Brahms was a Janus-like figure who looked backward, seeking inspiration from the older Baroque and Classical traditions, while at the same time he looked forward and seemed the embodiment of modernism. A man of many contrasts, Brahms was devoted to his homeland in north Germany, but chose to live in southern Europe. He adored his parents and enjoyed family life, but never married. He was a kind and generous man, but often adopted an extremely rude manner toward others. He was fiercely independent, yet would mourn bitterly the loss of friends and relatives. He amassed a small fortune, but always lived frugally and dressed like a poor man.
I became interested in Brahms while working on a psychobiography of Robert Schumann and trying to understand the role he played during the two and a half years Schumann was hospitalized and his wife could not, or would not, see him.1 Brahms became a kind of human link between these two artists. He loved Clara and lived with her; he also loved Robert and visited him regularly in the hospital. He played the piano for both of them, spoke with one about the other, and conveyed messages back and forth. This linking function is beautifully symbolized in a composition Brahms wrote in 1854, his Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, op. 9, dedicated to Clara Schumann. This work begins with a Schumann melody for which Clara herself had once written variations; it continues with variations that sometimes resemble Schumann’s musical style and at other times are uniquely Brahmsian.
It occurred to me that Brahms’s way of interacting with and making music for the Schumanns may have had certain characteristics of what Winnicott, working with mothers and children, has called the “transitional object” and Volkan, observing states of bereavement, called a “linking phenomenon.”2 These technical psychoanalytic terms have come to denote such tangible physical items as clothing, dolls, toys, or other belongings that can carry personal meanings and thus are capable of temporarily allaying the anxieties produced by separation from a true love object. In terms of providing emotional gratification, transitional objects are less real than human objects but more real than fantasized objects. Art objects in that sense can become very powerful transitional or linking phenomena, valuable not only for individuals but for entire cultures.
Music, as I have suggested elsewhere, may be especially well suited for use as a transitional or linking phenomenon.3 It has a unique capacity for soothing and comforting. It has both the concreteness of real events and the abstractness of symbols. Some composers seem especially gifted in exploiting these transitional qualities of music, and I would like to suggest that Brahms is a good example of such an artist. Not only did he create effective musical links for future generations, but he also manifested certain qualities of personality that I would consider “transitional.”
Despite the voluminous literature about him, Brahms remains somehow remote and unfathomable. Perhaps that is the way he wanted it to be. Brahms seems to have resisted most efforts to get close to him. Those who tried to do it were rebuffed. Even Clara Schumann had to confess that nearly fifty years of acquaintance with this musician had given her no insight into his character or ways of thinking. Here was someone who habitually kept his feelings to himself, and he deliberately destroyed many manuscripts and other personal documents that might have revealed how his mind functioned.
For the clinician, such behavior can be frustrating as well as tantalizing. Does Brahms’s reserve indicate the desire to hide something? Or was this a way of trying to get people more interested in him? My impression is that despite his efforts at anonymity, Brahms wanted to be understood. He seems to have suffered greatly at times, and he probably had a number of depressive episodes. But the basic textbooks about illnesses of great composers are not helpful in this regard.4 In my review of the literature, I have been able to find only four authors who focus directly on his emotional condition. Lange-Eichbaum cites observations that depict Brahms as “obstinately depressive [ein trotziger Melancholiker]… sexually inhibited, immature, [and] with advancing age crotchety, pedantic, and helpless in practical matters.”5 Schauffler calls him a “schizoid personality.”6 Hitschmann describes his “marriage inhibition.”7 Geiringer, in the keynote address at the 1983 Library of Congress Brahms Conference, calls him “ambivalent.”8
Each of these diagnostic hunches has something of merit. In addition, I would suggest that Brahms had something of the “avoidant personality” described in our modern diagnostic nomenclature, viz., hypersensitivity to rejection, unwillingness to enter into relationships that did not guarantee uncritical acceptance, social distancing, and low self-esteem. But how are all of these descriptive criteria to be understood in the context of his developmental history, particularly his musical development? In brief, he appears to have been hypersensitive and moody beginning in childhood, but music helped him to find ways of avoiding personal intimacy and thus prevent overstimulation throughout adolescence. Most of his adult life he was a loner, and he never married. Severe emotional crises were generally averted, and no serious breakdowns ever occurred. With Brahms there was also a very good fit between his personality, his talent, and his ambition—he never seriously attempted to compose an opera, for example—so that despite a number of career frustrations he always continued to work. Finally, to appreciate Brahms’s generally favorable state of health, it should be pointed out that he had the advantage of a long-term relationship with an outstanding physician and surgeon, Theodor Billroth, who became his devoted admirer and undoubtedly exerted a therapeutic influence. Thus conditions that might well have become more overtly psychopathological seem to have been held in check, so that Brahms’s depressive disorder and personality problems were muted, leaving residues of great music, loneliness, and altruism.
