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MYTH IN BRAHMS
BIOGRAPHY
OR
WHAT I LEARNED FROM
QUANTUM MECHANICS
Styra Avins1

English Abstract
The biography of Johannes Brahms has been marked by a persistent web of myth regarding the cir-
cumstances of his childhood and upbringing, with some biographers basing their understanding of
the man on these distorted events of his childhood. This paper examines the components of the
myth, and a general description of the kind of research needed to come to a more realistic under-
standing of the life. The underlying point of the paper is a general discussion of how musicologists,
historians, and scientists deal with the issue of “truth” and facts.

French Abstract
Toute tentative de cerner la vie de Johannes Brahms est depuis toujours voilée par divers mythes
concernant son enfance et son éducation, certains biographes basant leur compréhension de
l’homme sur ces événements déformés de ses jeunes années.
L’article passe en revue les principales composantes du mythe et décrit de façon générale le type
de recherche nécessaire pour arriver à une compréhension plus réaliste de sa vie. Le point sous-
jacent de l’article est une discussion générale de la façon dont musicologues, historiens et scientif-
iques traitent de la question de la « vérité » et des faits.

German Abstract
Die Biografie von Johannes Brahms ist von einem anhaltenden Mythos bezüglich der Umstände sei-
ner Kindheit und Erziehung geprägt, und einige Biografen begründen ihr Verständnis seiner
Persönlichkeit mit diesen verdrehten Ereignissen seiner Kindheit. Dieser Aufsatz untersucht die
Bestandteile von diesem Mythos und beschreibt die Art der Forschungmethoden, die ein realisti-
scheres Verständnis seines Lebens ermöglichen würden. Was diesem Aufsatz zugrundeliegt, ist
eine Untersuchung, wie Musikwissenschaftler, Historiker und Naturwissenschaftler jeweils mit
“Wahrheit” und “Tatsachen” umgehen.

1. Styra Avins is a professional cellist in New York educated at the Juilliard School and the Manhattan School
of Music, author of a number of books and articles about Brahms, and for 10 years adjunct Professor of Music
History at Drew University, New Jersey. For my understanding of physics and scientific methods I am deeply in-
debted to the work of several noted physicists: the distinguished Austrian, Anton Zeilinger; the British Nobel
Laureate in Medicine, Peter Medawar; the American Nobel laureate in Physics, Steven Weinberg; and Josef
Eisinger, nuclear physicist and biophysicist at the Bell Laboratories, New Jersey, who has taken the time to ex-
plain to me the fundamentals of physics both classical and modern. My understanding of the effect of post-
modernist/post-structuralist thought on history and historiography is especially indebted to the works of Ernst
Breisach, to co-authors Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob; and to fruitful discussions with Jerrold
Siegel, Kenan Professor of History Emeritus, New York University.

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On the face of it, this essay is about the complex of myth found in a large number of bi-
ographies of Johannes Brahms, myth which centers on the circumstances of his child-
hood and early working life, and in some accounts extends to the effects of those pur-
ported circumstances on the rest of his life. I call it the Poverty Myth, and discuss how it
arose, why it persists so stubbornly, how it could have been avoided, and how it may be
laid to rest. To be clear, I am defining myth here as a widely-held but false idea about
something.
The underlying subject of this essay, however, is epistemological: a renewed look at
methods used in scientific research to approach truth, and what we may profitably take
from them in our practice as (music) historians and biographers—or put differently, more
emphatically, what good historical/biographical methodology needs to have in common
with fruitful scientific research if it is to succeed in leading to an understanding of past
happenings that is more than just the subjective view of a particular person.
For some my theme is contentious. Isn’t talk of scientific method in the humanities out-
dated? And haven’t the methods of science been fundamentally discredited? Hasn’t sci-
ence been shown to have feet of clay, merely a construct of a given society with results
that have no special claim to “truth”? Even so distinguished a historiographer as Ernst
Breisach tells us that we must learn to live without the possibility of finding truths which
are valid for all human beings, and carry on without the comfort of “…Newton’s physics
with its certainties that have long been abandoned.”2
I will make a case for finding this view of science in general, and of Newton in particu-
lar, deeply flawed, and hope to show that in our search for a valid historical view, science
offers us a useful model after all.
If Brahms had been more cooperative with his early biographers, he would not be the
jumping-off place for this essay. Instead, he was no help at all, causing his biographers to
scratch around for whatever they could find or surmise about his early years.
In 1880, his friend Hermann Deiters, a distinguished music journalist, undertook to
write a biographical sketch of Brahms, whom he had known since 1855. Deiter’s request
for personal information reached Brahms while he was on holiday in Ischl, and his re-
sponse must have disappointed Deiters considerably:
Joh. Brahms to Hermann Deiters
Ischl, 8 August 1880 3
. . . I really know absolutely no dates or years with regard to myself; and here, naturally, I can’t
attempt to look up old letters, etc. In that regard, I hardly need to add that I dislike speaking
about myself, and also dislike reading anything that concerns me personally.
I think it would be wonderful if every artist, great or small, would quite seriously provide a
confidential chronicle—I don’t have time for it, but it’s a pity! But with regard to what La Mara,
etc., professes to tell about me—I do not appreciate it and fail to see why it is told from time to
time.4
2. Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, & Modern, 2nd edition (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2003), p. 372.
3. Johannes Brahms, Briefwechsel (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft, 1912–22), vol. iii, pp. 122–23. Tr.
in Styra Avins, Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 561.
4. A reference to what may be the first biographical sketch of Brahms, written by the music journalist Marie
Lipsius. In 1875, under the pen name La Mara, she published Musikalische Studienköpfe aus der Jüngstver-
gangenheit und Gegenwart (Leipzig: Heinrich Schmidt & Carl Günther, 1875), a series of short music biogra-
phies. Among them was a sketch of Brahms (vol. iii, pp. 233–97). La Mara’s little sketch was not merely a chron-
icle, but included a rare and valuable account of Brahms’s youth, written for the occasion by Eduard Marxsen,
his major piano teacher, who had known him since his 10th year; and perhaps this is what bothered him.
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MYTH IN BRAHMS BIOGRAPHY 185

. . . I do understand, of course, that it is necessary for your purposes, but even with my best
intentions I just cannot answer your specific questions.
Except: J.B., born 1834 in Altona on the 7th of March (not as often stated, 7th of May 33 in
Hamburg), I read that often, to my amusement, and what is in the parentheses is correct.
My father has unfortunately died (after 1870, as evidence of my inability to answer)! I became
Dr in Breslau (two or three years ago!). Before that (several years) I was awarded the title in
Cambridge. In such a case thanks to Parliament, one must suffer through certain ceremonies
there in person—I preferred to be impolite, and so it did not come to pass.5
The stories about the C and A minor sonatas might be true, for all I know. That doesn’t re-
quire much youthful exuberance and I often perpetrated more potent stuff. . . . 6

