returning it to the library if I listened to every classical music piece on Spotify or Youtube. Nonetheless, I still ended up putting a bunch of music CDs on hold just because I want to listen to some of his suggestions more and I also spent whole evenings just watching classical music performances on Youtube....oh, and by the way, watch this one....I can't get enough of it....https://youtu.be/9rAd0-pTuU8. It is Dvorak's Violin Concerto in A Minor...the finale at the 23:20 mark just makes me smile.

One of the best parts of Language of the Spirit for me was learning about the history of classical music from medieval times to modern and the explanation of some of the jargon/terminology used. An essay introduces each historical musical period...baroque, classical, modern, etc...I was reminded of the World History class I had in high school which covered some of the same ground but via famous pieces of art rather than music.

I really wish I owned a copy of this book as it would be something I would return to in order to explore the works of a different composer each time...especially from the Classical period. I tend to really like the modernists like Bartok and Shostakovich but I also realized I like a lot of shorter pieces like Bach's sonatas and partitas, and as usual I have a strong affinity for string instruments, especially played solo or as part of a small ensemble.

Finally, Swafford is an engaging writer and you can tell he is passionate about many of the composers and their music. I was never bored and found myself deeply interested in all the essays and especially when I came to the individual essays on composers whose music I listen to frequently.

So, I highly recommended Language of the Spirit to anybody who loves classical music like I do and do exactly as the author recommends and listen as well as read.

3/22/22

Brahms is not the most obvious subject for a biography: he was a hard-working career musician, who put a lot of complexity into his music but kept his life almost ostentatiously simple. He was notoriously healthy, and never married or had a serious love-affair (plenty of flirtations, though, including one of forty years' duration with Clara Schumann). No-one has ever discovered any suggestion of him having sex with anyone other than a prostitute, but there's no mystery about the reasons for that: his experiences playing piano in sailors' dance-halls in Hamburg as a boy obviously left him with seriously distorted ideas about women and sexuality. But that's pretty much the only "dark spot" for biographers to illuminate, and it's soon dealt with.

Apart from that, there's the famous Brahmsians vs. Wagnerites divide that enlivened musical debate in the second half of the 19th century. Swafford has his fun with this, of course, but he also makes sure we understand that it was never quite as simple as that. Brahms himself was known to say positive things about Wagner's operas, and he owned a number of Wagner scores and knew them intimately. He often joked in later life that for an old man, the temptation to write operas was like the temptation to get married — he took care never to compete with Wagner on his own turf. There's also the bizarre way Brahms's (Jewish) former friend Hermann Levi became Wagner's preferred conductor after Hans von Bülow (whose wife had run away with Wagner) defected the other way to become the most respected interpreter of Brahms...

Even if his major works often took a while to work their way into the hearts of the public, Brahms was publishing a steady stream of stuff eminently suitable for middle-class people to play in their drawing-rooms or amateur choirs to sing, making him one of the first major composers to earn his living mostly from publications. Between the Wiegenlied ("Brahms's Lullaby") and the German Requiem, he pretty much offered a cradle-to-grave music service, with more Liebeslieder and Hungarian Dances than anyone could possibly want in between...

Swafford doesn't spend much time on this "mass-market" side of Brahms, but he does go into rewarding amounts of detail about the composition and reception of the symphonies, concertos and major chamber works. And that seems to be where this biography really scores: Swafford manages to make the mysterious and very technical process of composing music almost accessible for the non-musician. And that "almost" is only there because you do need at least a certain amount of background knowledge of music history and of basic concepts like forms and keys and time signatures to follow his explanations, without which you probably wouldn't be reading a book like this anyway.

The stress is on how Brahms built new and unexpected things on the existing structures of classical and romantic music: he was writing for a very informed public, and he took care to promote the wider understanding of music history, bringing out new editions of earlier composers and forcing the Viennese public to listen to Bach and Palestrina whether they liked it or not. Swafford credits Brahms with pushing through the switch in concert-hall repertoire from mostly contemporary programming — as it had been up to that point — to the canon-based programmes that still dominate things today. I suspect that's an exaggeration, but he obviously played a big part in making the listening public more aware that appreciating music implies knowing about where it comes from historically.

