Short answers, pulled from the story.
Johannes Brahms was a German composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period, born in Hamburg on the 7th of May 1833 and died in Vienna on the 3rd of April 1897. His works include four symphonies, four concertos, A German Requiem, much chamber music, and hundreds of folk-song arrangements and Lieder.
Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg on the 7th of May 1833 into a musical family. He died in Vienna on the 3rd of April 1897 at the age of 63 and is buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery.
A German Requiem, Op. 45, is Brahms's large choral work set not to the Latin Mass for the dead but to texts he selected himself from the Luther Bible. He began it after his mother's death in February 1865, and the complete work was first performed in Bremen in 1868, with a seventh movement added for the Leipzig premiere in February 1869.
Hans von Bulow named Brahms the heir to Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven and ranked him among the Three Bs, writing that after Bach and Beethoven he was the greatest and most sublime of all composers. His First Symphony was hailed as Beethoven's Tenth, a comparison Richard Wagner mocked.
Brahms grew devoted to Clara Schumann after meeting her and her husband Robert in Dusseldorf in 1853, supporting the household during Robert's confinement and dedicating his Variations on a Theme of Schumann, Op. 9, to her in 1854. He resisted the romance and never married, but their emotional bond lasted until her death, which prompted his Four Serious Songs, Op. 121, in 1896.
Brahms labored over his First Symphony, Op. 68, for roughly fifteen years, from about 1861 to its appearance in 1876. An extreme perfectionist, he destroyed the original slow movement and substituted another even after the work's first performances.