Johannes Brahms

Biography

Youth (1833–1850)

Brahms's father, Johann Jakob Brahms, was from the town of Heide in Holstein. Against his family's will, Johann Jakob pursued a career in music, arriving in Hamburg at age 19. He found work playing double bass; he also played in a sextet in the Alster-pavilion in Hamburg's Jungfernstieg. In 1830, Johann Jakob was appointed as a horn player in the Hamburg militia. He married Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen the same year. A middle-class seamstress 17 years his senior, she enjoyed writing letters and reading despite an apparently limited education.

Johannes Brahms was born in 1833. His sister Elisabeth (Elise) had been born in 1831 and a younger brother Fritz Friedrich was born in 1835. The family then lived in poor apartments in Hamburg's Gängeviertel and struggled economically. (Johann Jakob even considered emigrating to the United States when an impresario, recognizing Johannes's talent, promised them fortune there.) Eventually Johann Jakob became a musician in the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg playing double bass, horn, and flute. For enjoyment, he played first violin in string quartets. The family moved over the years to ever better accommodation in Hamburg.

Johann Jakob gave his son his first musical training; Johannes also learned to play the violin and the basics of playing the cello. From 1840 he studied piano with Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel. Cossel complained in 1842 that Brahms "could be such a good player, but he will not stop his never-ending composing."

At the age of 10, Brahms made his debut as a performer in a private concert including Beethoven's Quintet for Piano and Winds Op. 16 and a piano quartet by Mozart. He also played as a solo work an étude of Henri Herz. By 1845 he had written a piano sonata in G minor. His parents disapproved of his early efforts as a composer, feeling that he had better career prospects as a performer.

From 1845 to 1848 Brahms studied with Cossel's teacher, the pianist and composer Eduard Marxsen. Marxsen had been a personal acquaintance of Beethoven and Schubert, admired the works of Mozart and Haydn, and was a devotee of the music of J. S. Bach. Marxsen conveyed to Brahms the tradition of these composers and ensured that Brahms's own compositions were grounded in that tradition.

Early adulthood (1850–1862)

In 1850 Brahms met the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi and accompanied him in a number of recitals over the next few years. This was his introduction to "gypsy-style" music such as the csardas, which was later to prove the foundation of his most lucrative and popular compositions, the two sets of Hungarian Dances (1869 and 1880). 1850 also marked Brahms's first contact (albeit a failed one) with Robert Schumann; during Schumann's visit to Hamburg that year, friends persuaded Brahms to send the former some of his compositions, but the package was returned unopened.

In 1853 Brahms went on a concert tour with Reményi, visiting the violinist and composer Joseph Joachim at Hanover in May. Brahms had earlier heard Joachim playing the solo part in Beethoven's Violin Concerto and been deeply impressed. Brahms played some of his own solo piano pieces for Joachim, who remembered fifty years later: "Never in the course of my artist's life have I been more completely overwhelmed". This was the beginning of a friendship which was lifelong, albeit temporarily derailed when Brahms took the side of Joachim's wife in their divorce proceedings of 1883.

Brahms admired Joachim as a composer, and in 1856 they were to embark on a mutual training exercise to improve their skills in (in Brahms's words) "double counterpoint, canons, fugues, preludes or whatever". Bozarth notes that "products of Brahms's study of counterpoint and early music over the next few years included "dance pieces, preludes and fugues for organ, and neo-Renaissance and neo-Baroque choral works".

After meeting Joachim, Brahms and Reményi visited Weimar, where Brahms met Franz Liszt, Peter Cornelius, and Joachim Raff, and where Liszt performed Brahms's Op. 4 Scherzo at sight. Reményi claimed that Brahms then slept during Liszt's performance of his own Sonata in B minor; this and other disagreements led Reményi and Brahms to part company.

Brahms visited Düsseldorf in October 1853, and, with a letter of introduction from Joachim, was welcomed by the Schumanns. Robert, greatly impressed and delighted by the 20-year-old's talent, published an article titled "Neue Bahnen" ("New Paths") in the 28 October issue of the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik nominating Brahms as one who was "fated to give expression to the times in the highest and most ideal manner".

Maturity (1862–1876)

In autumn 1862 Brahms made his first visit to Vienna, staying there over the winter. Although Brahms entertained the idea of taking up conducting posts elsewhere, he based himself increasingly in Vienna and soon made it his home. In 1863, he was appointed conductor of the Wiener Singakademie. He surprised his audiences by programming many works by the early German masters such as Heinrich Schütz and J. S. Bach, and other early composers such as Giovanni Gabrieli; more recent music was represented by works of Beethoven and Felix Mendelssohn. Brahms also wrote works for the choir, including his Motet, Op. 29. Finding however that the post encroached too much of the time he needed for composing, he left the choir in June 1864.

