JohannesBrahms

In the autumn of 1853 a twenty-year-old pianist from Hamburg arrived at the Schumanns’ home in Düsseldorf with an introduction from Joseph Joachim. Johannes Brahms played his own music to them. Robert Schumann heard in him a composer of the future and announced him that October in an article called Neue Bahnen (New Paths). Publishers became interested. Brahms was now expected to fulfil a public prophecy before most of the public had heard any of his music. His piano sonatas were large-scale works. The symphonies Schumann expected took much longer to arrive.

Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833. His father, Johann Jakob, earned his living playing instruments including the horn and double bass. His mother, Christiane Nissen, was a seamstress. He studied piano with Otto Cossel and then piano and composition with Eduard Marxsen, who grounded him in Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. He played, arranged and accompanied for money. A tour with the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi in 1853 brought him to Joachim, and Joachim sent him on to Düsseldorf.

1854–⁠61Clara and the First Piano Concerto

Schumann attempted suicide in February 1854 and entered the asylum at Endenich. Brahms went to help Clara with the children and the household’s practical affairs while she continued earning money at the piano. Robert died in 1856. Brahms wrote to Clara with an intensity he seldom showed in public; their friendship lasted more than forty years. She read his drafts, performed his music and told him what she thought of it. She did not always approve.

The First Piano Concerto began as music for two pianos, passed through an attempt at a symphony and was completed in D minor with a long, turbulent orchestral opening. The piano enters quietly. Brahms played the première in Hanover in January 1859, with Joachim conducting. At Leipzig five days later he was hissed. For much of the long first movement the soloist plays within the orchestral texture, and several of the hardest passages are not written for display.

He also worked with singers at the Detmold court and with a women’s choir in Hamburg. In the Serenades and the First String Sextet he tried out orchestral and chamber combinations. In 1861 he took an aria from Handel’s B♭ keyboard suite and wrote twenty-five variations and a fugue on it. The variations turn the theme into a march, an ornamented line and a heavy chordal statement, and the pianist’s figuration changes from one variation to the next.

ViennaVienna posts and Ein deutsches Requiem

He first visited Vienna in 1862 and made it his principal home after hopes of a leading appointment in Hamburg came to nothing. He directed the Singakademie in 1863–⁠64 and the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde’s concerts from 1872 to 1875. Publishing and performing eventually paid well enough for him to give up regular conducting. He collected manuscripts and early editions, studied Renaissance music and edited older works.

Critics cast him as Wagner’s opposite. In 1860 Brahms had helped Joachim draft a declaration against the New German School. It reached print before they had gathered the intended signatures, and it was ridiculed. After that he kept out of such campaigns. He knew and admired Wagner’s music, though he never wrote an opera.

His mother died in 1865, while Ein deutsches Requiem was taking shape. Brahms chose his text from Luther’s Bible, beginning with a blessing for those who mourn and ending with one for the dead. Before the Bremen performance, the conductor Carl Reinthaler objected that the text omitted Christ’s redemptive death. On 9 October 1867 Brahms replied: “I would gladly leave out ‘German’ too and simply put ‘human’.” He did not change the text.

On Good Friday 1868 Brahms conducted six movements in Bremen Cathedral, with Clara in the audience. The success made his name far beyond the circle that already knew his chamber music. He added a movement for soprano and chorus, whose words promise comfort like a mother’s, and the complete seven-movement work was heard in Leipzig in 1869. The choral writing runs from Denn alles Fleisch to Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen.

1876–⁠85Four symphonies

The First Symphony reached Karlsruhe in November 1876. It begins with timpani beating beneath lines that move chromatically in opposite directions. In the finale, a horn call enters over the C minor music; Brahms had sent that tune to Clara as a birthday greeting from the Alps in 1868. A brass chorale follows, then the C major melody that resembles Beethoven’s Ninth. He began the Second Symphony the next summer at Pörtschach, beside the Wörthersee.

His independence now allowed him to help others. Through the Austrian state stipend scheme he encountered Dvořák’s scores, supported the younger man and recommended him to Simrock. His own Hungarian Dances, many based on tunes already circulating, sold far beyond the audiences for his symphonies.

1891–⁠97Mühlfeld and the late works

Brahms had considered retiring from composition in 1890. After hearing Richard Mühlfeld of the Meiningen orchestra he wrote a Clarinet Trio and a Clarinet Quintet in 1891, then two sonatas in 1894. In the slow movement of the quintet the clarinet plays an elaborate solo passage over muted strings; at the end of the finale the music with which the work began returns. The piano collections Opp. 116–⁠119 belong to the same late period. They are short pieces, with restless rhythms and melodies in the middle voices.

Clara died in May 1896. Brahms had completed his Four Serious Songs that spring, setting biblical words about death and love, and his final organ preludes were based on Lutheran chorales. In March 1897 he attended a performance of the Fourth Symphony in Vienna. He died on 3 April. The books and scores in his library went to musicians.