There are some minor things I don't like about the book: it's over-long, and Swafford repeats himself a lot when talking about non-musical background topics ("Ah yes, there's the "Antisemitism" theme from Chapter One again..."). And there's some carelessness about the use of idioms — it's not a good idea to fix in the reader's mind the image of Brahms putting failed works and early drafts "in the stove" to destroy them if you also talk about him putting pieces that need more refinement "back in the oven". But those are all very minor things, the point of this book is to talk about Brahms and his composition process and his relationships with his musical contemporaries, and that Swafford does extremely well.

A weighty book about a weighty subject. I concur with those readers who found that Swafford does a fine job of outlining the life and times, interspersed with a judicious amount of analysis (not overly-technical) of many of the most interesting works of this composer (some of them unknown to me before reading the book). The author succeeds in creating a portrait of a man by turns charming and crotchety who had both the gift of making friendships and of straining them, as well as an artist fully aware of his worth and yet modest. From the time he appeared on the Schumanns’ doorstep as a slight, improbably beautiful youth with long blond hair and twinkling blue eyes, to his twilight years, prematurely aged, four decades later, Brahms’ entire career was played out in the public eye to a degree few artists before or since have endured. It is no surprise that he was an intensely private man. He did what no composer before him had done, live independently from his earnings as a composer, supplemented by his fees as conductor or performer of his own works and those of others. In part this was due to his freedom-loving nature, but it wouldn’t have been possible if his career had not coincided with the largest musically-literate public the world had yet seen.
One section I found particularly interesting was the first part of chapter 17, in which Swafford shares his insights in Brahms’ creative process, a combination of inspiration and diligent craftsmanship. Overall, the quality of the writing is high, although it did seem to sag toward the end. Perhaps I was tiring after more than 600 pages, but it does seem as if the last few years are sketchily filled in and plagued with more repetition than earlier parts of the book. The narrative impact picks up, as does the pathos, as Clara Schumann declines and dies, followed immediately by the onset of Brahms’ own mortal illness.
Swafford closes the book with a chapter he calls epilogue and provocation. I had the sense that this not was not only the title of the section, but also an assessment of Brahms in the course of music history. Although his works remained unceasingly popular in concert hall and recordings, he appeared for the past century to represent a dead-end in the development of the western musical tradition. The author concludes that this composer is now, after the storms of modernism, once again relevant for the future of music. An interesting thesis.
Some readers have faulted one aspect of Swafford’s account, namely the credence he gives to Brahms’ psycho-sexual development through his many nights supporting the family playing piano in Hamburg’s notorious red-light district (the tales of which originated with Brahms himself). I haven’t yet read the book by Kurt Hoffman that challenges this notion, but read this book with this challenge in mind. I felt that while Swafford does repeatedly bring this in for its explanatory power, in the end his depiction of Brahms’ personality stands, whatever the truth of the matter.

Excellent, highly-readable survey of the history of classical music from the Middle Ages to the present. Divided into (short) chapters about the life of various influential composers, but *the best part* is the suggested pieces, helpfully highlighted in *bold*: I read the book with my Amazon Prime Music, playing excerpts on my phone.

I think this book should be made into an app, or a web site, where you can listen to the music as you read along.

Superb - the best biography of a composer that I have read - and I have read many.½

Beethoven vividly placed in his time as Enlightenment artist and nascent Romantic. A transitional figure, "[a]s usual, he conceives his ideas in terms of familiar formal outlines." But into those outlines, he pours a fiery and experimental Romanticism and "bend[s] formal traditions...nearly beyond recognition." Swafford sees Beethoven's character as shaped by external forces--his abusive father, illness, etc. Irascible and implacably confident, tragic in his impending deafness from age 27, he is also amazingly resilient and defiant. A composer himself, Swafford extracts Beethoven's process from his sketchbooks and offers insightful, often quite detailed analysis of the works. Repetitive on some points, but an achievement.

