Johannes Brahms - Biography
Johannes Brahms was born May 7th, 1833 in Hamburg, Germany and died in Vienna, Austria on April 3rd, 1897. His father, Johann Jakob Brahms, was an itinerant musician who worked in theater and restaurant bands, while his mother, Johanna, was a seamstress and seventeen years her husband’s senior (though she survived him by many years). Brahms grew up in poverty in the slums of Hamburg. Though he was musically precocious, attaining proficiency on the piano by the age of ten, he had very little formal education. In spite of this, throughout his life he was an omnivorous reader with an encyclopedic knowledge of literature and music. By his early teens, he was regularly performing in the cheap theatres and bars in Hamburg, which was then as it is now, one of the world’s major seaports. Though Brahms’s contention that he was performing in brothels during this period is thought to have been an exaggeration, this was certainly a brutal environment for an adolescent to be exposed to. The exterior brusqueness of his personality – which often approached rudeness – was probably in part conditioned by this brutal childhood. (Brahms had a quip that he used when leaving a social gathering, he offered an apology to anyone he had not offended). Brahms’s talent was so extraordinary that a leading music teacher in Hamburg, Eduard Marxsen, was willing to take him on free of charge. By his late teens, he was giving concerts often under an assumed name and started composing, although he later destroyed these early compositions.
At the age of nineteen, he became the accompanist for a well known Hungarian violinist, Eduard Remenyi. While touring with Remenyi, he met the great violinist Joseph Joachim who, though only two years older, was already a celebrity. They were to become lifelong friends. Joachim was to introduce him to Robert Schumann, who in his early forties was considered one of the great living composers. Schumann was so taken with Brahms that he declared in an article entitled “Neue Bahnen” (New Paths) that Brahms, at only twenty years old, was already a great. Around this time he wrote his first published compositions, including two piano sonatas and the first version of his Piano Trio No. 1, op. 8. Schumann, unfortunately, was mentally unstable descended into madness soon after Brahms met him. After a suicide attempt, he was institutionalized, lost all of his motor functions, and was to die two years later in 1856. Meanwhile, Brahms had become very close to Schumann’s wife, Clara, herself a famous pianist and talented composer, and her five children. She and Brahms were to remain friends for more the forty years. Brahms was deeply affected by Schumann’s horrible suffering and his tragic Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, op. 15, written shortly after Schumann’s death (particularly its long, solemn adagio) is a requiem for his friend. Other important works he wrote in his mid-twenties were two orchestral serenades, Sextet for Strings No. 1, op. 18, Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor, op. 25 and Piano Quartet No. 2 in A major, op. 26. It should be noted that, though early compositions, they are nonetheless immediately recognizable as Brahms; his style deeply serious with heavy textures and superb craftsmanship was there from the beginning.
Brahms needed a permanent position as he neared thirty. After not gaining the directorship of the Hamburg Philharmonic, he accepted a position with a well known choral society in Vienna. During this period he wrote a lot of choral music, including a dramatic cantata, Rinaldo, - the closest he got to writing an opera - and a beautiful piece, Alto Rhapsody. This absorption in choral music was to lead his famous Deutsches Requiem (German Requiem). This “requiem” of the title refers to its incorporation of passages from the Bible rather than Catholic liturgy. Brahms himself was firmly agnostic throughout his life but for all his gruffness, he was a deeply contemplative man.
In the next phase of his career, Brahms concentrated on chamber music (Piano Quintet, op. 34, Two String Quartets, op. 51, and Piano Quartet, op. 60) and piano music, including his celebrated Hungarian Dances, originally for piano duet. During this time he also moved to Vienna. His one orchestral work from this period was Variations on a Theme of Haydn, op. 73, his first orchestral masterwork. He had been working (off and on) on a symphony beginning in 1862 but his reverence for Beethoven and his self-critical nature prevented its completion.
Around this time, a schism developed between the musically conservative Berlin and Leipzig circle (led by Joseph Joachim and the reactionary music critic Eduard Hanslick) and the radical “New German School” (epitomized by Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt and others in the the Weimar scene). Brahms was reluctant to get into this fight (he admired Wagner’s music but disliked the man) but ultimately aligned himself with the conservatives and thus earned the lifelong enmity of Wagner and his followers in what became known as the War of the Romantics. After Wagner’s death, the “enemy” became the wonderful Austrian composer Anton Bruckner, a gentle soul which withered under criticism. The battle amongst these camps raged on till the turn of the twentieth century.