All his life Brahms had a way of avoiding intimate relationships with other people. Already as a child he was solitary and reclusive, preferring to be at the piano or to play with his favorite collection of toy soldiers, an interest that may have combined his need for order with sublimated aggression (as well as his love for his father, who belonged to a military band). Brahms’s interest in military matters never subsided. All his life he was very patriotic. Enthusiastic about the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he wanted to be sure “that the French [would] get a good beating,” and he composed the Triumphlied for Chorus and Orchestra, op. 55, when they did.9 Brahms greatly admired Bismarck, and knew many of his speeches and much of his writing by heart.
Solitary pursuits, in particular reading, occupied much of his time. One of his favorite books was the Bible, from which he also could quote at length. He was widely read in the classics, history, legends, Renaissance art, biographies of musicians, and poetry. Brahms resented bitterly any allusions to his lack of formal education, and he was proud of his ability to discuss literature and the arts with some of the leading German-speaking intellectuals.10 He was an avid collector of rare books, musical manuscripts, and original autographs, including works by Mozart and Schumann. Over the years this came to be a valuable collection, over which he fussed like an orderly librarian, conscientiously keeping track of every sheet of music he ever lent out.
Some of the negative impression Brahms made on others may be attributed to the difficulty he had in using words. He often acknowledged this fault in letters containing apologies for the rough or clumsy way he would express himself—“I can’t write letters, also can’t write diplomatically.”11 He was often angry and self-critical for saying the wrong thing, and he would mock himself cruelly. Those who came to know Brahms well gradually came to realize that, as Niemann said, “His mockery and anger and humour were nothing but a ‘lightning conductor,’ a protection against his own soft-heartedness, of which he was afraid.”12
A man of rigid habits, Brahms rose very early (at 5 a.m. in the summer), brewed many cups of strong black coffee for himself, and worked without stopping until midday. He then went to a restaurant, always the same one for the last fourteen years of his life in Vienna, Zum roten Igel (The Red Hedgehog). Then he would go for a long walk, preferably in the country. Toward the evening, he prepared himself to go to a concert or the opera. Afterward he had supper, often with friends and usually in an informal setting such as a beer hall. He could easily take a catnap and seldom seemed tired. It was difficult for others to keep up with Brahms; for example, while traveling he always had to be on the go, to walk faster, climb higher, and explore more places than anyone else. Like Beethoven, he moved around a great deal, frequently changing his residence until he finally settled down in 1872 at Karlsgasse 4, in a small furnished apartment. Yet his bags were always kept packed for a trip, and he would spend long stretches of time each year away from home. Brahms always preferred older houses, and when traveling he would stay in simple, modest inns where he could relax unobserved, mingle with the help rather than the guests, and not have to dress up. His tendency to wear ill-fitting clothes, to forget his tie and collar, and to look rumpled if not disheveled (but never dirty), was noticed already in his twenties, at the Detmold court, where Brahms sometimes appeared in public and even conducted concerts dressed in a way that would draw attention to his “bad manners” and thus offend his patrons. Later, in Vienna, he habitually wore trousers that were too short, and instead of an overcoat would drape a green blanket around his shoulders, held in place with an oversize safety pin.
To account for these character traits, and others yet to be described, I would like to suggest two possibilities, fully recognizing that proving or disproving such explanations will be impossible, considering that our subject cannot be brought into the laboratory for biological study or into the consultation room for a thorough psychological evaluation.
Brahms at the villa of Johann Strauss in Ischl, 1894 or 1895.
