The Life of Johannes Brahms (vol 1 of 2)

Florence May knew Brahms. She studied with Clara Schumann in Frankfurt, encountered the composer in his own drawing room, and watched him conduct his own works from the piano. This first volume of her definitive biography, published in 1905 just eight years after Brahms' death, draws on that intimacy. May traces the composer's life from his origins in Hamburg, where the son of a poverty-stricken musician scraping together a living in waterfront taverns, through his desperate early years in Vienna, to the moment when Robert Schumann famously declared him the heir to Beethoven's crown. The book pulses with the tension of a young man fighting for recognition in a world that seemed determined to ignore him. May gives us the relationships that shaped him: his complicated bond with Schumann, his devotion to Clara after Robert's death, his friendships with violinists and singers who championed his earliest works. This is not distant biography but rather the testimony of someone who breathed the same air as Brahms, who heard him play his own compositions in private, who understood the quiet modesty beneath the public grandeur. For anyone who has ever loved Brahms' music, May offers the closest thing to sitting in his presence.