[ebooks] Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists: A Critical Reader by From Columbia University Press in Arts-Photography

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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 Brahmss 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 Brahmss life; Josef Joachim; the brilliant; self-lacerating violinist; the extraordinary musical amateur Elisabet von Herzogenberg; on whose exacting criticism Brahms relied; Brahmss 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.From the Hardcover edition.