That is the full extent of aid he gave to his would-be biographer, and when the little
book first appeared, most of the details about his life were either muddled or simply in-
correct. Only two other biographies appeared in his life time: one in 1875 (see footnote 4),
and one in 1888.7 Neither was a full-length biography.
The first of those appeared shortly after Brahms’s death, and within the next six years
there appeared two biographies based on extensive interviews, questionnaires, a scatter-
ing of letters, newspaper articles, some town records, personal experience, and most use-
fully, the memoirs of a number of Brahms’s good friends. The first of the two, and in many
ways still the most accurate, was by Florence May, the English pianist who had traveled
to Baden-Baden in 1870 to study with Clara Schumann and for one brief month, during
that summer, was the piano student of Brahms himself. Her biography appeared in 1905.
May traveled extensively and interviewed a long list of people who had known Brahms.
She was well-placed to do so, speaking fluent German, knowing many of the Brahms cir-
cle personally, and understanding quite well the circumstances of his life from 1871 on.
The first chapter of her book, “Personal Recollections,” constitutes one the great eye-
witness accounts we have of Brahms. May was a professional pianist, not an historian, but
she understood the need to use primary documents when she could find them, and to dis-
tinguish between rumor and what could be verified by other eye-witnesses, documents, or
personal observation.
The other major biography of this time is by Max Kalbeck,8 and is close to what Leon
Edel describes as a chronicle life and works, something in the nature of an Official
Biography.9 Kalbeck probably had that in mind, and in any case, that is how it has been
treated. An enormous work of over 2,000 pages, the first volume was in print in Vienna by
1903. The complete work, in eight “half volumes”, was not finished until 1914, but each
volume was influential as soon as it appeared. Kalbeck knew Brahms personally during
the last twenty years of the composer’s life and saw him several times weekly. They were
not intimate friends, and never used the “du” form of address with each other, but Kalbeck
was assuredly part of Brahms’s inner circle. They had many friends in common, a cir-
cumstance which granted Kalbeck the cooperation of a wide range of contacts. He was
5. Brahms’s Honorary Doctorate was awarded barely one year before this letter was written.
6. Playing from memory, the 19-year old Brahms transposed Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, Op. 47, up a half
step to accommodate his violinist, who wouldn’t tune down to a piano one half step too low. The feat was also
reported as having happened 10 years later, this time in a performance of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata, Op. 30,
No. 2. Brahms’s colleague in Detmold, the violinist Karl Bargheer, reported that when they used to perform
together for the reigning Count, he never knew in which key Brahms would begin.
7. Bernhard Vogel, Johannes Brahms: Sein Lebensgang und eine Würdigung seiner Werk (Leipzig: Max
Hesse’s Verlag, 1888).
8. Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms, 4 vols. (Berlin: Deutsche Brahms Gesellschaft, 1914–21).
9. Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1984), p. 176.
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186 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 62/3

given access to correspondence and allowed to make copies of the letters of a number of
people. He incorporated them into his biography, sometimes obliquely and sometimes by
direct quotation, even before the letters were published. He himself was editor of crucial
volumes in the series of Brahms correspondence published by the Deutsche Brahms
Gesellschaft; his share of those volumes includes the very large correspondence between
the composer and his publisher, Fritz Simrock, and the rich set of letters between him and
Elisabeth and Heinrich von Herzogenberg—a couple who were among Brahms’s closest
friends. Kalbeck devised questionnaires and interviewed even more people than did
Florence May. His biography covers virtually every month of every year of Brahms’s life
once he was known to the world and, for example, Kalbeck was able to produce a list of
the names of friends and acquaintances Brahms met and interacted with in all the places
where he spent his summer holidays. The index to his biography is a virtual Who’s Who
of German and Austrian musical life. In short, Kalbeck’s Johannes Brahms is on a monu-
mental scale, an undertaking, before faxes, photocopying machines, the Web, and per-
sonal computers, which seems almost superhuman to us now. We know nothing of any
research assistants, and it seems likely that he did most or perhaps all of the research him-
self. Living primarily in Vienna, the opportunity for him to carry out archival research in
Hamburg and the small towns that Brahms had contact with in the first 20 years of his life
must have been quite limited, although he made at least one fact-finding trip to Hamburg.
Despite its indispensability, however, Kalbeck’s biography has been the source of un-
ending problems. Simply put, it is unreliable. By present standards, Kalbeck was uncriti-
cal in his methods. Information is rarely accompanied by sources, and much of what the
passage of time has allowed us now to evaluate turns out to be speculation, not identified
as such. While material discovered subsequently has often revealed the accuracy of his ac-
count, also evident is the sometimes speculative nature, as well as the sheer misinforma-
tion, incorporated into his biography. Until recently, readers who questioned his work
were thoroughly ignored. For all its more modest aims, Florence May did a far better job
of recreating the world Brahms grew up in, and it speaks volumes against Kalbeck’s de-
votion to the art and methodology of biography, as opposed to his devotion to his biogra-
phy, that he could only speak of May’s work with condescension. He does not seem to
have considered the possibility that she might have had better information than he.10 My
study of the array of biographies published before and after Kalbeck’s Johannes Brahms
leads me to believe that the Poverty Myth, which pervades Brahms biography to this day,
can be traced directly to him.
The myth runs more or less as follows: Brahms was born and brought up in a Hamburg
slum known as the Gängeviertel, in mean circumstances (some claim genuine poverty).
To put food on the family table, his parents required the young boy (how young? some
stories claim eight or nine years old) to spend nights playing the piano in brothels and low
sailor’s dives, and sometimes even hauled him out of bed to do so. He saw terrible things

10. Florence May, The Life of Johannes Brahms (London: William Reeves, 1905, and 2nd revised edition,
1948). For example, May’s account of the formation of the Hamburg Frauenchor differs from Kalbeck’s and is
the correct version, something we now know thanks to the discovery, decades later, of a diary kept by one of the
young women in the chorus. See Sophie Drinker, Brahms and his Women’s Choruses (Merion, PA: Sophie
Drinker, 1952). Informed of the discrepancy, Kalbeck simply dismissed it. When May’s biography was translated
into German in 1911, the reviewing journal compared it favorably to Kalbeck’s, commenting how much more in-
formative it was, but predicted (correctly) that no one would pay it any attention. R. Hohenemser, “Neue Brahms-
Literatur,” Die Musik, Bd. 45 (10, 1912), pp 56–60.
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MYTH IN BRAHMS BIOGRAPHY 187