(Interesting to chart the rise of the artist through Haydn, who, as court composer, wrote almost exclusively to order; Beethoven, who still wrote many works on commission; to Chopin, who was completely independent and followed his inspiration. So different from Chopin--in so many ways--in this, too: "[Beethoven] based all his pieces on a story or an image and wrote the music to fit it.")

Originally I wrote: "See other reviewers for accurate ratings. My rating reflects only the audiobook version, which has a terrible narrator."
However, I decided that this would be unfair to the book. My rating for the book is 4 but my rating for the narrator, Michael Prichard, is 1 at best.
Ratings of the printed book vs ratings of the audible version should not be concatenated, so in this case I have not rated the book.

I've been reading this 1077 page biography of one of the most famous composers for the past 3 months. I barely know where to begin in reviewing this book.

As a professional classical musician, I knew a lot about Beethoven going in to this. I've played almost all of his symphonies (and extensively studied and listened to the few I haven't performed) and I've played all of his chamber music that uses the horn. He's also such a big name that I've picked up a lot of the facts of his life in various classes. I guess I wasn't sure how much I was going to learn that was new out of this book. In the end, I think it was beneficial to have everything gathered in to one book and it really clarified Beethoven's influence for me. I also enjoyed that Swafford placed Beethoven in his times. There is enough discussion of the Napoleonic wars and the impact on Vienna, where Beethoven lived, to solidly ground the book historically without losing focus on Beethoven. I also thought the portrait of Beethoven's character was well within the known facts and didn't over-romanticize his life, something that has often been done.

Some highlights of what I took away from this book:

- that Beethoven was grounded in the Aufklarung (Enlightenment) philosophy. Though he was adopted by the Romantics and his music definitely pushes out of the bounds of classical music, he didn't think of himself as a Romantic. ETA Hoffmann was a music critic who really embraced Beethoven's music and sort of adopted him into the Romantic trend. Beethoven's eccentric character and habits lent themselves well to the image of the tortured artist.

- There was a ton of censorship of all the arts in Vienna, but Beethoven largely escaped scrutiny because instrumental music was too hard to pin down to a philosophy. He had freedom to pursue his composition however he liked.

- As a performer Beethoven was an amazing improviser his improvisation skills greatly influenced his compositional technique, especially in his piano music. His other over-riding compositional style was to come up with a whole idea and create the entire multi-movements works to serve the whole.

- The main genres he influenced (has been virtually unsurpassed in even to this day) are the symphonies, string quartets, and piano sonatas.

- He used instruments in new ways, stretching the capabilities particularly of the string bass, horn, and vocalists. Also the string quartet as a whole.

- I knew, of course, that he lost his hearing, but I didn't realize how much of his life he was plagued with chronic stomach pain. He was basically never healthy as an adult.

- Interesting sections on the tuning of pianos and the perceived character of different keys. Also the different pianos available at the time.

- fascinating information on publishing and how impossible it was for a composer to ensure both quality of publication and get compensation for his compositions

Overall, I wouldn't say this is a book for a non-musician. There is a lot of technical language in the description of Beethoven's major works (Swafford details all of Beethoven's major works). Swafford does a good job of explaining himself and has a good appendix that gives a little music theory refresher and discussion of forms but I still think it would be confusing to anyone without at least a little music knowledge or at least a good grasp on listening to Beethoven's music. It would be fairly easy to skip the musical analysis (or skim) and read the rest as a biography. That would make it closer to 600 or 700 pages.

I'm glad a took the time to read this even though it was a big commitment.½

In the introduction to his biography of the Big B, Swafford says he wishes to avoid the Romanticizing (or Freudianizing) indulged in by other Beethoven biographers. He avoids terms like "genius" and "masterpiece"; he plays down the conventional "three periods" approach to the music; he describes Beethoven's relationship to classical forms as not so much revolutionary as "radically evolutionary" (a phrase he credits to Joseph Kerman). Instead of the Titan shaking his fist at heaven, Swafford's Beethoven is a human being: terrible at relationships, plagued by ill health, living through a whiplash era of revolution and counterrevolution, tirelessly experimenting in musical forms while juggling the demands of aristocratic patrons, music publishers, and an emerging bourgeois audience.