From 1864 to 1876 he spent many of his summers in Lichtental on the north side of Vienna, where Clara Schumann and her family also spent some time. His house in Lichtental, where he worked on many of his major compositions, including his middle-period chamber works, is preserved as a museum.

In Vienna Brahms became an associate of two close members of Wagner's circle, his earlier friend Peter Cornelius and Karl Tausig, and of Joseph Hellmesberger Sr. and Julius Epstein, respectively the Director and head of violin studies, and the head of piano studies, at the Vienna Conservatoire. Brahms's circle grew to include the notable critic (and opponent of the 'New German School') Eduard Hanslick, the conductor Hermann Levi and the surgeon Theodor Billroth, who were to become among his greatest advocates.

In January 1863 Brahms first met Wagner, for whom he played his Handel Variations Op. 24, which he had completed the previous year. The meeting was cordial, although Wagner was in later years to make critical, and even insulting, comments on Brahms's music. Brahms however retained at this time and later a keen interest in Wagner's music, helping with preparations for Wagner's Vienna concerts in 1862/63, and being rewarded by Tausig with a manuscript of part of Wagner's Tannhäuser (which Wagner demanded back in 1875). The Handel Variations also featured, together with the first Piano Quartet, in his first Viennese recitals, in which his performances were better received by the public and critics than his music.

In February 1865 Brahms's mother died, and he began to compose his large choral work A German Requiem, Op. 45, of which six movements were completed by 1866. Premieres of the first three movements were given in Vienna, but the complete work was first given in Bremen in 1868 to great acclaim. A seventh movement (the soprano solo "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit") was added for the equally successful Leipzig premiere (February 1869). The work went on to receive concert and critical acclaim throughout Germany and also in England, Switzerland and Russia, marking effectively Brahms's arrival on the world stage.

Success (1876–1889)

Brahms's First Symphony, Op. 68, appeared in 1876, though it had been begun (and a version of the first movement had been announced by Brahms to Clara and to Albert Dietrich) in the early 1860s. During the decade it evolved very gradually; the finale may not have begun its conception until 1868. Brahms was cautious and typically self-deprecating about the symphony during its creation, writing to his friends that it was "long and difficult", "not exactly charming" and, significantly, "long and in C Minor", which, as Richard Taruskin points out, made it clear "that Brahms was taking on the model of models [for a symphony]: Beethoven's Fifth." It quotes "Ode to Joy" theme from the Ninth Symphony; Hans von Bülow dubbed it "Beethoven's Tenth".

Despite the warm reception the First Symphony received, Brahms remained dissatisfied and extensively revised the second movement before the work was published. There followed a succession of well-received orchestral works: the Second Symphony Op. 73 (1877), the Violin Concerto Op. 77 (1878; dedicated to Joachim, who was consulted closely during its composition), and the Academic Festival Overture (written following the conferring of an honorary degree by the University of Breslau) and Tragic Overture of 1880.

In May 1876, Cambridge University offered to grant honorary degrees of Doctor of Music to both Brahms and Joachim, provided that they composed new pieces as "theses" and were present in Cambridge to receive their degrees. Brahms was averse to traveling to England and requested to receive the degree 'in absentia', offering as his thesis the previously performed (November 1876) symphony. But of the two, only Joachim went to England and was granted a degree. Brahms "acknowledged the invitation" by giving the manuscript score and parts of his First Symphony to Joachim, who led the performance at Cambridge 8 March 1877 (English premiere).

The commendation of Brahms by Breslau as "the leader in the art of serious music in Germany today" led to a bilious comment from Wagner in his essay "On Poetry and Composition": "I know of some famous composers who in their concert masquerades don the disguise of a street-singer one day, the hallelujah periwig of Handel the next, the dress of a Jewish Czardas-fiddler another time, and then again the guise of a highly respectable symphony dressed up as Number Ten" (referring to Brahms's First Symphony as a putative tenth symphony of Beethoven).

Later Life (1889–1897)

Brahms and Johann Strauss II were acquainted in the 1870s, but their close friendship belongs to the years 1889 and after. Brahms admired much of Strauss's music and encouraged the composer to sign with his publisher Simrock. In autographing a fan for Strauss's wife Adele, Brahms wrote the opening notes of The Blue Danube waltz, adding the words "unfortunately not by Johannes Brahms". He made the effort, three weeks before his death, to attend the premiere of Johann Strauss's operetta Die Göttin der Vernunft (The Goddess of Reason) in March 1897.