in these establishments, where one biographer claims that he was perversely dandled by
prostitutes. A recent biographer claims Brahms was abused by drunken sailors. In some
accounts these “experiences” marked him for life, impairing his ability to have normal re-
lationships with women. Another part of the myth concerns his parents and upbringing;
among the claims, his father was a simple sort of man who began his career in Hamburg
as a street musician collecting coins thrown to him by passers-by; his mother had a good
heart but was ignorant. Brahms himself had a minimal education.
Not every biography presents all of these elements. Some few leave them out alto-
gether. In some the brothels become Lokals, Kneipe, or dance halls. If one is describing
the teen-age Brahms, this last, at least, is no myth. When he left school at the normal
school-leaving age of 14, he sometimes earned money playing the piano in Hamburg
dance halls. But dance halls were not brothels, or necessarily sordid, and many were per-
fectly respectable places where people took their families. Nevertheless, by the 1920s the
favorite word is Animierlokale, with the implication of a drinking establishment dedicated
to the arousal of its patrons. An interesting aspect of the myth, therefore, is to track its
variation from author to author. Appended to this paper is a brief listing of 48 biographies
of Brahms, including most major and many minor ones. Noted there are those biogra-
phies which expressly rely exclusively on Kalbeck’s work, even when other material was
available. Also noted are the 20 biographies which promote the Poverty Myth in full.
Kalbeck’s biography is given in bold type, as it contains the myth’s first mention, and be-
cause many subsequently give him as a reference and include the story in their own work.
How, in fact, does one go about trying to sort out reliable information about Brahms’s
life? Can one speak of facts that have existence apart from the perspective of the writer?
Of truth that transcends historical context? Some have denied that possibility, not only for
history but for any field. Is, indeed, the use of well-established twentieth century historio-
graphical methodology really passé? That question is the crux of this essay, and I am turn-
ing to work in the sciences as a potential model. But I want to be very clear about my point
of view: the practice of history is not science, nor is the practice of biography or any of the
humanist studies, and this essay is not an attempt to claim that they are. I do not ally my-
self with the Positivist and Scientific Historians of the turn of the twentieth century. What
interests me are the techniques and fundamental assumptions that scientists use, and I
want to pursue the claim that good biography and history is written in the frame of mind
that guides good science.
Two crucial matters separate history from science, however: the difficulty—and often
the impossibility—for historians to test hypotheses and either confirm them or prove
them wrong; and the fact that history can never predict the future nor lead to an end point
so that the historian can say “I have discovered a basic truth, and there is no more to be
said about it.” Steven Weinberg, theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate, for example, is
working to fill in the gaps which would unify quantum mechanics as it is now understood,
with gravitation, as now understood, in such a way as will lead to a simple, objectively true,
unified theory underlying all natural phenomena, and explain how the universe works
with a simple series of basic laws. As he writes, “I’m trying to put myself out of a job.”11
Biographers need have no such fear. We can never completely reconstruct the details of
how life was lived even 50 well-documented years ago to the degree that we feel certain
there is nothing further to add.
11. Steven Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and its Cultural Adversaries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2001), p. 209.
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188 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 62/3

The caveats for us are well-laid out by the historian, Laurence Stone.12 They apply in
reading of the work of others, as well as serving as a caution for one’s own:
. . . any conclusions are provisional and hypothetical, always liable to be overturned by new data.
...
3. . . . we are all subject to bias and prejudice because of our race, class and culture; . . . in con-
sequence we should follow the background of the historian;
4. . . . texts . . . were written by fallible human beings who made mistakes, asserted false claims,
and had their own ideological agenda which guided their compilation; they should therefore be
scrutinized with care, taking into account authorial intent, the nature of the document, and the
context in which it was written;

Stone’s point is that none of this is new; these ideas have underpinned the standard of
good historical research for much of the twentieth century. All history (read biography)
is provisional.
What science offers, however, is the strongest possible case for an external reality, that
which can be known outside the reference to a particular human mind or culture or soci-
ety, a reality which is therefore universally valid. This is a claim that has been disputed,
and which needs to be revisited.
Doubts by non-scientists about the validity of those basic laws of nature which have
been discovered over the past 400 years and which have been held to be universally valid
have much to do with Einstein’s promulgation of his theories of Special and General
Relativity; and with the twentieth century discovery of Quantum Mechanics as opposed to
Newtonian Mechanics, both of which cast a whole new light on classical physics. So I want
to step back in time for a moment.
The publication of Newton’s Principia (in 1687)13 allowed scientists over the next 200
years to understand nature in a way both comprehensive and quantitative, and to formu-
late, on the basis of a few simple laws expressed mathematically, precise, quantitative in-
formation about physical nature on earth and in the heavens. With Newton’s three laws it
was possible to calculate the motion and acceleration of anything. Planets, soccer balls,
bullets, gun recoil, cars, or airplanes, the motion and trajectories of all could be under-
stood with mathematical precision. It did not matter where on earth you were, what color
you were, what language you grew up speaking, or what belief system you had. If you un-
derstood the principles and the mathematics, you could solve the equations, and the re-
sults could be verified over and over again.
Then came Einstein, and the discovery that in close approach to the speed of light,
Newtonian physics had to be adjusted. “Einstein proved Newton wrong,” a historian of
science once said to me. And by implication, these “laws of nature,” once held to be im-
mutable, crumbled away.
Or did they? The notion that Einstein’s Laws of Relativity disproved or denied Newton
is quite wrong. Talk to any physicist and you will get a look of shock at the mere sugges-
tion. No working scientist I know takes such talk seriously. Newtonian physics is still the
basis of a scientific education, and if you know how to look, you can find examples of
Newton’s laws daily, just as valid now as ever before. Force still equals Mass times
Acceleration. Water droplets still delay dropping if—as every cook does instinctively—you
make use of Newton’s Second Law and unweight your dripping colander as you move it
12. Lawrence Stone, Gabrielle M. Spiegel, “History and Post-Modernism”, Past and Present, No. 135, (May,
1992), 189–208, pp 189–190.
13. Isaace Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (London: Royal Society, 1567), 3 vols.
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MYTH IN BRAHMS BIOGRAPHY 189

