Hans A. Neunzig

Brahms lovers usually know the bare facts of the great nineteenth-century composer's life: he played the rough equivalent of whore-house piano in Hamburg's red-light district as a youth; fell in love with the concert-pianist wife of his chief mentor, Robert Schumann; was notoriously brusque, one of those is-there-anyone-I-haven't-offended? types; had long fallings-out with his closest friends; was the designated (by others) champion of pure music against the program music of Liszt and the musical dramas of Wagner. Neunzig's excellent sketch of Brahms' life and achievements, which has waited 30 years to be translated, brings those legends and more to life by smoothly incorporating the words of Brahms, his acquaintances, and previous biographers into virtually every paragraph of an engrossing, highly concentrated text. As in other volumes in Haus' handsome Life & Times series, illustrations and sidebars on important persons and events mentioned in the narrative abound, and only a smattering of typos (extraneous or omitted words, not misspellings) dilutes the pleasures of aa excellent biographical primer.… (més)