Brahms: A Master Musicians Series Biography

This work is half-biography and half-musicology. For the readers of musical score and musicologists, I would give this book a five-star rating. For more casual readers who are simply interested in the life of Brahms, it only rates three. (I rated it four stars because I'm very familiar with Brahms' music and I play music as well, but I cannot read sheet music.) Most folks would say that you can't talk about Brahms without discussing his music and with that thought, I wholly agree; however, in a more traditional and general interest biography, his music would have been discussed in a less technical sense which is more pleasing to folks who do not read music and/or for those who are not all that familiar with Brahms' numerous works. In the author's defense, this latter purpose was clearly not his objective in writing the book -- I just wish to alert casual biography readers that about four chapters of the book will put them to sleep in a hurry. The author has also included many examples of musical scores throughout the text to illustrate his points. I found the author's commentary on Brahms life, including his numerous relationships with other period artists and with his family members, (musical and otherwise), to be informative and well-written. I toughed it out through the more technical chapters as MacDonald had a great deal to say about the old Master throughout that text as well but there it was much spottier. The unorthodox relationship between Brahms and Clara Schumann is well-documented and scattered throughout the book. And I must say, having completed my reading, that I now harbor a real sense of Brahms, the Man. This is the chief strength of the work. The several black-and-white photographs and art illustrations were immensely helpful to me and the list of Brahms' works near the conclusion of the book was equally informative. A chronology of his life is additionally included as an appendix. In summary, while author Malcolm MacDonald's 490-page, 1990 Brahms book probably does not stand as the ultimate authority on this complex man, I still found it to be a fine biography and can recommend it to others noting the caveats which I previously outlined.

A colleague of mine noticed the picture of the young Brahms on the cover of MacDonald's biography. She remarked with surprise on his handsome, vigorous appearance. Too often people tend to think of Brahms as an old, bearded, somewhat overweight composer of conservative romantic music. The text of MacDonald's ambitious study, together with the cover portrait, aims to dispel stereotypes held by many about Brahms. For MacDonald, Johannes Brahms (1833 --1897) was an unabashedly romantic composer (granting the difficulties of defining that notoriously difficult term, "romantic"), with strong ties to the musical past who looked forward to and helped create the linear, contrapuntal, and decidedly unromantic music of the twentieth century. MacDonald's interest in the relationship between Brahms and Schoenberg is understandable as he has written a companion volume on Schoenberg for the "Master Musicians" series. The book is both a biography of Brahms and a musical study with heavy emphasis on the latter. In the biographical sections of his account, MacDonald covers briefly Brahms's childhood in the rough, seafaring districts of Hamburg,his early musical instruction, and his wide reading. He describes Brahms's relationship with the Schumann's and the ambiguities of his lifelong love for Clara Schumann. There is a great deal of emphasis on Brahms's inability to marry, despite several flames in his youth. MacDonald describes how love and passion inform Brahms's work throughout and how music helped Brahms give voice to feelings that, for whatever reason, he could not express in his life. MacDonald also places Brahms in a musical context that includes his extensive study of his predecessors, from his contemporaries through Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, to the baroque and earlier. Brahms was undoubtedly the most musically learned of the great composers and he was able to integrate his learning with his own romantic voice. MacDonald finds that Brahms remained throughout his life a romantic composer. This means, I think, that Brahms saw music as an essentially spiritual calling, somewhat of a substitute for the role revealed religion plays in the lives of many, which emphasizes romantic and physical love, the unity of man with nature, and the value of the past. Bach used the past in his devotion to early music and to folksongs of many types. Brahms's romanticism, and the manner in which he integrated it with counterpoint and variation, paved the way for the destruction of romanticism and for the creation of a more recognizably modern sensibility. I found the most valuable part of MacDonald's book to be the detailed analyses he offers of virtually all Brahm's major works. The discussion is presented chronologically. The musical discussions generally follow the biographical sections of the book and deal with Brahms's compositions by categories: orchestral music, chamber music, choral music, piano, song. MacDonald offers numerous musical e

MacDonald's biography of Brahms is insightful and informative benefiting from findings in recent Brahms scholarship as well as from the authors command of language and knowledge of the art of music. Its only fault, albeit a rather prominent one, is the author's need to comment at least a few words on every work of Brahms's. This becomes tedious and the reader is left with a feeling of unsatisfied curiosity as if he or she is reading program notes to a concert he will not hear. MacDonald, however, reserves his more detailed accounts for Brahms's more important and popular major works (his all too brief analysis of the Fourth Symphony leaves one wishing he would write a book entirely devoted to that masterpiece) a trait which reveals the author's keen analytical mind. The book would have benefited greatly if the author had devoted space given to smaller or less significant pieces to a more extensive discussion of the composers major works