from pot to sink. If you are traveling in a car without a seat belt at 60 miles an hour and
the car slams into a concrete barrier, you are going to obey Newton’s First Law and con-
tinue moving 60 miles an hour. In both cases, you and your droplets, or you and your car,
are going to vindicate Newton—unless your car or your droplets are traveling very nearly
at the speed of light, in which case you have to adjust the calculations regarding your
mass. At earthly speeds, the correction is infinitesimal. At the fastest speed at which a bul-
let can be shot, for example, the amount by which its mass must be corrected to account
for the effect of Relativity is about one hundred billionth less than the number reached by
using Newtonian calculations. If you are in a space craft in airless space, using Newton’s
Third Law you can still calculate how much fuel you need to fly at a given speed as com-
bustion of the fuel pushes the craft forward. Again, just don’t approach the speed of light
if you don’t want to have to correct your calculations, because that is the only circum-
stance under which Newton has had to be refined. For all earthly purposes, Newton’s
Laws are just that: not laws of science, but universal laws of nature, not invented but dis-
covered and mathematically formulated by Newton, and enlarged upon by hundreds of
scientists who came after him, who experimented using his three principles, and who de-
veloped the mature form of what is now called Newtonian physics. With all due respect to
Ernst Breisach, the certainties of Newton’s mechanics are just as certain as ever. They
have been refined, not abolished.
Another and perhaps greater shock to the classical view of Newtonian physics had its
beginnings at the start of the twentieth century, and found mature expression by 1926:
quantum physics (a.k.a., quantum mechanics). When the dust had settled, the classic view
of causality was disrupted, and the element of chance in the workings of nature was es-
tablished. A deeper understanding of physics meant giving up the notion that “for every
effect there must exist a cause, and every well-defined cause leads to only a single effect,
not to several different ones.”14 Even Einstein had a hard time accepting this idea. The “un-
certainty principle” had a tremendous effect on the popular mind, on philosophy, and,
therefore, on a broad range of academic activity. Here the problem for us as biographers
is that outside of its use by scientists, the concept has been widely misunderstood and
wrongly applied. There may be those who wish to use it as a metaphor, but in the physi-
cal world the quantum effect is important and has meaning only for the behavior of atomic
particles and molecules. Quantum physics, and the “uncertainty” it involves, is only ap-
plicable on the level of elementary particles, not in the macro world we work and live in.
Moreover, its fundamental aspect—wave functions—is perfectly predictable. The famous
uncertainties (having to do with the impossibility of measuring both the position and ve-
locity of a particle at the same time) only arise because of interaction with the measuring
apparatus.15
In addition, the discovery of the quantum effect revealed one of the universal constants
of nature: Planck’s Constant. Zeilinger reminds us that along with other universal con-
stants, it has a fixed value that is independent of external circumstances, is demonstrably
the same anywhere here on earth as it is in distant galaxies, and has been shown not to
change with time.16

14. Anton Zeilinger, Einsteins Schleier: Die neue Welt der Quantenphysics (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003)
15. Weinberg, Facing Up, p. 119.
16. Zeilinger, Einsteins Schleier, p. 18. This is neither the place, and I am certainly not the person, to deliver
a discourse on quantum physics. Just for the record, however, light has at the same time the character of a wave
and a particle—the photon. The energy of a photon is obtained by multiplying Planck’s Constant with the fre-
quency of the light (number of cycles per second).
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I mention these matters because in 1962, Thomas Kuhn published his famous book,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which has influenced the way many people now
think about the practice and products of scientific research.17 It is he who popularized the
use of the word “paradigm.”18 Kuhn postulated a cyclical view of scientific activity, with pe-
riods of “normal science”—science as carried on by most scientists within the paradigm
(model) which governs the practice of science at the time—followed by a revolutionary
advance or “paradigm shift,” which throws science into some confusion for a time, then
profoundly alters the previous practice or “paradigm” and so into a new era of “normal sci-
ence” until the next paradigm shift. If it stopped there, his would be a reasonable picture
of the course of fundamental research over the past 400 years. But Kuhn went much fur-
ther. He claimed, among other things, that scientists, working in semi-seclusion among
like-minded colleagues, tend to explain away anomalous or unexpected results, and that
only mounting evidence forces them—little by little and reluctantly—to change their view.
Eventually the new view prevails and a paradigm shift has occurred.
Contrast this view of things with the experience of the distinguished Austrian physicist,
Prof. Anton Zeilinger: “Physicists are always very excited when faced with contradictions
between a model they have created and what nature actually presents in an experiment.
For such a contradiction demonstrates very clearly that their model is wrong, and that
they are able to learn something new.”19 My own personal experience, gained from living
with a working experimental physicist for most of my adult life, confirms Zeilinger’s. I
have listened to scores of lively conversations in my living room as my husband discussed
with colleagues his latest puzzling result and what it might mean. And I’m old enough to
remember, although I had no idea of the consequences of the findings, the excitement en-
gendered by Lee and Yang’s work at Columbia University as they were discovering and
publishing what I now read is called The Non-conservation of Parity. For present purposes
the details of the experimental results don’t matter. What is telling is that at the time, it
threw certain fundamental assumptions out the window at the same time as it solved a
whole tangle of problems, that within a few months the idea was tested experimentally,
and within less than a year the entire world of physics had accepted the startling finding.
C.P. Snow, in his famous book, Two Cultures, called it “one of the most astonishing dis-
coveries in the whole history of science…a piece of work of the greatest beauty and orig-
inality.”20 At the time of his writing, this exciting result was a mere two years old. I make
this point because Kuhn’s claim that scientists are loathe to accept new paradigms until
forced to do so seems quite unjustified. Of course scientists are cautious and want proof
before throwing out current working assumptions: that is their job.
It is useful to note that in this case, moreover, the old view wasn’t wrong; it was merely
not universally applicable. That leads us to other of Kuhn’s problematic claims: that a par-
adigm shift means complete abandonment of the earlier paradigm; that all past beliefs
17. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
18. One of the difficulties with the word is that it is used in a variety of ways, even by Kuhn. Weinberg ac-
cepts it to mean a complex of attitudes and traditions. A simpler formulation is to take it to mean “a general
model.”
19. Zeilinger, Einsteins Schleier, p. 32.
20. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1963), p. 15. Lee and Yang were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work shortly after. Snow cited the in-
difference of his Cambridge University colleagues to the beauty of the work as the quintessential example of how
uninformed his non-scientist colleagues were about science, and how disinterested—the premise of his little
book.
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MYTH IN BRAHMS BIOGRAPHY 191

about nature have turned out to be false, and that after a paradigm shift, scientists find it
nearly impossible to see things as they were previously seen. According to him, scientists
are unable to preserve the ability to switch back and forth between the old and the new.
If Kuhn were indeed correct, the universal laws of nature I have mentioned would be any-
thing but universal, and disappear with every paradigm shift. And as a by-product, for ex-
ample, teachers of physics would be unable to do justice to Newton in their classrooms,
although in fact Newton’s Mechanics is still the basis of an education in the field. In this
regard a comment by the biologist Peter Medawar is appropriate: “Theories are repaired
more often than they are refuted.”21
To paraphrase Weinberg, Kuhn’s radical skepticism and conclusions about what sci-
ence accomplishes have made him a hero to those philosophers, historians, sociologists,
and cultural critics who question the objective character of scientific knowledge and who
prefer to describe scientific theories as social constructions.22 Weinberg is talking, of
course, about the intellectual trend generally included under the rubric of post-modernism.
Whether Kuhn intended to join the trend or not, his views have been appropriated by post-
modernists who have argued, even without his help, against the possibility of any certain
knowledge, and who challenge convictions about the objectivity of knowledge. Nietzsche
is quoted too, with his contention that human beings invent, rather than discover a truth
in concordance with nature. Foucault and Derrida deny the possibility of an objectivity
predicated upon the separation of the self and the object of knowledge, and depict human
beings as caught in a prison of language which stands as an insuperable barrier to truth.
Foucault goes so far as to say that there is no truth outside of ideology, and contends that
the claims scientists make for objectivity and truth are part of a tortured enterprise
trapped within discourses, themselves the products of biased institutions.23 “They [follow-
ers of Foucault] deny any direct personal relation to the reality of the world out there be-
cause reality is the creature of language.”24 Literary theory has influenced all forms of cul-
tural studies, especially in the United States, musicology not the least of them.
Upon reflection, it is not surprising that the “linguistic turn” of post-modern theory has
been provided by four Frenchmen: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and
Jean-François Lyotard. At the heart of the French educational system leading to higher
education—the L ycée curriculum and Baccalaureat exam granting admission to
University—is l’explication du texte, a text-based study originally meant as a tool for liter-
ary analysis. It is the central exercise for lycée students in the “seconde”—the 10th year of
school, and the first year of senior high school in France. At the end of the next year (‘pre-
mière) is an examination essentially devoted to it: l’Épreuve de français, part I of the all-
important Bac. L’explication du texte plays a role in the examination at the end of the next

