Jan Swafford

Beethoven, el genio romántico, hombre atormentado y fascinante capaz de componer las piezas más sublimes, vivió su tiempo con extraordinaria intensidad. Jan Swafford recrea de manera amena y profunda la vida del hombre, del compositor y del genio. Partie

En El lenguaje del espíritu, el reconocido misicólogo y compositor Jan Swafford que, a lo largo de los siglos, la música clásica ha sido cosas muy distintas, y dentro de su rica historia todos podemos encontrar algo con lo que conectar. Swafford traza aqui la historia de toda la musica occidental, convirtiendose en un guia complice y experto que nos introduce en los compositores y sus obras, y comparte con nosotros las ideas y percepciones que confieren a la musica sus cualidades universales y su capacidad unica para transmitir amor, esperanza, entusiasmo o desesperacion. De paso, nos anima a ver nuestra propia vida y nuestros sentimientos reflejados en los extraordinarios sonidos creados por artistas como Mozart, Brahms, Debussy o Stravinsky. Una lectura esencial para cualquiera que quiera saber mas sobre la mas sublime de las artes.Jan Swafford consigue algo muy dificil: capta el espiritu de la musica con palabras. Sus breves retratos de los compositores y sus obras resultan muy convincentes y, mas importante aun, nos impulsan a ir corriendo a escuchar esa musica de la que nos habla.Emanuel Ax, pianistaCualquiera que sienta curiosidad por la musica pero no haya tenido la suerte de contar con un maestro con Swafford, deberia leer esta introduccion a la musica clasica. ¡Este libro deberia ser de lectura obligatoria en todos los colegios!John OConor, exdirector de la Real Academia de Musica de IrlandaEn el centro de este libro se encuentra un genuino amor por la musica. Es un viaje hacia lo que significa a un nivel muy personal y nos recuerda a los que estamos en la profesion por que nos hicimos musicos.Leonard Slatkin, director de la Orquesta Sinfonica de Detroit

From his celebrated early childhood, Mozart has been caught up in myths: the superhuman prodigy, the adult who was still a child, the neglect, the paupers grave. None of these myths are true, at least not at face value. Wolfgang Amade Mozart is not primarily a myth-busting book, but in the process of bringing to vivid life the man and composer absorbed in writing for his public rather than for posterity, the myths topple en route. Swafford portrays a man who had his sorrows like everybody else, but who was a high-spirited, high-living bon vivant fond of games of skill, well-read and thoughtful if also at times playing the clown: in the end fundamentally a happy and happily married man who had a wide circle of friends.

Sunday Times Classical Music Book of the YearMagisterial, warm, and engaging . . . A triumph of scholarship and musical affinity . . . Jan Swafford is to be saluted.IndependentJan Swaffords biographies of composers Charles Ives and Johannes Brahms have established him as a revered music historian, capable of bringing his subjects vibrantly to life. His magnificent new biography of Ludwig van Beethoven peels away layers of legend to get to the living, breathing human being who composed some of the worlds most iconic music. Swafford mines sources never before used in English-language biographies to reanimate the revolutionary ferment of Enlightenment-era Bonn, where Beethoven grew up and imbibed the ideas that would shape all of his future work. Swafford then tracks his subject to Vienna, capital of European music, where Beethoven built his career in the face of critical incomprehension, crippling ill health, romantic rejection, and fates hammer, his ever-encroaching deafness. At the time of his death he was so widely celebrated that over ten thousand people attended his funeral.This book is a biography of Beethoven the man and musician, not the myth, and throughout, Swafford - himself a composer - offers insightful readings of Beethovens key works. More than a decade in the making, this will be the standard Beethoven biography for years to come.

A preeminent composer, music scholar, and biographer presents an engaging and accessible introduction to classical music For many of us, classical music is something serious -- something we study in school, something played by cultivated musicians at fancy gatherings. In Language of the Spirit, renowned music scholar Jan Swafford argues that we have it all wrong: classical music has something for everyone and is accessible to all. Ranging from Gregorian chant to Handels Messiah, from Vivaldis The Four Seasons to the postmodern work of Philip Glass, Swafford is an affable and expert guide to the genre. He traces the history of Western music, introduces readers to the most important composers and compositions, and explains the underlying structure and logic of their music.Language of the Spirit is essential reading for anyone who has ever wished to know more about this sublime art.

