An edition of Johannes Brahms (1997)

Johannes Brahms

a biography

1st ed.
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Last edited by MARC Bot
July 12, 2024 | History
An edition of Johannes Brahms (1997)

Johannes Brahms

a biography

1st ed.
  • 5 Want to read

Jan Swafford 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.

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 Reguiem - allowing us to hear these familiar works in new and often surprising ways.

Publish Date
Language
English
Pages
699

Buy this book

Previews available in: English

Edition Availability
Cover of: Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms
February 2003, Macmillan
Hardcover in English
Cover of: Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms: a biography
1999, Papermac
in English
Cover of: Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms: A Biography
December 7, 1999, Vintage
Paperback in English
Cover of: Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms
August 13, 1999, MacMillan
Paperback - New Ed edition
Cover of: Johannes Brahms
Johannes Brahms: a biography
1997, Alfred A. Knopf, Distributed by Random House, Inc.
in English - 1st ed.

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Book Details


Edition Notes

Includes bibliographical references (p. [671]-678) and index.

Published in
New York

Classifications

Dewey Decimal Class
780/.92, B
Library of Congress
ML410.B8 S93 1997

The Physical Object

Pagination
xxii, 699 p. :
Number of pages
699

ID Numbers

Open Library
OL682610M
Internet Archive
johannesbrahmsbi00swaf
ISBN 10
0679422617
LCCN
97029308
OCLC/WorldCat
37457773
Library Thing
13489
Goodreads
1336532

Excerpts

IN 1826 JOHANN JAKOB BRAHMS, aged nineteen, his gray eyes full of hope and good humor, arrived in the port of Hamburg carrying musical instruments and a Certificate of Apprenticeship.
added anonymously.

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History

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July 12, 2024 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
March 8, 2023 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
November 26, 2020 Edited by MARC Bot import existing book
May 2, 2020 Edited by ImportBot import existing book
April 1, 2008 Created by an anonymous user Imported from Scriblio MARC record