21. Peter Brian Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought: Jayne Lectures for 1968 (Philadelphia
PA: American Philosophical Society, 1969), p. 30.
22. Weinberg, Facing Up, p. 119. Weinberg provides a more wide-ranging account of Kuhn’s description of
what happens during a paradigm shift, and authoritatively disposes of the various points in the seventeenth es-
say of the book, “The Non-Revolution of Thomas Kuhn”, pp. 187–206. For Weinberg’s more general commentary
on the notion of the social construction of scientific thought, see also his Dreams of a Final Theory (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1992), especially chapter seven.
23. Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin
Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (New York: Vintage Books, 1980),
as cited in Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1994), p. 203.
24. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, p. 214.
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192 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 62/3

year as well, Part II of the Bac, and continues to play a role in subsequent years of study.
While in recent years the lycée curriculum has somewhat reduced the emphasis on l’ex-
plication du texte, the description outlined here is that experienced by Derrida and his
compatriots.25 Formative years of their intellectual lives were therefore spent in intense
study of texts. It seems inevitable that they came to the conclusion that in different hands,
the same text yields different understandings.
But science is not a literary text, nor a linguistic convention. Certainly there is a cul-
tural and linguistic context, which, in the West in a variety of ways, has fostered behavior
which has made possible and yielded what we call modern science, and guided the direc-
tion it has taken so far. The discoveries themselves, however, have an existence apart from
their cultural context. “Science still stands at the center of the enterprise of knowing …
still affirms … the human ability to reason independently and successfully about objects
outside the mind….”26 Basic science has yielded results which are real, in whatever way
one defines that word; results which are tangible, which are now a part of everyday life in
almost every part of the world. I am thinking at the moment of the discovery of quantum
mechanics, which made possible advances in the understanding of solid state materials,
which led in turn to semi-conductors, which led to the computer chips which now are an
integral part of everything from airplanes to cell phones to lap-top computers to washing
machines to the machinery which printed this page. The workings of quantum mechan-
ics are not different from one language or culture to the next, and its tangible conse-
quences are daily held in our hands.
So I want to come to the main thrust of this essay: a search for points of contact be-
tween scientific work and other kinds of intellectual enterprises; what they might have in
common, and what we as biographers, musicologists or historians can unabashedly make
our own.
Before getting into specifics, it needs to be said that scientists don’t learn anything
called Scientific Method, and look most uncomfortable if asked what it is. Einstein put it
this way: “If you want to find out anything from the theoretical physicists about the meth-
ods they use, I advise you to stick closely to one principle: don’t listen to their words, fix
your attention on their deeds.” 27 Still, after a moment of intense concentration when I
pressed the question on him, Richard Friedberg of Columbia University, the theoretical
physicist and excellent pianist, came up with a thought profoundly relevant to my discus-
sion here: “Science is a method for allowing a search for the truth with fallible equipment,
including humans.”28 The fallibility of humans is the crux of the matter. The practice of sci-
ence has shown us that with sufficient rigor, the fallibility of humans is not insurmount-
able, the quest after truth not ipso facto foolish, misguided, or doomed.

*****
What are the attributes that non-scientists can share with scientists so as to allow their
work to survive the vicissitudes of fashion and contribute something of lasting worth to
their field, something that is more than merely the personal understanding of the writer?
The qualities I have in mind for the most part are attitudes rather than methods.

25. Personal communication from Michel Levieux, retired teacher at the Lycée St. Jean de Passy in Paris.
26. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth about History, p. 197.
27. Quoted in Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, p. 1.
28. Personal communication, Bennington, VT, August 2004.
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MYTH IN BRAHMS BIOGRAPHY 193

First is the need for a viewpoint, some vantage from which to conceptualize the project
of whatever sort. Cultural context obviously plays a central role. Before a life can become
a biography, the complex, messy, inconsistent and disorganized raw material has to be or-
ganized in some way that of course is not akin to the way one experiences life in reality,
but makes sense to the biographer. So this is the point at which one has to ask who the bi-
ographer is, when and where and why the work was done. But the real work, the real ef-
fort of thinking critically, begins once we get past these warnings. A viewpoint is a funda-
mental necessity. Charles Darwin, writing to a friend in 1861, wrote: “How odd it is that
anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be
of any service,” and he went on to point out that a geologist without a point of view might
just as well go into a gravel pit, count the pebbles, and describe the colors.29 Similarly, a bi-
ography that is a heap of data interests no one.
The tools of good research are known to all, although in my experience what is not well
known is the degree to which they form part of the essential mental equipment of people
engaged in scientific studies. When, years ago, I mentioned the lack of good scientific
principles in Kalbeck’s work to a musicologist friend, I was swiftly informed how behind
the times I was, how inappropriate it is to speak of scientific method for those who work
in the Humanities. “No more gathering lists of facts,” was the way it was put to me. So I
want to list, instead, some of the attitudes and behavior I have observed in scientists I
know. The categories I’ve listed have blurred boundaries and overlap with each other.
Imagination: It was surely an astounding leap of imagination that allowed Max Planck
to conclude that light exists as discrete bundles (quanta) as well as a steady flow, as a way
of explaining what seemed an inexplicable reading of the spectra he was getting from the
radiation coming from a particular kind of heat source. Planck tried very hard to find a
more conventional solution, but could not. Imagination plays a big role in science: not fan-
tasy, but a play of mind based on experience and informed by the accumulated history of
the field. This is imagination focused on a particular possibility, and then subjected to crit-
ical evaluation.
Intuition is also an important, if mostly unspoken part of science. It is the sudden flash
of understanding as a whole host of previously-digested ideas and information come to-
gether. Medawar describes it as “an imaginative preconception of what might be true.”30
Intuition—flair, creative hunches, or inspiration—is perfectly capable of leading to fruitful
lines of inquiry.
Insight: the use of experience gained in one’s profession and in light of past work.
Insight guides a most crucial step in research, namely:
Asking fruitful questions, and evaluating the answers. This is a kind of feedback, the
constant, critical companion to work in progress. The scientist I know best considers this
to be the crux of his working method.
Investigation, gathering of evidence—the detective work. Scientists rarely start
from scratch. As with historians and biographers, they often study and make use of
the work other people have done. But if that is important, it is not sufficient. Neither in
the Humane Studies nor in the Sciences is the re-arrangement of other people’s footnotes
enough. The scientist observes, explores, tests, and experiments. The historian/

