Behind the beard

Musical Times, Spring 2000 by Hewett, Ivan

IVAN HEWETT takes stock of recent writings about the elusive Johannes Brahms

IN HIS NEW BIOGRAPHY of Brahms, Jan Swafford tells us that in the 1890s, tourists would gather outside the composer's favourite coffee-shop in Vienna to view the great man asleep under his `motionless beard'. By this time, we've learned that a willed insensibility was one of Brahms's characteristic traits, one which he used to fend off bits of the world he didn't like. When he attends a performance of a sonata by a composer he despises (Franz Liszt), he falls asleep; when he's dragged to a performance of Don Giovanni conducted by Mahler, he asks for a couch so he can take a nap (but then, to do him justice, he's jerked into excited wakefulness by the performance). When unconsciousness wasn't an option, Brahms had other ways of refusing engagement with the world. He was never at a loss for the wounding remark, the inappropriately coarse joke, the cold put-down. Time and again in Swafford's book we hear the hurt and baffled tone of those who offer Brahms love and esteem, only to have it flung back in their faces. `Brahms becomes more and more difficult to love' complains the long-suffering Billroth, who, at the end of his life and racked by a fatal cancer, asks Brahms's advice for his book on musical genius. Brahms's coldly dismissive replies to Billroth's admittedly naive questions, arriving weeks before Billroth's death, were never forgiven by his widow Most long-suffering of all Brahms's victims was, of course, Clara Schumann.