Johannes Brahms

The young eagle

Early years

Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833 in the city of Hamburg in northern Germany. His father, Johann, was a multi-instrumentalist who moved to Hamburg to earn a living playing in taverns and dance halls; he later joined a local militia as a horn player. As a young boy Johannes studied piano, cello, and horn. His early teachers included his father, as well as Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel (piano) and Eduard Marxsen (piano and music theory); the later instilled a lifelong love for the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and the Viennese Classical Trinity of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven. Beethoven’s influence in particular would prove to be particularly powerful and, for much of Brahms’s early career, a heavy burden.

Brahms made his performance debut in a private concert at the age of 10, playing chamber music by some of these masters. He gave his first solo performance at 15, playing works by Bach and Beethoven. Yet even as he took these early steps in a performance career, his teacher Cossel complained that he spent more effort on composing than practicing his piano technique. His parents also tried to discourage him from pursuing a career in composition, but to no avail; he completed his first piano sonata by the age of 13. This tension between performance and composition lasted well into his thirties.

New friends, new paths

After leaving school Brahms pursued a full-time career in music, giving performances and piano lessons while composing. The influences and relationships Brahms cultivated during his early years of independence would prove vital to his musical development. Bach and Beethoven remained his musical North Stars. Early on, he developed an enduring love of German Romantic poetry as well as folk poetry and music, all of which would influence Brahms’s work throughout his life. He composed numerous early works, many of which have been lost. He was exceedingly critical of his own compositions throughout his life and destroyed many of them. According to one of his childhood friends, the composer destroyed nearly two dozen string quartets before publishing his Opus 51 string quartets at the age of 40.

1853 was a pivotal year for Brahms, and by extension for the history of classical music. The Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi invited Brahms to go on tour with him; Reményi’s friendship inculcated in Brahms a fascination with Hungarian music, including the traditional folk dance called the csárdás, that culminated in his famous Hungarian Dances. That same year, Brahms met the virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim, whom he had admired since hearing him perform Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in D Major. The pair became lifelong friends and collaborators, performing and studying composition together while advising one another artistically. Brahms later dedicated two of his concertos to Joachim, his Violin Concerto in D Major and his Double Concerto for Violin and Cello in A Minor. Brahms shared some of his early works with Joachim, who would  recall some fifty years later, “Never in the course of my artist’s life have I been more completely overwhelmed.” He insisted that Brahms meet other prominent musicians, making introductions to numerous figures including Robert and Clara Schumann.

Brahms called upon the Schumanns one early autumn night. Robert’s diary entry from the next day includes the note, “visit from Brahms—a genius.” Over the next two weeks, Brahms showed the pair numerous compositions including songs, chamber works, and his Piano Sonata No. 3 in F Minor. Shortly after, in an article for his influential journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik entitled “New Paths,” Robert heralded the “young eagle” Brahms as one “called to give expression to his times in ideal fashion: a musician who would reveal his mastery not in gradual stages but like Minerva would spring fully armed from Kronos’s head.” That same month Robert, Brahms, and Robert’s pupil Albert Dietrich composed the F-A-E Sonata for violin and piano, a tribute to Joachim.

But Brahms’s relationship with the Schumanns soon took a devastating turn. Robert, who had long struggled with mental illness, attempted suicide and committed himself to an institution. Brahms moved in with the Schumanns to help Clara take care of the children and served as a go-between for her and Robert at the sanatorium. He died there less than three years after his and Clara’s happy first meeting with Brahms. 

The relationship Brahms and Clara formed in these circumstances remained one of mutual devotion for the rest of their lives. Both leaned on one another for support and encouragement, and Brahms often sought Clara’s input on his compositions. Though Brahms developed strong romantic feelings for Clara, their relationship remained platonic.

Early failures

For Brahms, the remainder of the 1850s was largely a period of self-scrutiny. Brahms felt intense pressure to live up to the praise of the deceased Robert Schumann. He gave fewer public performances and published no new works until 1860. He briefly served as a court musician and established and conducted a women’s chorus, though he abandoned both positions when they impeded upon his composing. 

The year 1859 presented an acute moment of crisis for the still-mostly-unknown composer. Critics and audiences alike disdained his Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor; it was so poorly received that some publishers refused to meet with him. Later that year he became engaged to be married but soon broke off the engagement. He remained a lifelong bachelor.

Around this time, Brahms became embroiled in the “War of the Romantics,” a split between the musically progressive and conservative factions of the day. Brahms, Clara Schumann, and Joachim fell upon the conservative side, which endorsed absolute music; Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt became the standard bearers of the progressive movement, which pushed the limits of chromatic harmony and experimented with programmatic compositions. Brahms lent his name to an article decrying the excesses of Liszt’s tone poems, mocking them as the “Music of the Future.” He was soundly lambasted as an outdated reactionary. Yet not all of Brahms’s endeavors from this period proved fruitless. In the early 1860s Brahms sent Schumann the prototype of what would become his Symphony No. 1.