(1) Bio-energetic factors: I assume Brahms to have been afflicted with some type of mood disorder, possibly a bipolar or cyclothymic disturbance that he tried to control, more or less successfully, through strenuously compulsive musical activities, playing the piano, studying scores, composing, and conducting. We know this to be a not uncommon problem among exceptionally productive and creative individuals.13 I have described the pattern in several other nineteenth-century composers, and such figures have unusually high levels of energy and are easily aroused.14 Unless contained through activity and work, their abundant vigor and interest can spill over into uncomfortable states of (hypomanic) excitement, as it probably threatened to do when Brahms would become overly abrasive, jocular, and irritating. At the other extreme are states of exhaustion and fatigue, with which Brahms attempted to cope through caffeine and nicotine. A certain narrowing of interest may also conserve energy, and I suspect that after a long and exhausting day of struggling with musical problems, insufficient energy remained for him to attend to the “less important” matter of social conformance.
(2) Psychological conflict: Brahms may have been torn between disobedience and conformity. This polarization undoubtedly reflected the influence of his parents, who were so widely discrepant in age, social background, and cultural attitudes. In regard to his habits of dress, one of my favorite anecdotes is about Brahms leaving home as a teenager. His mother gave him a sewing kit, with careful instructions on how to use it. He never did. Any holes in his clothes he would mend with sealing wax. This was his way of rebelling, through simultaneous protest and submission. Indeed, it has been noted that in contrast to the carelessness in his physical appearance, Brahms manifested the utmost scrupulosity in polishing his musical compositions. No gap was ever permitted in the fabric of a work; there were never any “loose threads.” Furthermore, I would suggest as an explanation for Brahms’s deportment some internalization of the life style and personal characteristics of Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert, two composers he tended to idealize.15 Brahms’s early infatuation with Robert Schumann, and his lifelong interest in Clara Schumann, may also have led to a degree of identification with these musicians. If that was the case, then the internalized influence of Schumann would probably have had a balancing effect, tending to neutralize Brahms’s identification with the lonely, eccentric, unmarried “mad genius” prototype. And that Clara did not permit a closer union and in the long run would not let him step into Robert’s shoes, reflects perhaps her good judgment in recognizing that such a move would have been destructive to Brahms’s great talent, which had to be nurtured in solitude and seemed to require certain eccentricities.
Needless to say, regular employment proved to be impossible for this artist who valued freedom and needed independence to do his creative work. Brahms used to say that he wanted to be appointed Director of the Hamburg Philharmonic Society, and he felt rebuffed and embittered when Julius Stockhausen (a singer and friend of Brahms) obtained the prestigious post instead. But every time an equivalent position in Berlin, Cologne, or another major city was offered to Brahms, he would find various reasons for turning it down, and when the Hamburg post finally was made available for him, he claimed lamely that it was now too late to accept it. Brahms did accept employment on a few occasions, but only briefly. At age thirty, he served as conductor of the Vienna Singakademie; ten years later he became artistic director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde but resigned after three years. By that time he no longer needed a salary. Brahms was now earning sufficient income by giving concerts, and he gradually became fairly wealthy through the sale and publication of his compositions.
Self-imposed bachelorhood was another reason for his loneliness. Brahms would speak regretfully about this at times, and his song Kein Haus, keine Heimat, op. 94, no. 5, expresses very well the unhappiness of a lonesome man who, in the words of Friedrich Halm, has “no house, no home, no wife, no child. I’m like a straw blown by the wind.” But there also were times when he tried to make a virtue of bachelorhood. For example, when offered the directorship of the Music Society in Düsseldorf (a post held earlier by Mendelssohn and Schumann), Brahms declined. In explaining why, he wrote to Billroth:
My main objections are of a rather childish nature, and I must remain silent about them. Perhaps the good taverns and restaurants in Vienna, the disagreeable, rough Rhenish tone (generally in Düsseldorf), and—and—in Vienna one can remain a bachelor without any hindrance. In a smaller city an old bachelor is a caricature. Marriage is something I no longer want and—I do have some reasons to be afraid of the fair sex.16
No friendship did more to reduce Brahms’s loneliness than that with Joseph Joachim, the violinist and composer who was two years his senior (and outlived him by a decade). “Frei aber einsam” (Free but lonely) was Joachim’s personal motto; its initials FAE make a musical pattern that Schumann, Brahms, and Dietrich used in their jointly composed F.A.E. Sonata for Violin and Piano. Brahms also employed the theme elsewhere, for example in the first movement of his String Quartet in A Minor, op. 51, no. 2.
