Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg on 7 May 1833 in a working-class district near the port. His father, Johann Jakob, was a modest musician who played double bass and horn in the city’s orchestras; his mother, Christiane, seventeen years older than her husband, was a seamstress. Johannes learned violin, cello and horn from his father early on, then piano with Otto Cossel and Eduard Marxsen, an excellent teacher who introduced him to Bach and Beethoven and taught him composition.

To help his family the teenager played piano in the evenings in harbour taverns and restaurants, according to a tradition perhaps exaggerated by his biographers. He also gave lessons and arranged light music for a publisher. In 1853 he went on tour as accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi, who introduced him to Gypsy music. On this journey he met the great violinist Joseph Joachim, who became his lifelong friend, and then Liszt in Weimar, in front of whom he is said to have fallen asleep while Liszt was playing.

On Joachim’s advice he went to Düsseldorf in September 1853 and knocked on the door of Robert and Clara Schumann. He played them his piano sonatas. Robert was overwhelmed and published an enthusiastic article, “New Paths”, presenting the twenty-year-old as the genius Germany had been waiting for. A few months later Robert fell seriously ill. Brahms moved in near Clara to help her raise her seven children. A deep friendship, perhaps love, united Clara and Johannes for more than forty years.

The fame Schumann had announced weighed heavily on Brahms, who was very demanding of himself. His Piano Concerto No. 1 (1859) was hissed in Leipzig. He destroyed many works he was not satisfied with. In 1862 he settled in Vienna, where he spent the rest of his life, directing for a time the Singakademie and then the Society of Friends of Music. He never married, despite several broken engagements, and lived simply in a small flat.

In 1868 he premiered in Bremen A German Requiem, on biblical texts he chose himself, meant to comfort the living rather than pray for the dead. Its success was immense and made him the most famous composer in Germany. That same year he wrote the Lullaby (Wiegenlied), given to a friend for the birth of her son, now one of the best-known melodies in the world. His Hungarian Dances for piano four hands (1869), inspired by Gypsy music, were a huge popular success.

He hesitated for a long time to write a symphony, overawed by Beethoven: “You cannot imagine what it is like to hear behind you the footsteps of a giant,” he wrote. His First Symphony, begun around 1855, was completed only in 1876 after more than twenty years of work; the conductor Hans von Bülow nicknamed it “Beethoven’s Tenth”. The next three came more quickly, the Fourth dating from 1885. He also composed the Violin Concerto (1878) for Joachim, the Piano Concerto No. 2 (1881) and a wealth of chamber music.

In the quarrel between supporters of Wagner and Liszt, looking to the “music of the future”, and those of the classical tradition, Brahms was presented, often against his will, as the leader of the conservative camp. Yet Schoenberg later showed how innovative his writing was. In 1889 he recorded an excerpt from a Hungarian Dance on an Edison cylinder, one of the very first recordings by a great composer. Clara’s death in May 1896 affected him deeply. Suffering from liver cancer, he died in Vienna on 3 April 1897.