29. More Letters of Charles Darwin, eds. F. Darwin and A. C. Seward (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1903),
p. 176, quoted in Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, p. 11.
30. Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, p. 51.
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194 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 62/3

biographer assesses known materials, and searches archives and primary documents. In
all instances, the quality of observation is crucial: one has to be able to look with fresh
eyes at old material, to have an alertness and flexibility of mind to spot and acknowledge
anomalies, to pay attention to something out of the ordinary or unexpected. This is espe-
cially true when dealing with information “everybody knows,” information passed down
from one work to another without any verification other than it appeared in a previous
book.
Interpretation of evidence, assessing relevance, is key. Jan La Rue, writing on music
analysis, clearly agrees: “The proper test for observation is not [merely] ‘Is it true? But ‘Is
it significant?’ ”31
Validation of evidence—reassessing, corroborating. We share with scientific research
the need to find relevant facts that can be verified. That rather obvious need goes hand in
hand with something much less common in our field, the constant attempt to discover
whether the information we have might not be true. Scientists are always looking for pos-
sibilities of falsifying their findings; biographers usually have to be more subtle, if less con-
clusive. It might be close to impossible to prove that the child Brahms did not play the pi-
ano in brothels, but by studying his family’s circumstances, income, moral values, and
local legal regulations, one comes easily to the conclusion that it would have been unlikely
and even irrational for his parents to have sent him out to do such work. Medawar de-
scribes scientific reasoning as an “exploratory dialogue that can always be resolved into
two voices or two episodes of thought, imaginative and critical, which alternate and inter-
act.” A view is proposed, a view is tested against other possibilities, a view is altered or ex-
panded, and the process continues. In science, points of view—theories—are subject to
experimental validation. We cannot do that, but we can hope to find documentary evi-
dence to back up our view—never ruling out the possibility that there is no evidence, or
that our working model needs to be altered in some important way, put on the back
burner for the time being, or even relegated to the dust bin. Writing biography has to be
the constant formation of a provisional view, subject to revision with even the discovery of
just one new document. We move in a kind of dialogue between the possible and the
actual, and in that way our work differs not at all from science. Medawar is quite clear on
this point. Calling it the “hypothetico-deductive process”, he writes:
There is nothing distinctively scientific about the hypothetico-deductive process. . . . It is merely
a scientific context for a much more general stratagem that underlies almost all regulative
processes . . . feedback.”32

Returning now to Kalbeck and the creation of the myth he developed, I can make cer-
tain “soft” assumptions as to how that happened. I know that Kalbeck was a middle-class
man from a comfortable merchant family in the middle-sized central-European city of
Breslau, and I am guessing that he allowed his personal inexperience of life among the
lower-middle class population of the bustling, commercial port city of Hamburg of 1833 to
skew his understanding of the city and its inhabitants. In this he did not differ from a num-
ber of the biographers who immediately followed him. The exception, again, is Florence
May. I could also make the case that subsequent biographers of Brahms were daunted by
the sheer bulk of Kalbeck’s work, and being themselves less than rigorous in their prac-

31. Jan La Rue, Guidelines for Style Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1970), p. 36.
32. Medawar, Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought, p. 54.
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MYTH IN BRAHMS BIOGRAPHY 195

tice of historiography, concluded they had no possibility of improving upon it. I believe
these insights of mine, but do not claim proof for them! What I can show is that Kalbeck
and the biographers who followed him until recently failed to ask certain vital questions.

1. Did the city of Hamburg have laws regulating brothels? Did the laws of the city al-
low a teen-aged youth, let alone a boy, to play the piano in a brothel?
2. More basic: Was music allowed in brothels?
3. Brahms’s father obtained citizenship of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg in
1830, three years before Brahms’s birth. What did that entail? Did it cost money? If
so, how much?
4. Where precisely did the Brahms family live during the children’s childhood? How
much rent did the Brahms family pay, in the various dwellings they moved to?
5. How far was it from the Brahms home to the dock-side brothels in St. Pauli where
Brahms the child is said to have been dragged out of bed at night to play?
6. Brahms was born in an old section of Hamburg called the Gängeviertel, which even-
tually became a teeming slum. What was it like in 1833 when he was born, in con-
trast to its condition in the late nineteenth century and beyond, when his biogra-
phers started to visit it? For how long did Brahms live there?
7. From ages 6 to 14, Brahms and his brother attended school, completing their stud-
ies at the same age as other young men destined for trade or commerce. Attendance
at school was not required at that time. What was the cost of the school tuition? If in
fact the family was so poor, where did they find the tuition money?

Among the many possible questions a biographer could ask, I chose these because
they are limited in scope, and because they can be answered with some precision. The an-
swers, had any of the 20 “poverty myth” biographers looked for them, would have put an
end to the stories altogether.
The most dramatic answer concerns the brothels of Hamburg and its suburbs.
Brothels were licensed and regulated by law. The statutes are specific and on record:33 no
one under 20 years of age was allowed into a brothel anywhere in the city or in the dock-
side suburb of St. Pauli, to the southwest of the city. Anyone who has seen the drawing of
Brahms by J. B. Laurens at age 20 will confirm that he would have had a difficult time pass-
ing for 20 even when he was indeed 20, let alone at age 14, or 9.34 Moreover, music was for-
bidden in Hamburg brothels. The fines were substantial and could put a house of prosti-
tution out of business and the owner in jail.