Brahms and Joachim often gave concerts together, and they maintained a lively correspondence for more than forty-one years, commenting on many musical matters as well as personal ones, such as their mutual dislike of gossip and their concerns about mental illness. Brahms held Joachim in very high esteem as a composer; in his typically ambivalent fashion he would regularly ask for technical advice, but just as regularly reject it. One source of difficulty in the relationship, alluded to earlier, was Brahms’s discomfort with the violinist’s need for physical expressions of affection. Apparently Joachim would try to embrace him, and while lying in bed would shed tears and beg his “dear Johannes” to come over to show his love.17 An unconscious homosexual element in the relationship is also suggested by Joachim’s delusion about his wife having an affair with Brahms’s friend Simrock. Early in the course of the troubled Joachim marriage, Brahms had written a cradle song for the couple’s son, who in his honor was named Johannes. This song Brahms later incorporated into his moving Songs for contralto, viola, and piano, op. 91. He had hoped that the music would bring about a reunion between Joachim and Amalie. It did not.
Sexuality clearly seems to have been a problem for Brahms. He was able to be affectionate with women, even demonstrative at times (as suggested by photographs, although these are mostly of the older Brahms and tend to show the women hugging him rather than vice versa). His habitual caution if not abhorrence in regard to physical intimacy may reflect traumatic childhood experiences, with parents who were unhappily married, often at cross-purposes, and perhaps abusive at times. His reserve toward women may also have been conditioned by the climate of sexual promiscuity in the Hamburg taverns where he had worked as a teenager. Hitschmann described it this way:
Too early he came to know the active, frivolous, purchasable sexuality of the prostitute. He once told of scenes he had witnessed: of the sailors who rushed into the inn after a long voyage, greedy for drinks, gambling, and love of women, who, half-naked sang their obscene songs to his accompaniment, then took him on their laps and enjoyed awakening his first sexual feelings.18
One would have to assume that unconscious and even conscious fantasies have been incorporated into such reminiscences. Nevertheless, Hitschmann’s imagery suggests that young Brahms may have been seduced into playing the role of an aphrodisiac puppet, a go-between whose physical androgyny might be stimulating to men as well as women. And at a very critical period in his life he entered into the sexually complicated relationship between Robert and Clara Schumann, trying to satisfy both partners, as well as himself, in a marriage that had failed. “I dream and think only about the marvelous time when I will be able to live with both of you,” he wrote on 24 October 1854.19 Two months later: “I wish the doctor would employ me as an attendant or male nurse…. I could write to you about him every day, and I could talk to him about you all day” (15 December 1854). And finally, as we know, he was in love with Clara: “I think I can no longer love an unmarried girl—at least, I have completely forgotten them; they only promise the skies, whereas Clara shows it to us open.”20
Brahms did attract other women. Several members of a female choir he conducted in Hamburg adored him, and a singer from Vienna named Bertha Porubsky may even have encouraged him to move to that city. The relationship did not continue. However, when Bertha later married and had a child, Brahms composed his famous Wiegenlied (Lullaby), op. 49, no. 4, for her. A more substantial romance was with Agathe von Siebold, the daughter of a professor in Göttingen, introduced to him by Joachim. Brahms is said to have given her an engagement ring, and when Clara Schumann found out about this, she warned him not to marry Agathe. Brahms soon terminated this relationship, but not without considerable anguish, which he symbolized by means of an agitated theme spelling her name A-G-A-H-E in the first movement of his Sextet for Strings in G Major, op. 36.
