I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms. Nancy Shear. Regalo Press. 320 pages
BOOK REVIEW — Polymath Nancy Shear is as inimitable as New York itself. A writer, broadcaster, commentator, and arts consultant with irrepressible energy, she has darted from National Public Radio to the New York Philharmonic, keeping her in the cultural conversation for more than six decades. In her memoir, I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms, Shear turns back to her youthful years as an assistant orchestral librarian for the Philadelphia Orchestra, a role that led her to become Leopold Stokowski’s trusted aide, a bystander to Eugene Ormandy’s tenure, and cellist Mstislav Rostropovich’s confidante.
The book is both a backstage chronicle — offering the human lens behind eminent figures, with Stokowski as the chief protagonist — and a coming-of-age story of a young woman fleeing a fractured home life into the refuge of music and its makers. And lest readers expect a quietly observed cultural history from an ingénue, Shear’s personal disclosures live up to the fabled librarian stereotype: Behind the prim, quiet surface lies a rebellious, brave, and free spirit.
Shear’s title springs from a fleeting anecdote, no doubt inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s 1953 short story The Man Who Knew Brahms, first published in Life magazine. The story plays on the prestige that comes from claiming proximity to great cultural figures. In Shear’s memoir, the reference gestures toward a larger premise: that cultural history is often sustained through personal connections.
I Knew a Man Who Knew Brahms is ultimately a testament to both the rigor of musical life and the courage it demands of those who inhabit it. Through her close encounters with Stokowski, Ormandy, and Rostropovich and her work behind the scenes, Shear reveals both the human vulnerabilities of artistic life and the dedication required to support it. The book is not simply a tribute to the figures whose contributions shaped an era but a celebration of Shear herself — an extraordinary woman who, at the age of 15, sneaked into concerts because she could not afford them, and who, through fearlessness and determination, not only witnessed history but became an indispensable part of it.
Shear, 79, offers remarkable clarity in her recollections. Considering that most of the events transpired over six decades ago, she recalls rehearsal details, conversations, and performance anecdotes with almost forensic precision, while giving equal attention to the nuances of personal ebbs and flows.
In sharing her endearingly committed, yet ambiguous relationship with Stokowski, Shear contextualizes the conductor’s achievements, drawing attention to his interpretative liberties — such as doubling woodwind instruments contrary to the composer’s score, or preferring free string bowing — as well as his vitality and support of contemporary music.
“An example of this vitality,” she writes, “involved his performances of the brutally difficult Ives Fourth Symphony. He was eighty-three in 1965 when he premiered and recorded it with the American Symphony in Carnegie Hall, and eighty-eight when he repeated the work in Philharmonic Hall.” Readers experience Shear as both witness and participant in Stokowski’s life at very close range. He emerges as a mentor, a figure of compulsive authority and uncompromising stubbornness, but one who, in Shear’s eyes, was empathetic and largely misunderstood.
In contrast, her unexpected relationship with Rostropovich is at once more intimate and personal: part romance, part companionship, part professional trust. He is depicted as a larger-than-life musician whose deeply held and unwavering commitment to human rights and artistic freedom inspired the young Shear to take unimaginable leaps of faith.
The memoir widens the frame to consider the invisible labor behind the performances we experience in the concert hall: the exacting work of librarians who enable the conductor’s artistry, the fragilities of the concert institution, and the role of women in the last half of the 20th century.