After the successful Vienna premiere of his Second String Quintet, Op. 111 in 1890, the 57-year-old Brahms came to think that he might retire from composition, telling a friend that he "had achieved enough; here I had before me a carefree old age and could enjoy it in peace." He also began to find solace in escorting the mezzo-soprano Alice Barbi and may have proposed to her (she was only 28). His admiration for Richard Mühlfeld, clarinettist with the Meiningen orchestra, revived his interest in composing and led him to write the Clarinet Trio, Op. 114 (1891); Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115 (1891); and the two Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 120 (1894).

Brahms also wrote at this time his final cycles of piano pieces, Opp. 116–119 and the Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), Op. 121 (1896), which were prompted by the death of Clara Schumann and dedicated to the artist Max Klinger, who was his great admirer. The last of the Eleven Chorale Preludes for organ, Op. 122 (1896) is a setting of "O Welt ich muss dich lassen" ("O world I must leave thee") and the last notes that Brahms wrote. Many of these works were written in his house in Bad Ischl, where Brahms had first visited in 1882 and where he spent every summer from 1889 onwards.

In the summer of 1896 Brahms was diagnosed with jaundice and pancreatic cancer, and later in the year his Viennese doctor diagnosed him with liver cancer, from which his father Jakob had died. His last public appearance was on 7 March 1897, when he saw Hans Richter conduct his Symphony No. 4; there was an ovation after each of the four movements. His condition gradually worsened and he died on 3 April 1897, in Vienna at the age of 63. Brahms is buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery in Vienna, under a monument designed by Victor Horta with sculpture by Ilse von Twardowski.

Music

Brahms's major works are for orchestra, including four symphonies, two piano concertos (No. 1 in D minor; No. 2 in B-flat major), a Violin Concerto, a Double Concerto for violin and cello, two Serenades and the Academic Festival and Tragic Overtures. The former includes student drinking songs.

His large choral work A German Requiem—not a setting of the liturgical Missa pro defunctis, but a setting of texts which Brahms selected from the Luther Bible—was composed in three major periods of his life. An early version of the second movement was first composed in 1854 after Robert Schumann's attempted suicide (and later used in his first piano concerto). Most of the Requiem was composed after Brahms's mother's death in 1865. He added the fifth movement after the 1868 premiere, and in 1869 the final work was published.

His works in variation form include the Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel and the Paganini Variations, both for solo piano, and the Variations on a Theme by Haydn (now sometimes called the Saint Anthony Variations) in versions for two pianos and for orchestra. The final movement of the Symphony No. 4 is a passacaglia.

His chamber works include three string quartets, two string quintets, two string sextets, a clarinet quintet, a clarinet trio, a horn trio, a piano quintet, three piano quartets, and four piano trios (the A-major trio being published posthumously). He composed several instrumental sonatas with piano, including three for violin, two for cello, and two for clarinet (which were subsequently arranged for viola by the composer). His solo piano works range from his early piano sonatas and ballades to his late sets of character pieces. His Eleven Chorale Preludes, Op. 122, written shortly before his death and published posthumously in 1902, have become an important part of the organ repertoire.

Brahms was an extreme perfectionist, which Schumann's early enthusiasm only exacerbated. He destroyed many early works—including a Violin Sonata No. 3 (Brahms) violin sonata he had performed with Reményi and violinist Ferdinand David—and once claimed to have destroyed 20 string quartets before he issued his official First in 1873. Over the course of several years, he changed an original project for a symphony in D minor into his first piano concerto. In another instance of devotion to detail, he laboured over the official First Symphony for almost fifteen years, from about 1861 to 1876. Even after its first few performances, Brahms destroyed the original slow movement and substituted another before the score was published.

Style, influences, and historiography

Brahms's music, rooted in Viennese Classical and earlier traditions, extended Beethovenian motivic–harmonic integration as a core structural principle. Often, rather than making an expository display of modulating sequences, Brahms used developing variation in a process of motivic–harmonic transformation. His music maintains large-scale tonal coherence while often delaying, deflecting, or attenuating tonic articulation in a manner that can resemble sustained delay of resolution. While cast conservatively as absolute music against the Lisztian–Wagnerian New German School's embrace of program music and virtuoso aesthetics, much of it was vocal, including hundreds of folk-song arrangements and Lieder (German art songs) often engaging with themes of nature and rural life. These melodies became sources for his instrumental music, as was common from Schubert through Mahler.