Brahms often teased Clara about possibly marrying one of her daughters, but he found excuses: “If [Eugenie] retains only a tiny scar on her pretty face [from a minor injury], then surely I can’t marry her, and nothing will tie me down” (15 January 1856). Julie Schumann, probably the prettiest of the girls, also interested Brahms for a while. When she got married in 1869 to the Italian Count Marmorito, he felt embittered and angry, unjustly, since he had never declared any intention to marry Julie. Brahms had recently composed his melancholic Alto Rhapsody, op. 53, and he now made a point of saying it was “a bridal song for the Countess Schumann, but with rage do I write such things—with anger!”21
Another attractive woman in his life was Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and again Brahms’s avoidance of physical intimacy is apparent. She had been his piano student, and he broke off the relationship after noticing himself to be uncomfortably sexually aroused in her presence. They remained on good terms, however, and he regularly sought to please Elisabeth by sending her his “trifles,” as he mockingly called compositions like the “tiny little Piano Concerto [in B-flat Major], written with a small, delicate Scherzo.”22
He also befriended a couple of contraltos. One was the buxom Hermine Spies, whom Brahms referred to jokingly as “Hermione without an O.”
She premiered many of his most beautiful songs. The other was Alice Barbi, a friend in his old age. These must have been exceptional women to put up with his derisive, self-disparaging remarks to the effect that any woman who could find him appealing must be out of her mind! Brahms liked to pose for photographs as a presumably happy bachelor surrounded by attractive women. In unguarded moments, however, his eccentricities became only too apparent, and many of his casual remarks sound utterly disillusioned: “I have no friends! If anyone says he is a friend of mine, don’t believe it.”23 It is often said that he frequented prostitutes. In Vienna Brahms was occasionally observed in the company of a streetwalker whom he seemed to know on a first-name basis. Whether such contacts actually led to physical intimacy is anyone’s guess. I find myself in sympathy with the art historian Alessandra Comini’s opinion (personal communication) that after pleasurably chatting and gossiping with these women for a while, Brahms probably went home to satisfy himself in private.
One of Brahms’s most active defenses against isolation was a highly developed feeling of responsibility. The sense of obligation he displayed toward his own family and in his relationship with Robert and Clara Schumann has already been mentioned. His generosity in financial matters knew no bounds. He supported his parents, his siblings, his stepmother, and her children. He gave money lavishly to anyone, friend or stranger, who so much as requested it or seemed to be in need. Ruthless as he was toward mediocrity, he never stinted praise or direct helpfulness when it came to other musicians. He was genuinely impressed with the talent of Antonín Dvorák, found ways to get his compositions published, and even went to the trouble of copying scores for him. In the case of Richard Wagner, who on several occasions had made scurrilous statements about Brahms, he always behaved with utmost decency. Not that he had any sympathy for Wagner’s extremism. On the contrary, Brahms had taken an early public position against the Liszt-Wagner camp. (He was also one of the few German composers who at that time did not make anti-Semitic remarks.) It was simply that Brahms respected Wagner as a composer of operas, the only musical form in which he himself had made no progress. Despite Clara Schumann’s condemnation of Tristan und Isolde, Brahms judged this to be a “magnificent work,” and he even assisted Wagner in a practical way, by copying orchestral parts for the premiere of Die Meistersinger in Vienna.24
In his thirty-year relationship with Theodor Billroth one also observes Brahms’s altruism. These men had much in common: their background in northern Germany, their loyalty to their parents, their energy and creativity, as well as their abhorrence of emotional display. Billroth habitually condemned moodiness, which he thought was a form of stupidity. Like Brahms, he firmly believed that the best way to handle one’s emotions was through disciplined work. But Billroth and Brahms also had their differences: the surgeon was a tall, stately man, eloquent in speech, socially tactful and gracious, as compared to the short, awkward composer with his shabby appearance and impossible manners.
Billroth was an accomplished pianist, a passable violist, and an amateur composer. He had written three trios, a string quartet, and a piano quartet, all of which he destroyed. To please his mother, Billroth had studied medicine instead of music. He was the most daring and innovative surgeon of his day, pioneering such operations as radical mastectomy, total thyroidectomy, and various gastrointestinal procedures. His marriage was not a happy one, however, and that may have been a factor in his sensitive understanding of the lonely, sexually inhibited Brahms. Both men adored children, and Billroth was heartbroken when his first son turned out to be a deaf, mute, and possibly autistic child. (The boy died when Billroth was thirty-seven; that was the year he befriended Brahms.) They took many vacation trips together and in Vienna saw as much of each other as the busy surgeon’s schedule would permit. Brahms regularly invited Billroth to his rehearsals, and he offered him many new compositions to be premiered in his home. Needless to say, Billroth championed Brahms’s music with utmost enthusiasm.