The mature artist

Breakthrough

The 1860s saw the crystallization of Brahms’s mature style. During the first half of the decade he completed numerous pieces for solo piano as well as chamber works such as the Sonata for Cello and Piano No. 1 and the Piano Quartet No. 1 and No. 2. He met Wagner, whose music he admired, even if musical conservatives in the so-called “War of the Romantics” held up Brahms as their champion.

Following the death of his mother in 1865, the devastated composer began composing a tribute to her memory. Four years later, he premiered his seven-movement Ein Deutsches Requiem for chorus, orchestra, and soprano and baritone soloists. The Requiem helped establish his reputation as a composer at home and abroad.

Vienna, and a symphony at last

Shortly before his fortieth birthday, Brahms conducted his first concert as music director of the Viennese Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde orchestra and choir. Up to that point, he had resisted such a position in order to maintain the freedom to travel and compose. He settled in the Austrian capital, where he lived for the rest of his life. He programmed early works (including Baroque masters Bach and George Frideric Handel) and works from the Classical and Romantic eras. Though he programmed his own works, he still had yet to compose a symphony. 

That day would finally come in 1876 with the completion of his dark and dramatic Symphony No. 1 in C Minor (ever the perfectionist, he revised it between its first season of performances and its publication). Its successful premiere seemed to assuage the anxiety of influence that had long plagued Brahms, for he completed his pastoral Symphony No. 2 in D Major a year later. He ultimately completed four symphonies.

A flood of orchestral works followed the premieres of the first two symphonies. Nearly twenty years after the failed premiere of his first piano concerto, he began work on the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major. His friend Joachim premiered his Violin Concerto on New Year’s Day 1879. By the end of the 1880s he had completed his second piano concerto, the Academic Festival Overture and the Tragic Overture, the Double Concerto for Violin and Cello, and his final two symphonies.

Twilight

Nearing sixty and as friends around him passed away, Brahms attempted to retire from composing. Instead, his final decade produced some of his most brilliant chamber music. Clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld inspired some of his late works for the instrument including a trio, a quintet, and a pair of clarinet sonatas. The introspective 6 Klavierstücke were some of the final pieces Brahms published. 

His beloved friend Clara Schumann died in the spring of 1896. That summer, Brahms received a diagnosis of cancer. In March 1897, a month before his death, he made one of his last public appearances at a performance of his Fourth Symphony. He was buried in the “Musician’s Corner" of the Vienna Central Cemetery, near Beethoven and Franz Schubert.

Brahms’s work

Chamber music

The famously perfectionist Brahms destroyed many of his early works, including versions of string quartets and piano music. He left behind 24 completed pieces of chamber music written over a span of 40 years. His primary instrument, piano, figures prominently, especially in the earlier works. Though he completed nearly two dozen string quartets, only three survived Brahms’s furnace.

His handful of chamber sonatas rank among the greatest of the nineteenth century. Violinists routinely perform his three sonatas for that instrument, including the Sonata No. 1 in G Major, nicknamed the “Rain Sonata” for a melody taken from his Regenlied. In his twilight years he completed chamber works for clarinet, including a quintet and a pair of sonatas (he later transcribed the sonatas for viola).

The symphonies

Overwhelmed by Beethoven’s influence and Robert Schumann’s enthusiastic early praise, for years Brahms felt unable to live up the bar set by these elder statesmen of German music. He spent at least twelve years composing the Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, eventually completing it at the age of 43 (Beethoven completed eight of his nine symphonies by the same age; Mozart composed 41 symphonies before his death at the age of 35). “I will never write a symphony!” Brahms once despaired. “You have no idea how dispiriting it is for one of us when he constantly hears such a giant marching behind him.”

Yet Brahms ultimately completed four symphonies, all of which rank among the greatest orchestral compositions of the nineteenth century and remain some of the most performed of any composer. The First, Second, and Fourth Symphonies are among the top five most-performed symphonies at Carnegie Hall, with the First in the very top spot. Though his Symphony No. 1 shows a clear debt to Beethoven—its progression from C minor to C major mirrors Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor—Brahms put his own indelible stamp on the genre. With the premiere of his Symphony No. 4, he completely overcame Beethoven’s anxiety of influence to reach “the summit of his achievement in the genre.”

The concertos

Brahms’s four concertos span the breadth of his career. Following the unsuccessful premiere of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor in the late 1850s, he waited more than 20 years before completing his Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major. Unlike its older brother, the second concerto was an immediate success. Brahms’s friend Theodor Billroth wrote that the works stood in the relationship “of youth to man.”