33. For the statutes and answers to the other questions posed here see Styra Avins, “The Young Brahms:
Biographical Data Reexamined,” 19th Century Music, XXIV/3 (2001), pp. 276–89. I have simplified matters here
somewhat: the laws of St. Pauli were different from those of Hamburg. In the former, dance halls were synony-
mous with brothels and music was allowed. A letter from Brahms’s mother confirms that Brahms’s father found
work there for a time, and moved the family to St. Pauli for a year when Brahms was three years old. They soon
moved back to Hamburg. But the age limit of 20 applied in both places. It is also important not to confuse work
in those locations with entertainment music in respectable taverns and even dance halls in Hamburg, where
Brahms assuredly did play on occasion once he had left school.
34. Joseph Bonaventure Laurens (1801–1890), French painter and musician, friend of Robert and Clara
Schumann. He visited the Schumanns in November 1853, at the very time the 20-year-old Brahms was making
his first visit to the Schumann home. The pencil sketch he made from life has been widely reproduced. See for
example, illustration #11 in Styra Avins, Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters.
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196 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 62/3

Apart from his failure to ask certain crucial questions, Kalbeck had other traits which
hampered the quality of his biography—one in particular which, I suspect, we can all em-
pathize with: he was in love with his own material and did not suffer correction readily.
When faced with an alternative version of the “facts” as he understood them, he always
chose his own. For example, when made aware that his assessment of Brahms’s school-
ing was faulty he declined to alter later editions. In the practice of science, this kind of be-
havior is unable to persist. It is called “pathological science,” and given the requirement
that scientific experiments be repeatable, the false results inevitably are discovered, the
people involved discredited, their careers usually severely damaged.
Kalbeck was prey to the male chauvinism of the day; his attitude towards Brahms’s
mother and to Clara Schumann is notably condescending, to say nothing of the dismissive
comments about Florence May’s careful biography noted above. But most striking of all,
he appears to have paid no notice to the number of personal memoirs about Brahms writ-
ten before his own work was published, two of them by Hamburg residents who surely
knew the conditions in Hamburg better than he. Moreover, two people who knew Brahms
well in youth and young adulthood wrote letters describing his family and their circum-
stances. Kalbeck knew those letters and even quoted from them in his biography; neither
letter mentions either family poverty or the wretched work Brahms supposedly had to un-
dertake to help to provide support. Should this not have made a careful biographer won-
der at his own interpretation of the life? Indeed, among the people who have written about
Brahms, not a single person who knew Brahms personally as a contemporary, or who
lived in Hamburg during his lifetime, includes the myth except for Kalbeck, who only
knew him for the last 20 years of his life, well after the Hamburg period.
How Kalbeck came up with the story of sordid poverty is not clear. There is no doubt
that money was always a pressing matter in the family household, although the reasons
are different from Kalbeck’s assumptions. We know that Brahms rarely spoke about his
personal affairs (as evidenced in the letter reproduced at the beginning of this essay); we
know that he spoke glowingly of his mother and was proud of his father’s musical ac-
complishments who, as a young man, defied his parents to become a musician and made
his way alone to the foreign city-state of Hamburg. We have good reason to think that on
the occasion of Father Brahms’s two visits to Vienna Brahms talked about his father and
his career in Hamburg, which indeed included playing in St. Pauli establishments. One
can guess—but only guess—that someone, perhaps Kalbeck himself, misunderstood
what he heard and assumed the story referred to the son, not the father. Kalbeck’s late
visit to the Gängeviertel and the mistaken belief that the family spent the first three years
of the composer’s life there, complete the necessary ingredients for the invention of
poverty and the immorality that is often assumed to accompany it.
What a contrast is John Rosselli’s brief biography of Vincenzo Bellini, a brilliant exam-
ple of what sound—and in the sense I have described it, scientific—methodology can ac-
complish by way of revising the biography of someone we thought we knew.35 A whole
web of misconceptions about Bellini falls away thanks to Rosselli’s archival researches
and his eye for inconsistencies in previous biographies. He compares published letters
with their originals, digs around in street directories, in archives of the Paris Opera, in
diaries, diplomatic records, and genealogies, and uses his detailed knowledge of the
chronology of Bellini’s life to give a framework to his findings. Of course the topics which

35. John Rosselli, Vincenzo Bellini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
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MYTH IN BRAHMS BIOGRAPHY 197

interested Rosselli were of his own choosing; there is nothing new here. It has been in-
cumbent on historians to make their point of view visible for a long time. But I doubt that
after reading Rosselli’s work there can be anyone who doubts that he has drawn closer to
a more accurate model of Bellini’s life than existed before.
What kinds of materials have proved useful in dealing with the myth in Brahms’s biog-
raphy, in addition to the study of Hamburg’s brothel laws? Rent records (showing, among
other things, that the Brahms family lived in the Gängeviertel for about 6 months after his
birth and moved out of the Quarter long before it became a slum); a map of Hamburg in
1843, indicating the considerable distance between the Brahms house at that time and the
St Pauli docks; a sample of the 9-year old Brahms’s handwriting, exquisite and faultless, a
sign of careful and attentive schooling; school tuition records; an oil portrait of Brahms’s
father painted when the composer was five years old—not something the father of a fam-
ily short of food is likely to have commissioned; a study of the economics of the Hamburg
underclass, coupled with an approximation of Father Brahms’s income based on the work
we know he had; citizenship laws of the time; family and other letters (in particular, but
not only, a long letter from Brahms’s mother which was known and suppressed by two ma-
jor biographers); memoirs by contemporaries, and in one important instance, an interview
with a childhood neighbor (recorded by Florence May, and ignored by Kalbeck).
Having noted the problems and some possible solutions, can one be confident that the
days of this or other myths are over? I doubt it. Paraphrasing Medawar, exploding myths
of the past is no guarantee that they will be avoided in the future. This particular myth per-
sists because people like it, and only when the kind of scientific rigor I am suggesting be-
comes the norm is there hope that it will disappear.
We need to note, too, that there are two meanings for the word myth. One is pejorative,
but the other descriptive and ceremonial. So far, I have used the word in the first sense,
“a story that is untrue,” an old-wives’ tale.
But the word also includes those stories by which an individual, group, or nation, rec-
ognizes itself, encourages itself, celebrates itself. And in that sense, the Brahms Poverty
Myth does very well. This is the classic story by which genius overcomes adversity: from
humblest beginnings to sublime creations.
Kalbeck wrote his biography in the Heroic Mode, a point of view that was much the
vogue at the time. There is no doubt that placing the child in poverty and even immoral
conditions serves to strengthen the heroic outcome. Kalbeck’s biography fit a widely-held
notion of what a biography, or rather, what a hero ought to be.
The lives of cultures and individuals are shaped in significant measure by the stories
they tell, particularly those of their origins, a point of view discussed in depth by a student
of the function of myth in society. 36 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,
when upward mobility was already possible particularly by means of artistic achievement,
Brahms’s life story could serve as well as Horatio Alger’s, an idealized version of what we
hope for our children even if it is too late for ourselves. If the process by which Brahms
became a great man was arduous and full of pitfalls, so much the better.
Does this trend in biography still serve? I sympathize with Brahms, who wished (so
long as he did not have to be included!) that all artists, great and small, would write hon-
est accounts of their lives. My own sense is that the real-life story of people who achieve

36. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1999).
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198 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 62/3

great things, to the extent that we can discover it, is far more inspiring and moving than
any myth because it is closer to us, closer to what we actually are and to what we can as-
pire. Biographers have the opportunity to reveal patterns and explore life’s potential in
ways that deeply enrich our understanding of their subjects and perhaps of ourselves. The
search for those patterns and details cannot be dismissed as irrevocably doomed by that
“insuperable barrier to truth, language.” Scientific enterprise still stands as the model of
investigative strategies which are capable of transcending place and personality, which al-
low, as my friend Richard Friedberg said, “a search for the truth with fallible equipment,
including humans.”
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MYTH IN BRAHMS BIOGRAPHY 199