Brahms considered writing opera and admired Wagner, perhaps alluding to Tannhäuser (I, mm. 31–35) and Götterdämmerung (II, mm. 108–110) in the Symphony No. 3 while resisting ideas about the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art) or Musikdrama (music drama). His first opus, the Piano Sonata No. 1, derives its Andante from a Minnesang (courtly love song), and he sometimes embedded more subtle musical quotations in ostensibly non-programmatic works: the Symphony No. 4 may allude with autobiographical intent to the second movement of Beethoven's Fifth, the texted chaconne of Bach's Cantata No. 150, and to Schumann's music, including Clara's musical cryptograms and the Fantasie in C (with its own use of Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte).

Brahms venerated Beethoven; in the composer's home, a marble bust of Beethoven looked down on the spot where he composed, and some passages in his works are reminiscent of Beethoven's style. Brahms's First Symphony bears the influence of Beethoven's Fifth, for example, in struggling toward a C major triumph from C minor. The main theme of the finale of the First Symphony is also reminiscent of the main theme of the finale of Beethoven's Ninth, and when this resemblance was pointed out to Brahms he replied that any dunce could see that. In 1876, when the work was premiered in Vienna, it was immediately hailed as "Beethoven's Tenth". Indeed, the similarity of Brahms's music to that of late Beethoven had first been noted as early as November 1853 in a letter from Albert Dietrich to Ernst Naumann.

Brahms loved the classical composers Mozart and Haydn. He especially admired Mozart, so much so that in his final years he reportedly declared Mozart as the greatest composer. On 10 January 1896, Brahms conducted the Academic Festival Overture and both piano concertos in Berlin, and during the following celebration Brahms interrupted Joachim's toast with "Ganz recht; auf Mozart's Wohl" (Quite right; here's Mozart's health). Brahms also compared Mozart with Beethoven to the latter's disadvantage, in a letter to Richard Heuberger in 1896: "Dissonance, true dissonance as Mozart used it, is not to be found in Beethoven. Look at Idomeneo. Not only is it a marvel, but as Mozart was still quite young and brash when he wrote it, it was a completely new thing. You couldn't commission great music from Beethoven since he created only lesser works on commission—his more conventional pieces, his variations and the like." Brahms collected first editions and autographs of Mozart and Haydn's works and edited performing editions.

Performance practice

Brahms played principally on German and Viennese pianos. In his early years he used a piano made by the Hamburg company Baumgarten & Heins. Later, in 1864, he wrote to Clara about his attraction to instruments by Streicher. In 1873 he received a Streicher piano op. 6713 and kept it in his house until his death. He wrote to Clara: "There [on my Streicher] I always know exactly what I write and why I write one way or another." Another instrument in Brahms's possession was a Conrad Graf piano – a wedding present of the Schumanns, that Clara Schumann later gave to Brahms and which he kept until 1873.

In the 1880s for his public performances Brahms used a Bösendorfer several times. In his Bonn concerts he played on a Steinweg Nachfolgern in 1880 and a Blüthner in 1883. Brahms also used a Bechstein in several of his concerts: 1872 in Würzburg, 1872 in Cologne and 1881 in Amsterdam.

Reception and legacy

Brahms is seen as looking both backward and forward. His output was often bold in its exploration of harmony and textural elements, especially rhythm. As a result, he influenced composers of both conservative and modernist tendencies; Anthony Tommasini writes that he "sometimes become entangled in an attempt to extend the Classical heritage while simultaneously taking progressive strides into new territory.".

Brahms's symphonies are prominent in the standard repertoire of symphony orchestras; only Beethoven's are more frequently performed. Brahms's have often been measured against Beethoven's.

Brahms often sent manuscripts to friends Billroth, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, Joachim, and Clara Schumann for review. They noted its textures and frequent dissonances, which Brahms wrote (to Henschel) that he preferred on the strong beat, "resolve[d] ... lightly and gently!" In 1855, Clara felt Brahms's harshness most distinguished his music from Robert's. Billroth described Brahms's dissonances as "cutting", "toxic", or (in the case of "In stiller Nacht") "divine". In 1855, Joachim noted "steely harshness" in the Benedictus of the Missa canonica, with its "bold independence of the voices". But in 1856 he objected to "extensive harshness" in Geistliches Lied, telling Brahms: You [are] so used to rough harmonies, of such polyphonic texture ... . ... You cannot ask that of the listener ... art [should] inspire collective delight ... .