Yet much is familiar here. Last winter I read Maynard Solomon's Beethoven, and Swafford's 1,000 pages added surprisingly little to what I learned from that book. On some very interesting and important subjects (Haydn, aristocratic patronage, the music publishing industry, the renaming of the Bonaparte Symphony) Swafford is surprisingly less informative than Solomon, despite having twice the pages to work with. The growing deafness, the Heiligenstadt Testament, Napoleon: these are related to the music in the usual way. Swafford may eschew the phrase "Heroic Period" but the term he substitutes, the "New Path," is used to signify roughly the same thing. There are, despite the disclaimers, Romantic references to Beethoven's "courage, his defiance of fate" (308). Unlike Solomon, Swafford keeps speculation to a minimum--he does not claim to have solved the mystery of the "Immortal Beloved," for example. But Beethoven came alive in Solomon's biography as he didn't (for me) here.

I think this is in part because Swafford never arrives at a strong point of view on his subject to replace the Romantic or Freudian ones he rejects. He tells the life primarily through the music and the result is rather episodic, as the reader is marched through one opus after another. (While musical examples are provided, the analysis is not such to scare off the casual reader: these are colorfully descriptive rather than analytical. A few works--the Eroica, the Missa Solemnis, the Ninth Symphony, get a more lengthy discussion, and there is more "nitty-gritty" analysis to be found in the hundred pages of footnotes, some of it really insightful--although I found it easy to get lost in them as they are not keyed to page numbers.) One gets the impression, particularly in the second half, that one is reading a series of self-contained program notes linked by the thinnest of connecting tissue. The narrative momentum suffers for this.

I happened upon one factual error: Swafford more than once identifies the key of the Archduke Trio as E-flat major, rather than B-flat major. This is not a misprint, because Swafford makes a point of grouping it with the "Harp" quartet, "Emperor" concerto, and "Lebewohl" sonata as one of Beethoven's major 1809-1811 works composed in E-flat (534). (The key is correctly given as B-flat major on page 1018.)

More problematic is a confusing index, a real concern with a book of this length. An entry for "Piano Sonata in C Minor" (no opus number is provided) leads to pages concerning the Op. 111 sonata, although Beethoven wrote three piano sonatas in that key. The Op. 10/1 C Minor sonata is discussed on 213-214, but does not seem to be indexed. The Op. 13 C Minor sonata is listed under its familiar nickname "Pathetique." Moreover, while the non-nicknamed sonatas (as well as trios and quartets) are indexed by genre, symphonies are not: whose idea was it to enter Symphony No. 9 as "Ninth Symphony" (under N)!? Surely it would have made sense to index the works consistently, preferably by genre, and perhaps grouped under the entry for "Beethoven" as is often done.

If you've never read a Beethoven biography--and have strong forearms-- Swafford's lengthy, meticulous, well-researched biography that attempts to avoid Romantic gloss (but check out that subtitle!) may serve you well. However, those who have already read Solomon's classic biography will not find much new in these 1,000 pages. Solomon's book is still the one I would recommend to someone looking for a biography of this composer.

Readers of liner notes know all about Brahms as a grumpy perfectionist haunted by a sense of his own belatedness in a field in which Beethoven had done it all. It is hard not to find such a character relatable and human. Swafford's massive biography situates Brahms's grumpiness in historical and political context, revealing Brahms as a political liberal with musically conservative tastes who became the target of a Wagnerian musical avant-garde that was, paradoxically, aligned with the political right wing of Brahms's society: anti-semites, pan-Germans, aristocrats, conservative Catholics, and the like. It also offers frequently amusing insight into Brahms's sex life (which basically amounted to frequenting brothels while pining away for Clara Schumann).

