BRAHMS THE WISEASS

posted by James Reel

    Jan Swafford, who wrote one of the best biographies of Johannes Brahms and who taught at the University of Arizona one year, and with whom I've had the pleasure of serving on a couple of panels, exposes Brahms as a master of sarcasm and ironic self-deprecation here. Not exactly the image of Brahms we get from the portraits of the serious guy with the long gray beard, but it does somehow evoke the caricature of the portly man trailed by a hedgehog.