APPENDIX: List of Major (And Some Minor) Biographies of Brahms

Biographies from Beginning To 2015
Date & Author
1874 La Mara No poverty myth until post-Kalbeck editions (1911, 8th ed.).
1880 Deiters No poverty myth (unchanged in later editions of 1888 and Eng.
transl. 1889).
Author a personal acquaintance
1888 Vogel No poverty myth.
1897 Reimann First full biography.
Gängeviertel as slum but no dockside brothels or depiction of
poverty. Post-Kalbeck editions include poverty myth.
1898 Deitrich No poverty myth.
Memoir, author a close personal acquaintance as young man.
1898 Spengel No poverty myth.
Hamburg resident, personal friend, based also on local
information.
1898 Widmann No poverty myth.
Memoir by a close personal friend.
1901 Heuberger No poverty myth.
Personal friend, information from conversations noted in his
diary. Not published until 1971 (q.v.).
1901 Hubbard, E. No poverty myth. In contrast, comfortable middle class.
Information supposed to have come from youthful colleague,
Remenyi.
Very unreliable, even fantastic, except for actual Remenyi
encounter.
1902 Hübbe No poverty myth.
Hamburg resident, based on local information. Some personal
contact with Brahms as teen-age piano teacher.
1903–1921 Kalbeck Poverty myth, first time.
Personal friend from 1880.
1905 May No poverty myth apart from Gängeviertel as slum.
Denounces loose rumors, distinct effort to disprove
them.
1905 Erb Gängevertel slum, but no dockside brothels, etc.
Rather unreliable in many areas.
1908 Perger No poverty myth, personal acquaintance of Brahms and
Kalbeck
1911 Fuller-Maitland No poverty myth.
Fuller-Maitland was a long-time friend of Joachim.
1912 Burkhardt Poverty myth, stated reliance entirely on Kalbeck.
1912 San-Galli Mild version of poverty myth.
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200 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 62/3

1920 Neimann Poverty myth.

1922 Ochs Poverty myth.
“Matrosenkneipe” appears first time (not a current word in 19th
C.).
Memoir, personal acquaintance. First-hand account of conver-
sation 40 years previous.
1926 Pulver Questions poverty myth but no attempt to document contrary
view.
1928 Specht Poverty myth, stated reliance entirely on Kalbeck.
1930 Ernest, G. Poverty myth, stated reliance entirely on Kalbeck.
1931 Geiringer Poverty myth, with attempt to justify sordid work.
No change in later editions.
Suppression or dismissal of Mother’s last letter which would
have altered perspective considerably (Geiringer was first to
have access to it).
1933 Ehrmann Poverty myth.
1933 Fellerer Memoir, radio talk.
Personal acquaintance since childhood. No confirmation or
mention of “incident” described by Schauffler (q.v.), at which
he would have been present.
1933 Schauffler Poverty myth full-blown.
Relevant portion a third-hand recollection 50 years later, widely
quoted.
1938 Gerber Poverty myth.
Recognizes problems with Kalbeck, but not with early bio-
graphical material.
1939 Hill Poverty myth, in later editions, too.
Careless and unreliable in other regards.
1945 Graf Memoir: no poverty myth, but documents (in late 1890s)
Brahms’ repertoire of old-fashioned entertainment music.
1952 Grassberger Poverty myth.
Compilation of many previous biographies.
1947 Rehberg Poverty myth.
Compilation of many previous biographies, no new work.
1957 Edw. Crass Poverty myth.
Author from East Germany, where access to most primary
sources might have been difficult.
1961 Gàl Poverty myth.
Compilation of many previous biographies.
1971 Heuberger No poverty myth.
Compiled from conversations noted in his diary, completed in
1901, suppressed out of respect for Brahms’s wishes.
1973 Neunzig Minor ref. to Gängeviertel, no dockside brothels, etc.
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MYTH IN BRAHMS BIOGRAPHY 201

1986 Höcker Poverty myth, despite access to Stephensen family letters and
early revisionist archival research by Kurt Hofmann. Brahms-
Studien Vols. 1–3, which could have led to revisions.
1986 Hofmann Refutes poverty myth.
First detailed exposition of revisionist details, in series of essays.
1989 Keys Poverty myth, stated reliance entirely on Kalbeck
1990 MacDonald Poverty myth.
1997 Swafford Poverty myth in most lurid form, unique to this account.
1997 Floros No poverty myth.
1997 Kross No poverty myth.
First German biography to provide documentary support for
revisionist view
1997 Avins No poverty myth.
First publication in English to provide specific details of revision-
ist view as part of annotations to a general collection of letters.
2000 Musgrave No poverty myth.
First biography in English to provide documentary support for
revisionist view.
2008 Korff No poverty myth.
Vigorous refutation.
2009 Sandberger (ed.) No poverty myth in a detailed dictionary-style work dealing
with all aspects of Brahms’s life and work.
2011 Giani No poverty myth.
Italian biographer makes extensive use of the research in
English and German from 1986 on.
2013 Geck No poverty myth.

Selected Dictionar y and Encyclopedia Entries

1879–1889 Grove’s Dictionary, 1st ed.37 No poverty myth, but minimal biographical entry.
nd
1911 Grove’s Dictionary, 2 ed.
1927 Grove’s Dictionary, 3rd ed.
th
1940 Grove’s Dictionary, 4 ed.
Author: A. Maczewski; update of entry in
Appendix to volume 4 by Mrs. Newmarch
No poverty myth.
Author: J. A. Fuller-Maitland, a long-standing
friend of J. Joachim
No poverty myth.
Author: J. A. Fuller-Maitland.
No poverty myth.
Author: J. A. Fuller-Maitland.

37. Grove’s Dictionary stands for A Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 1st edition edited by George Grove;
2nd edition edited by J.A. Fuller-Maitland; 3rd edition edited by H. C. Colles; 4th edition, largely a reprint of the
3rd edition with some corrections, edited by H. C. Colles; 5th edition edited by Eric Blom.
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202 FONTES AR TIS MUSICAE 62/3

1955 Grove’s Dictionary, 5th ed. Mild reference to poverty myth.

Author: P. F. Radcliffe
1980 TNG, 6th ed.38 No poverty myth, very sketchy early life.
Author: Heinz Becker
2001 TNG 2, 7th ed. No poverty myth.
Authors: George Bozarth and Walter Frisch.
2002 Oxford Companion to Music No poverty myth.
Author: Styra Avins.
2015 GMO, 8th ed.39 No poverty myth.
Authors: George Bozarth and Walter Frisch.
2015 Wikipedia Current German version contains no poverty
myth.
Current English version downplays poverty
myth, but does not quite abandon it.

38. TNG stands for The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, edited by Stanley Sadie.
39. GMO stands for Grove Music Online, current editor Deane Root.