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| Birth Name(s) : Johannes Brahms |
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Full Johannes Brahms Biography
Johannes Brahms (May 7, 1833 – April 3, 1897) was a German composer of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, he eventually settled in Vienna, Austria.
Johann Jakob gave his son his first musical training. He studied piano from the age of seven with Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel. Brahms showed early promise (his younger brother Fritz also became a pianist) and helped to supplement the rather meager family income by playing the piano in restaurants and theaters, as well as by teaching. It is a long-told tale that Brahms was forced in his early teens to play the piano in bars that doubled as brothels; recently Brahms scholar Kurt Hoffman has suggested that this legend is false. Since Brahms himself clearly originated the story, however, some have questioned Hoffman's theory.
Although many listeners may regard Brahms as one of the last bastions of the Romantic Period, he was not a mainstream Romantic, but rather maintained a Classical sense of form and order within his works – in contrast to the opulence and excesses of many of his contemporaries. Thus many admirers (though not necessarily Brahms himself) saw him as the champion of traditional forms and "pure music," as opposed to the New German embrace of program music. With the possible exception of Anton Bruckner, Brahms was arguably unmatched as a symphonist in the late 19th century. His symphonies helped revive a virtually moribund genre, and inspired such composers as Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius.
Brahms himself had considered giving up composition at a time when all notions of tonality were being stretched to their limit and that further expansion would seemingly only result in the rules of tonality being broken altogether. But he offered substantial encouragement to Schoenberg's teacher Alexander Zemlinsky, and was apparently much impressed by two movements of Schoenberg's early Quartet in D major which Zemlinsky showed him.
Brahms's 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 Joseph Haydn in versions for two pianos and for orchestra. The final movement of the Fourth Symphony (Op. 98) is also formally a set of variations.
Brahms also loved the Classical composers Mozart and Haydn. He collected first editions and autographs of their works, and edited performing editions. Even more remarkable than this was his deep learning and study of the pre-classical composers including Gabrieli, Hasse, Schütz and especially Bach, among others. He had many friends among the leading musicologists of his day and he edited works by composers such as Rameau and Francois Couperin. He was well ahead of his time in his creative interest in this "Early Music" as composer, performer and scholar and particularly looked to such older music for inspiration in the arts of strict counterpoint. In fact, many of the themes to his better-known works are modelled on Baroque sources, such as Bach's The Art of Fugue in the fugal finale of Cello Sonata No.1, or the same composer's Cantata No. 150 in the passacaglia theme of the Fourth Symphony.
Brahms was an extreme perfectionist. He destroyed many early works - including a Violin Sonata he 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 a piano concerto, his first. In another instance of devotion to detail, he labored 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. (A conjectural restoration of the original slow movement has been published by Robert Pascall.) Another factor that contributed to Brahms's perfectionism was that Schumann had announced early on that Brahms was to become the next great composer like Beethoven, a prediction that Brahms was determined to live up to. This prediction hardly added to the composer's self-confidence, and may have contributed to the delay in producing the First Symphony. However, Clara Schumann noted before that Brahms's First Symphony was a product that was not reflective of Brahms's real nature. She felt that the final exuberant movement was "too brilliant," as she was encouraged by the dark and tempestuous opening movement she had seen in an early draft. However, she recanted in accepting the Second Symphony, which has often been seen in modern times as one of his sunniest works. Other contemporaries, however, found the first movement especially dark, and Reinhold Brinkmann, in a study of Symphony No.2 in relation to 19th century ideas of melancholy, has published a revealing letter from Brahms to the composer and conductor Vinzenz Lachner in which Brahms confesses to the melancholic side of his nature and comments on specific features of the movement that reflect this.
Brahms was also honoured by the German Hall of Fame, the Walhalla temple. On 14 September 2000 he was introduced there as 126th "rühmlich ausgezeichneter Teutscher" and 13th composer among them, by a bust of sculptor Milan Knobloch.
transcription of the Chaconne from J. S. Bach's Solo Violin Partita 2, BWV 1004
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