However, after reading and enjoying this biography I came across Alex Ross's review in the The Nation (March 23, 1998), which criticized Swafford for perpetuating discredited myths about the squalid poverty in which Brahms was raised (he actually grew up comfortably and decently working-class) and for making this imaginary childhood the basis for a deeply flawed psychological profile. Ross writes that Swafford "trie[s] too hard to give Romantic glamour to a basically unexciting life." Caveat lector.

Read this in and out over a number of months this past year. The best of the Beethoven biographies I've read. Very much like the Brahms bio—straight ahead, not much supposition or invention, very detailed. Good analysis of the music. One odd thing missing was an accounting of Schubert's late visit to Beethoven when on his deathbed. I believe it is agreed upon that it happened, just little if any information about it. I don't believe it was even mentioned.

An excellent piece of work. Solid research, interesting ideas, and an easy to read, conversational writing style. I like that Swafford stands firm on his assertions that Brahms was indeed shaped by his experiences playing in bars and brothers as a child. It has become somewhat fashionable to state that this is more mythology than fact, but Swafford doubles down and stands by his research in the new edition.

An incredibly well written biography that was hard to put down when the author was talking about Beethoven. However, as a music lover, but not a music major or critic, I found some of the analyses of Beethoven's work a bit over the top. That said, as I continue to build my library of and familiarity with Beethoven's works, I will return to this book and hopefully gain a greater appreciation of the analytical content.

What more can you say about a 1000 page book than - I wish it were longer! Simply superb.

As an aside, I read Edmund Morris' review in the NYT Book Review. Having read Morris' bio of Beethoven, I assume his snarky review was written out of jealousy - it wasn't 1/10th the book this one is (and I'm not talking page length). I also note that while Swafford seems to have used every great previous biography as a source, Morris doesn't show up in the Works Cited. I can't imagine why.

This is one of four general guides I own to classical music. I have other books specifically on orchestral, concerto, chamber, choral and opera, but this is one that covers all the different forms. The Miller Barnes and Noble Introduction to Music goes over such things as tone, rhythm, melody, etc. The Hurwitz Beethoven or Bust goes over the various forms (the concerto, for instance) and their various types. Goulding's Classical Music concentrates on the core repertory--"The 50 Greatest Composers and Their 1,000 Greatest Works." The Vintage Guide to Classical Music focuses more on the composers than the forms, but is more eclectic and comprehensive. Goulding includes very few Medieval or Renaissance or many Modern composers--while Swafford's Vintage Guide includes biographies and naming of the important pieces to know of de Machaut, Dufay, Desprez, di Lasso, Monteverdi, Ives, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Britten. In the back there's a useful section of a suggested classical library from Gregorian Chant to Phillip Glass.

This is one of the best biographies of a composer that I have ever read. Swafford's writing is excellent, his scholarship is thorough, he treats his subject with care, and shows Brahms's strengths and frailities. Swafford also provides a fascinating portrait of the Germany and the Vienna of Brahms. A great book about a great composer.

The brilliant biographer of a quintessentially American, prototypically modern musician (Charles Ives) proves just as masterful in probing the life and art of a 19th-century German composer. Writing with passionate clarity that perfectly matches the genius of Brahms (1833-97), Jan Swafford traces the emotional wellsprings of this secretive man's music without trivializing art into mere autobiography. A composer himself, Swafford understands and lucidly conveys Brahms's unique position in musical history: beloved by many, emulated by few, the triumphant yet melancholy heir of a tradition coming to an end in his lifetime.

The New York Times Book Review, Edward Rothstein
It is a measure of the accomplishment of Jan Swafford's biography of Brahms that ... sadness becomes palpable. Though Johannes Brahms: A Biography would have been still more of an accomplishment if its author had been as ruthless in pruning as Brahms was, it manages ... to construct a full-bodied human being in the midst of it ambling meticulousness. Swafford retains the genre's requisite wonder ... tempered with a skeptical imagination....

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.