Some criticized Brahms's music as overly academic, dense, or muddy. Even Hanslick criticized the First Symphony as academic. (He later praised the "harmonic and contrapuntal art" of the Fourth Symphony's passacaglia.) Elisabeth von Herzogenberg initially considered the Fourth's first movement a "work of [the] brain ... designed too much" (her opinion improved within weeks). Arnold Schoenberg would later defend Brahms: "It is not the heart alone which creates all that is beautiful [or] emotional". Benjamin Britten lost his taste for Brahms's "thickness of texture" and studied expressivity.

Schoenberg and others, among them Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus, sought to advance Brahms's reputation in the early and mid-20th century against the criticisms of Paul Bekker and Wagner. For Brahms's centenary in 1933, Schoenberg wrote and broadcast an essay "Brahms the Progressive" (rev. 1947, pub. 1950), establishing Brahms's historical continuity (perhaps self-servingly). Schoenberg portrayed him as a forward-looking innovator, somewhat polemically against the image of Brahms as an academic traditionalist. He highlighted Brahms's fondness for motivic saturation and irregularities of rhythm and phrase, terming Brahms's compositional principles "developing variation". In Structural Functions of Harmony (1948), Schoenberg analyzed Brahms's "enriched harmony" and exploration of remote tonal regions. Tommasini writes that "at his best (the symphonies, the piano concertos, the violin concerto, the chamber works with piano, the solo piano pieces, especially the late intermezzos and capriccios that point the way to Schoenberg) Brahms has the thrilling grandeur and strangeness of Beethoven."

Influence

Within his lifetime, Brahms's idiom left an imprint on several composers within his personal circle, who strongly admired his music, such as Heinrich von Herzogenberg, Robert Fuchs, and Julius Röntgen, as well as on Gustav Jenner, who was his only formal composition pupil. Antonín Dvořák, who received substantial assistance from Brahms, deeply admired his music and was influenced by it in several works, such as the Symphony No. 7 in D minor and the F minor Piano Trio.

Features of the "Brahms style" were absorbed in a more complex synthesis with other contemporary (chiefly Wagnerian) trends by Hans Rott, Wilhelm Berger, Max Reger and Franz Schmidt, whereas the British composers Hubert Parry and Edward Elgar and the Swede Wilhelm Stenhammar all testified to learning much from Brahms. As Elgar said, "I look at the Third Symphony of Brahms, and I feel like a pygmy." In France, Gabriel Fauré's music showed Brahmsian concern for rhythm and texture; in Russia, Sergei Taneyev was called "the Russian Brahms"; and in the United States, Amy Beach's musical textures were noted for their Brahmsian richness.

Ferruccio Busoni's early music shows much Brahmsian influence, and Brahms took an interest in him, though Busoni later tended to disparage Brahms. Towards the end of his life, Brahms offered substantial encouragement to Ernst von Dohnányi and to Alexander von Zemlinsky. Their early chamber works, those of Béla Bartók (who was friendly with Dohnányi), show a thoroughgoing absorption of the Brahmsian idiom.

Zemlinsky in turn taught Schoenberg, and Brahms was apparently impressed when in 1897 Zemlinsky showed him drafts of two movements of Schoenberg's early D-major quartet. Webern and later Walter Frisch identified Brahms's influence in the dense, cohesive textures and variation techniques of Schoenberg's first quartet.

In 1937, Schoenberg orchestrated Brahms's Piano Quartet No. 1 as an exercise suggested by Otto Klemperer to break writer's block; Klemperer regarded it as better than the original. (George Balanchine later set it to dance in Brahms–Schoenberg Quartet.)

In Anton Webern's 1933 lectures, posthumously published under the title The Path to the New Music, he claimed Brahms as one who had anticipated the developments of the Second Viennese School. Webern's 1908 Passacaglia, Op. 1, is clearly in part a homage to, and development of, the variation techniques of the passacaglia-finale of Brahms's Fourth Symphony. Ann Scott argued Brahms anticipated the procedures of the serialists by redistributing melodic fragments between instruments, as in the first movement of the Clarinet Sonata, Op. 120, No. 2.

Memorials

On 14 September 2000, Brahms was honoured in the Walhalla, a German hall of fame. He was introduced there as the 126th "rühmlich ausgezeichneter Teutscher" [honorably distinguished German] and 13th composer among them, with a bust by sculptor Milan Knobloch.

Archives

Brahms left his archive—including manuscripts and early editions of his works, his correspondence, and his personal library—to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. Over the next century, the Gesellschaft expanded the collection, adding documents from his friends as well as other sources about his life and work. The resulting Brahms Collection was added by UNESCO to its Memory of the World International Register in 2005, recognising it as globally important documentary heritage.