The friendship began to deteriorate after Brahms learned from an old letter that Billroth had made disparaging remarks about his lack of formal education—a touchy point. He then discovered that Billroth committed the unforgivable sin of applying his surgical technique to the manuscript of a string quartet Brahms had dedicated to him. (In his worshipful attitude, Billroth had cut Brahms’s signature from the title page and glued it onto his portrait.) For someone who revered original manuscripts as much as Brahms did, this was a sacrilege that justified the end of a long friendship. (Their relationship would have ended soon enough anyway, for Billroth became ill, and died in 1894. Brahms wanted to publish Billroth’s musical compositions in a posthumous edition, but the surgeon’s wife objected to this plan.)
Nowhere is Brahms’s generosity more apparent than in his behavior toward the old Clara Schumann.
It angers me [he wrote her on 24 July 1888] that [among other things] you have these [money worries]—while I swim in money without even noticing it and without having any pleasure because of it. I cannot live otherwise, don’t want to, and will not… and where my heart demands it, I can be helpful…and do good without being aware of it. After my death, however, I won’t have any responsibilities or special wishes.
Thus Brahms offered to send Clara 10,000 marks for the support of her children. “Just think what a great pleasure [it would] give me were you simply and nicely to say ‘yes.’” Clara, characteristically, said “no.” But Brahms found a way to give her the money anyway, by making an anonymous contribution to the Schumann Memorial Fund. He also took endless pains in helping Clara to edit her husband’s complete works. That project led to many pathetic disagreements, caused partly by Clara’s wish to suppress, and in some instances even to destroy, compositions by Schumann that she considered unworthy. Brahms was able to rescue Schumann’s D-Minor Symphony from such a fate by having the original score published alongside its later, more thickly orchestrated version (op. 120). That infuriated Clara, whose coldness toward Brahms made him feel utterly rejected: “It is hard, after 40 years of loyal service (or whatever you might wish to call my relationship to you) to be thought of as nothing more than a ‘bad experience’” (13 September 1892).
They soon forgave each other, however, and agreed to remain friends. Clara’s terminal illness following a stroke in 1896 was heartbreaking for Brahms, and her death left him totally bereft. He said that she was “the only person [he] had ever really loved.”25
One cannot measure a man of genius with the same yardstick used for normal people. Brahms may have had a depressive disorder and an avoidant personality. He often displayed obsessive-compulsive habits and an irritability and impulsivity that was upsetting to people. He became more eccentric as he grew older, and in the homes of his friends he was pampered like an overgrown child. An involutional melancholia in his mid-fifties probably interfered with both his creativity and his well-being, but he recovered with the sounds of Mühlfeld’s clarinet ringing in his ears, only to be stressed beyond endurance by the death of his one and only Clara Schumann.
In terms of the theory of “transitional objects,” which is so useful in explaining the childhood origins of shared pleasure, I would propose that there may also be “transitional personalities,” people who do not attach themselves firmly to anyone, but who allow themselves to be used for purposes of aesthetic gratification by everyone. These individuals are able to endure great loneliness and even isolation without becoming psychotic. They may seem to be dualistic, and their behavior is paradoxical.
One notices, for example, their brittleness and their integrity, their ruthlessness and their amiability, their vulnerability and their security. The art (or science, or other original things) they produce is meant to create linkages, to establish new connections between people, even across generations and cultures.
Brahms may have been such a transitional figure. He rose from rags to riches but never outgrew the rags. He was complicated and intellectual, but also simple and boorish. Although he remained a stranger to many people, he was also a friend, able to transcend his painful loneliness through altruistic acts. As a composer of difficult music that is easy to enjoy, Brahms seems to have mastered “the interplay between originality and the acceptance of tradition [that is] the basis for inventiveness.”26 He was the kind of person who immerses himself so fully in his creative work that there is little time or energy left over for intimacy and the formation of families. One thinks of other geniuses for whom the whole world became a family, Beethoven, for example, or Michelangelo. Such men can change civilization. They give us new sounds, new visions, and new meanings. They achieve truths that become eternal.
An expanded version of this article appeared as “Johannes Brahms—Music, Loneliness, and Altruism,” in Psychoanalytic Explorations in Music, ed. Stuart Feder, Richard Karmel, and George Pollock (Madison, Conn., 1990), 291-320.