Longtime friend and collaborator Joseph Joachim premiered Brahms’s sole Violin Concerto on New Year’s Day 1879,  performing it alongside Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. Joachim, the concerto’s dedicatee, referred to it as one of the four great German violin concertos. Contemporary audiences and violinists agree, and the work remains a cornerstone of the violin concerto repertoire. Joachim also received the dedication for the Double Concerto for Violin and Cello in A Minor (1887), Brahms’s final composition for orchestra. Brahms presented the work to Joachim as a peace offering after siding with Joachim’s wife during their bitter divorce. 

Hungarian Dances

Brahms’s early performances with violinist Ede Reményi instilled a fascination with Hungarian music. More than two decades after their first tour, Brahms completed a set of twenty-one pieces for piano four hands titled Hungarian Dances. These miniatures based mostly on Hungarian themes have since been arranged for a variety of instruments and ensembles. They remain some of Brahms’s most popular and commercially successful music.

Ein Deutsches Requiem

While Brahms’s reputation largely rests on his instrumental works, the majority of his compositions are for voice. He composed more than 200 songs and arranged well over 100 German folk songs. Though he never completed an opera, his works for voice and orchestra rank among his greatest achievements.

He composed Ein Deutsches Requiem in memory of his mother. Rather than set the text of the Latin mass for the dead, Brahms broke with tradition by selecting his own text from the German Luther Bible. His choices of text are humanistic and comforting, focusing on love and redemption instead of divine judgment (the Dies irae, a pivotal section of the requiem mass in works by Mozart and Verdi, is notably absent). The Requiem helped establish Brahms’s reputation as a composer at home and abroad.

Brahms’s influence on classical music

Within his own lifetime, Brahms became Germany’s preeminent musical figurehead. The conductor Hans von Bülow christened him the third of the “Three Bs,” the natural successor to Bach and Beethoven. A contemporary bemoaned his pervasive musical presence, naming his influence on younger composers the “Brahms fog.” Ironically, Brahms himself inspired the same anxiety of influence that had so plagued him in his first decades. 

Composers across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have acknowledged the direct influence of Brahms’s music: Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams in England, Milton Babbitt in the United States, György Ligeti in Hungary, among many others. The German modernists, including Arnold Schoenberg, adopted and sometimes rejected Brahms’s techniques to their own ends.

His music remains popular outside the concert hall, appearing in figure skating routines and hundreds of films and TV shows. His “Lullaby” and Hungarian Dances are instantly recognizable classics (Hungarian Dance No. 5 has become a recent favorite among electronic dance music composers).

Brahms taught few students, focusing instead on composition and performance. He coached his works with a small number of players. One of these, Carl Friedberg, taught at the Juilliard School; there his students included such luminaries as the African American musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

Prominent music theorist Heinrich Schenker called Brahms “the last master of German composition.” True or not, the claim accurately identifies Brahms’s place among the upper echelons of the musical firmament.

Johannes Brahms: timeline of key dates

• 1824: Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor premieres in Vienna.
• 1827: Beethoven dies.
• 1833: Johannes Brahms is born in Hamburg, Germany.
• 1840: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is born.
• 1847: Felix Mendelssohn dies.
• 1848: Revolutions spread across Europe, but these collective Revolutions of 1848 are quashed within two years. Karl Marx publishes the first edition of The Communist Manifesto.
• 1853: Violinist Joseph Joachim introduces Brahms to the Schumanns. Brahms plays some of his early piano sonatas for them.
• 1854: Robert Schumann throws himself into the River Rhine in a failed suicide attempt. Afterward he commits himself to a sanatorium.
• 1856: Robert Schumann dies in a private sanatorium near Bonn.
• 1859: Brahms premieres his Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor.
• 1865: Richard Wagner’s groundbreaking opera Tristan und Isolde premieres. Brahms’s mother dies, inspiring him to begin composing a Requiem mass.
• 1869: The complete seven-movement version of A German Requiem premieres in Leipzig.
• 1873: Publication of Brahms’s First and Second String Quartets.
• 1876: After spending more than twenty years composing it, Brahms premieres his Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. 
• 1879: Joseph Joachim, Brahms’s longtime friend and collaborator, premieres the Violin Concerto in D Major. Brahms completes his Hungarian Dances for piano four hands.
• 1883: Richard Wagner dies.
• 1885: Brahms’s final symphony, No. 4 in E Minor, premieres.
• 1886: Franz Liszt dies.
• 1894: Hans von Bülow dies.
• 1896: Clara Schumann dies.
• 1897: Brahms dies of cancer at the age of sixty-three.