The next phase of Brahms’s career began with the completion of his First Symphony in C minor, op. 67 in 1876. When the similarity to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy was pointed out, Brahms characteristically replied “Any ass can see that.” Once he overcame writer’s block, he completed the Second Symphony in D major op. 77, a work whose pastoral nature was totally unlike the heroic Beethoven-esque symphony before it. The next year, the famous Violin Concerto in D, op. 78 was completed and premiered by Joachim. He also wrote some of his best known leider at this time, cementing his reputation as the heir to Schubert and Schumann in that field. Second Piano Concerto in B flat, op. 83 was of truly heroic proportions and it, along with the masterful Third Symphony in F major, op. 90, come from this time. A rare, humorous piece, Academic Festival Overture was written to commemorate his receiving a doctorate from a German university and uses old student songs – many a High School orchestra has performed it at commencements. Brahms created an antipodean twin to this light headed romp with Tragic Overture. During this time, Wagner’s estranged assistant, the great conductor Hans von Bülow, anointed Brahms as one of “the three Bs” (the other two being, of course, Bach and Beethoven).
The final phase of Brahms’s career begins with his tragic last symphony, Symphony #4 in E minor, op. 98. The final movement is a variation based on a quotation from a Bach’s Cantata # 150, which in turn is written in the baroque, passacaglia form. The movement opens with a sternly-pronounced theme that is simultaneously tragic and defiant, constructed of imposing musical architecture that reflects the composer’s profound knowledge of the methods of the baroque masters and is completely devoid of sentimentality or sensuous orchestral color. In a mellower mood, Brahms completed his body of chamber music with a final Piano Trio, a lovely String Quintet, op. 111; Trio for Piano, Clarinet, and Cello, in A minor, op. 114; Two Clarinet sonatas, op. 120 and the autumnal Clarinet Quintet Op. 115, a final masterpiece inspired by his friendship with clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld. The final concerto, the neo-baroque Double Concerto, op. 102 for Violin, Cello and Orchestra is also fiercely concentrated (a bizarre bit of trivia: the slow movement served as the theme music for the soap opera, Secret Storm). By his early sixties, Brahms had become a prematurely aged man; the death of his friend Clara Schumann and a cooling off with Joachim wore on him. One of his last works, Four Serious Songs, op. 121, was based on stoic biblical verses dwelling on the nature of loss and summed up Brahms’s mood of resignation. During the early months of 1897, cancer of the liver was diagnosed and Brahms died in just a few months, his once massive figure having withered away. He died April 3rd of that year.
Except for a few light hearted works (e.g. Hungarian Dances), Brahms’s compositions aren’t for everyone. Their constant, noble purpose and the lack of sensuous color is viewed by some as turgid. George Bernard Shaw, a distinguished music critic in an early phase of his career, summed up the view of most of his generation when he quipped that the only person who could bear Brahms’s Requiem was his corpse. A Boston critic in the early years of the twentieth century, Philip Hale, said Symphony Hall should have a sign posted “exit in case of Brahms.” The symphonies which used to be enormously popular are not performed as often these days. Brahms benefited enormously from the great German musicians who dominated the concert stages the first half of the past century. (By the way he wasn’t always the corpulent figure with the luxuriant beard, in his youth he was slim and clean shaven). He could be a kind, supportive colleague to some (e.g. Antonín Dvořák and Gustav Mahler) whilst brutally candid to others (e.g. the great Austrian songwriter Hugo Wolf). His only indulgences were heavy German food, beer and fine cigars. He was never an anti-Semitic reactionary like Wagner, but he was a staunch German nationalist who kept a bronze relief of Otto von Bismark in his apartment and wrote a choral work, Triumphlied, to celebrate the military defeat of France by Germany in 1870. In fact, except for his early colorful years, his life was devoid of significant incident, just marked by steady hard work. He was a very private person who had many friends - but in the end, he was a solitary man.