1. Ostwald, Schumann: The Inner Voices of a Musical Genius (Boston, 1985), 283-93.
2. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London, 1971); V. Volkan, Linking Objects and Linking Phenomena (New York, 1981).
3. Ostwald, “The Healing Power of Music: Some Observations on the Semiotic Function of Transitional Objects,” in The Semiotic Bridge: Trends from California, ed. Irmengard Rauch and Gerald F. Carr (Berlin and New York, 1989), 279-96.
4. There is scant consideration of such matters in the Brahms chapter in F. H. Franken, Die Krankheiten grosser Komponisten, vol. 2 (Wilhelmshaven, 1989); and no chapter about Brahms in D. Kerner, Krankheiten grosser Musiker (New York, 1973).
5. W. Lange-Eichbaum, Genie, Irrsinn und Ruhm: Eine Pathographie des Genies, ed. W. Kurth (Munich, 1961).
6. Robert Haven Schauffler, The Unknown Brahms: His Life, Character, Works (New York, 1933), 156.
7. Eduard Hitschmann, “Johannes Brahms and Women” (1949), repr. in Great Men: Psychoanalytic Studies, ed. Sydney Margolin (New York, 1956), 200.
8. Karl Geiringer, “Brahms the Ambivalent,” American Brahms Society Newsletter 1/2 (1983): 5-6. Repr. in Geirlinger, On Brahms and His Circle: Essays and Documentary Studies, ed. George S. Bozarth (Sterling Heights, Mich., 2006), 3-6.
9. Kurt Stephenson, ed., Johannes Brahms in seiner Familie: Der Briefwechsel (Hamburg, 1973), 175.
10. See Michael Musgrave, “The Cultural World of Brahms,” in Brahms: Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies, ed. Robert Pascall (Cambridge, 1983), 1-26.
11. Berthold Litzmann, ed., Clara Schumann-Johannes Brahms: Briefe aus den Jahren 1853-96 (Leipzig, 1927), 1:597.
12. Walter Niemann, Brahms, trans. Catherine Alison Phillips (New York, 1929), 178.
13. Ruth L. Richards, “Relationship Between Creativity and Psychopathology: An Evaluation and Interpretation of the Evidence,” Genetic Psychology Monographs 103 (1981): 261-324.
14. Ostwald, Schumann; “Anton Bruckner: Musical Intelligence and Depressive Disorder,” in Kongressbericht zum V. Gewandhaus-Symposium (Leipzig, 1987); and “Gustav Mahler: Health and Creative Energy,” in Rondom Mahler 8 (Amsterdam, 1988).
15. The identification with Beethoven was brought home to me by Alessandra Comini in “Ansichten von Brahms—Idole und Bilder,” in Johannes Brahms: Leben, Werk, Interpretation, Rezeption (Leipzig, 1985), 58-65. Beethoven’s slovenliness, rudeness, and disregard of social convention have been discussed psychoanalytically by Maynard Solomon in Beethoven (New York, 1977; rev. ed., 1998). Schubert’s fluctuating sociability and withdrawal, his incessant involvement in things musical, and his ambivalence regarding women are also well known. See, most recently, Solomon, “Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini,” 19th-century Music 12 (1989): 193-206.
16. Otto Gottlieb-Billroth, ed., Billroth und Brahms im Briefwechsel (Berlin and Vienna, 1935), 222.
17. Private communication from Boris Schwarz at the International Brahms Conference, Library of Congress, May 1983.
18. Hitschmann, Great Men, 212.
19. Litzmann, Clara Schumann—Johannes Brahms, 1:24.
20. Artur Holde, “Suppressed Passages in the Brahms-Joachim Correspondence,” Musical Quarterly 45 (1959): 314. Translation adapted.
21. Johannes Brahms, Briefwechsel, rev. edns. (Berlin, 1912-22), 9:77-78.
22. Brahms, Briefwechsel, 1:154.
23. Quoted in Niemann, Brahms, 180.
24. Brahms, Briefwechsel, 7:83.
25. Niemann, Brahms, 175.
26. D. W. Winnicott, “The Location of Cultural Experience,” International Journal of Psychoanalysis 48 (1967):370.