An illuminating new biography of one of the most beloved of all composers, published on the hundredth anniversary of his death, brilliantly written by a finalist for the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award. Johannes Brahms has consistently eluded his biographers. Throughout his life, he attempted to erase traces of himself, wanting his music to be his sole legacy. Now, in this masterful book, Jan Swafford, critically acclaimed as both biographer and composer, takes a fresh look at Brahms, giving us for the first time a fully realized portrait of the man who created the magnificent music. Brahms was a man with many friends and no intimates, who experienced triumphs few artists achieve in their lifetime. Yet he lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world. The Brahms that emerges from these pages is not the bearded eminence of previous biographies but rather a fascinating assemblage of contradictions. Brought up in poverty, he was forced to play the piano in the brothels of Hamburg, where he met with both mental and physical abuse. At the same time, he was the golden boy of his teachers, who found themselves in awe of a stupendous talent: a miraculous young composer and pianist, poised between the emotionalism of the Romantics and the rigors of the composers he worshipped--Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. In 1853, Robert Schumann proclaimed the twenty-year-old Brahms the savior of German music. Brahms spent the rest of his days trying to live up to that prophecy, ever fearful of proving unworthy of his musical inheritance. We find here more of Brahmss words, his daily life and joys and sorrows, than in any other biography. With novelistic grace, Swafford shows us a warm-blooded but guarded genius who hid behind jokes and prickliness, rudeness and intractability with his friends as well as his enemies, but who was also a witty drinking companion and a consummate careerist skillfully courting the powerful. This is a book rich in secondary characters as well, including Robert Schumann, declining into madness as he hailed the advent of a new genius; Clara Schumann, the towering pianist, tormented personality, and great love of Brahmss life; Josef Joachim, the brilliant, self-lacerating violinist; the extraordinary musical amateur Elisabet von Herzogenberg, on whose exacting criticism Brahms relied; Brahmss rival and shadow, the malevolent genius Richard Wagner; and Eduard Hanslick, enemy of Wagner and apostle of Brahms, at once the most powerful and most wrongheaded music critic of his time. Among the characters in the book are two great cities: the stolid North German harbor town of Hamburg where Johannes grew up, which later spurned him; and glittering, fickle, music-mad Vienna, where Brahms the self-proclaimed vagabond finally settled, to find his sweetest triumphs and his most bitter failures. Unique to this book is the way in which musical scholarship and biography are combined: in a style refreshingly free of pretentiousness, Jan Swafford takes us deep into the music--from the grandeur of the First Symphony and the intricacies of the chamber work to the sorrow of the German Requiem--allowing us to hear these familiar works in new and often surprising ways. This is a clear-eyed study of a remarkable man and a vivid portrait of an era in transition. Ultimately, Johannes Brahms is the story of a great, backward-looking artist who inspired musical rev...

From the acclaimed composer and biographer Jan Swafford comes the definitive biography of one of the most lauded musical geniuses in history, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.At the earliest ages it was apparent that Wolfgang Mozarts singular imagination was at work in every direction. He hated to be bored and hated to be idle, and through his life he responded to these threats with a repertoire of antidotes mental and physical. Whether in his rabidly obscene mode or not, Mozart was always hilarious. He went at every piece of his life, and perhaps most notably his social life, with tremendous gusto. His circle of friends and patrons was wide, encompassing anyone who appealed to his boundless appetites for music and all things pleasurable and fun.Mozart was known to be an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture. He was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who could grasp your hand and look at you with a profound, searching, and melancholy look in his blue eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being not quite there. It was as if he lived onstage and off simultaneously, a character in lifes tragicomedy but also outside of it watching, studying, gathering material for the fabric of his art.Like Jan Swaffords biographies Beethoven and Johannes Brahms, this definitive Mozart biography is the complete exhumation of a genius in his life and ours: a man who would enrich the world with his talent for centuries to come and who would immeasurably shape classical music. As Swafford reveals, its nearly impossible to understand the history of classical music and its evolutions, as well as the Baroque period, without studying the man himself.This meticulously researched work reveals the man behind the music: a genius in his life and ours:A Force of Nature: Explore the personality of a man who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the keyboard to a leap over the furniture, who hated to be idle and was always hilarious. An Intimate Portrait: Go beyond the legend to meet the profound and searching man with a boundless appetite for music, friendship, and all things pleasurable and fun. The Man and The Music: Understand how Mozart watched life as if a character in its tragicomedy, constantly gathering material for the fabric of his art. The Classical Era Context: Discover why its impossible to grasp the evolution of classical music and its relationship to the Baroque period without a deep study of Mozart himself.

Uma viagem compreensível e apaixonada pela história da música ocidental. Para muitas pessoas, a música clássica é um assunto inatingível, coberto por um véu de complexidade e elitismo. Em Linguagem do espirito, o renomado musicologo e compositor Jan Swafford nos aproxima desse universo, fazendo no apenas uma introduço musical, mas um chamado a beleza e ao apelo que essa musica guarda para cada um de nos. Com texto convidativo e repleto de curiosidades, o autor mergulha na evoluço da musica classica ao longo dos seculos, explicando seus periodos, estilos e tendencias, enquanto percorre as biografias de alguns dos compositores mais importantes, como Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy ou Bach. Junto a isso, Swafford compartilha conosco as ideias e percepçes que do a musica suas qualidades universais e sua capacidade unica de transmitir as grandes emoçes humanas como amor, esperança ou desespero. Linguagem do espirito e um convite a todos os que desejam conhecer melhor essa que e chamada a mais sublime das artes."Um livro perfeito para quem quer conhecer a musica classica, mas de alguma maneira se sente intimidado por ela." Wall Street Journal