Johannes Brahms

• 1. Introduction

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  Johannes Brahms once interrupted a friend's toast in Berlin with five blunt words: "Quite right; here's Mozart's health." It was January 1896, near the end of a life spent measuring himself against the dead. He had been called the heir to Bach and Beethoven. He had also been mocked by Richard Wagner, parodied in the press, and hissed off a stage. A man who destroyed his own work by the armful, he reportedly admitted to wrecking twenty string quartets before letting one stand. So who was this German composer, born in Hamburg in 1833, who grew a beard to disguise himself as a joke and called his own First Symphony "long and difficult" and "not exactly charming"? Why did Antonin Dvorak, a devout Catholic, weep over him with the words "such a fine soul, and he believes in nothing"? And how did a perfectionist who labored fifteen years on a single symphony come to be claimed, decades after his death, as a secret prophet of modern music?

• 2. A Family Of Modest Means

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  Johann Jakob Brahms left the town of Heide in Holstein against his family's will, arriving in Hamburg at nineteen to chase a life in music. He found work playing double bass, joined a sextet in the Alster-pavilion on the Jungfernstieg, and in 1830 became a horn player in the Hamburg militia. That same year he married Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen, a middle-class seamstress seventeen years his senior who loved writing letters and reading. Their son Johannes had an older sister, Elisabeth, born in 1831, and a younger brother, Fritz Friedrich, born in 1835. The family lived in poor apartments and struggled with money for years. At one point Johann Jakob considered emigrating to the United States, after an impresario who recognized the boy's talent promised them a fortune there. Steadier work eventually came when the father joined the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, playing double bass, horn, and flute, and for pleasure took up first violin in string quartets. The family moved into ever better accommodation over the years, the slow climb of a household pulling itself upward through music.

• 3. The Boy Who Would Not Stop Composing

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  Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel complained in 1842 that his young pupil "could be such a good player, but he will not stop his never-ending composing." Brahms had begun piano lessons with Cossel in 1840, after his father taught him the violin and the basics of the cello. At ten he made his debut in a private concert, performing Beethoven's Quintet for Piano and Winds Op. 16, a Mozart piano quartet, and an etude by Henri Herz. By 1845 he had written a piano sonata in G minor, though his parents disapproved of his composing and saw a safer future for him as a performer. From 1845 to 1848 he studied with Cossel's own teacher, Eduard Marxsen, who had personally known Beethoven and Schubert and revered Mozart, Haydn, and J. S. Bach. Marxsen handed down that tradition and made sure the boy's own music grew from it. Brahms first appeared publicly as a solo pianist in Hamburg in 1847, playing a fantasy by Sigismund Thalberg. His full recital in 1848 included a Bach fugue, and a second in April 1849 paired Beethoven's Waldstein sonata with a waltz fantasia of his own, drawing favorable newspaper reviews. Stories of an impoverished Brahms playing in bars and brothels rest only on anecdote, and many scholars dismiss them, noting that Hamburg law strictly barred minors from such places.

• 4. The Schumanns

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  Robert Schumann published an article in the 28th of October 1853 issue of the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik titled "Neue Bahnen," or "New Paths," naming the twenty-year-old Brahms as one "fated to give expression to the times in the highest and most ideal manner." Brahms had arrived in Dusseldorf that October carrying a letter of introduction from the violinist Joseph Joachim. The praise thrilled and frightened him. In November he wrote to Schumann that such words "will arouse such extraordinary expectations by the public that I don't know how I can begin to fulfil them." The accolade opened doors: Breitkopf and Hartel in Leipzig published his first works under his own name, and there he met Ferdinand David, Ignaz Moscheles, and Hector Berlioz. After Schumann's attempted suicide and confinement in a sanatorium near Bonn in February 1854, Brahms based himself in Dusseldorf and ran the household's affairs on Clara Schumann's behalf. Clara was kept from her husband until two days before his death from pneumonia in 1856, while Brahms was able to visit and act as a go-between. He came to feel deeply for Clara, who represented to him an ideal of womanhood, yet he resisted the romance and chose a bachelor's life to guard his craft. In June 1854 he dedicated to her his Variations on a Theme of Schumann, Op. 9, and she repaid him by programming his music in her recitals for years to come.

• 5. Failure And Polemic

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  On the 22nd of January 1859 the premiere of the First Piano Concerto in Hamburg, with Brahms himself at the keyboard, fell flat. He wrote to Joachim that it was "a brilliant and decisive failure," adding that "the hissing was too much of a good thing." At a second performance the audience turned so hostile that he had to be restrained from walking off after the first movement. Breitkopf and Hartel then declined his new work, pushing him toward other publishers, among them Simrock, who would become his main partner. His attempt at musical politics misfired just as badly. In 1860, with Joachim and others, he drafted an attack on the followers of Franz Liszt, the so-called New German School, objecting to "rank, miserable weeds growing from Liszt-like fantasias." The draft leaked to the press, and a parody in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik ridiculed Brahms and his allies as backward-looking. He never entered public musical polemics again. His private life ached too. In 1859 he became engaged to Agathe von Siebold, then broke it off, yet still wrote to her, "I love you! I must see you again, but I am incapable of bearing fetters." They never met again, and he later called Agathe his "last love."

• 6. Vienna And The Requiem

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  In autumn 1862 Brahms made his first visit to Vienna and slowly made the city his home. Appointed conductor of the Wiener Singakademie in 1863, he startled audiences by programming early German masters such as Heinrich Schutz and J. S. Bach, alongside Giovanni Gabrieli, before leaving the post in June 1864 because it ate into his composing time. When his mother died in February 1865, he began A German Requiem, Op. 45, a work built not on the Latin Mass for the dead but on texts he chose himself from the Luther Bible. The complete work was first given in Bremen in 1868 to great acclaim, and a seventh movement, the soprano solo "Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit," was added for the Leipzig premiere in February 1869. Acclaim followed across Germany, England, Switzerland, and Russia, announcing his arrival on the world stage. Baptized Lutheran and confirmed at fifteen in St. Michael's Church, Brahms has been described as an agnostic and a humanist. Asked by the conductor Karl Reinthaler to add explicitly religious text, he replied that he would gladly drop even the word German and use Human, and would dispense with passages like John 3:16. He chose his texts, he said, "because I am a musician, because I needed it."

• 7. The Long-Awaited Symphony

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  Brahms's First Symphony, Op. 68, appeared in 1876, fifteen years after he began wrestling with it around 1861. He had warned Clara and Albert Dietrich about it as early as the 1860s, and the finale may not have taken shape until 1868. He described it to friends as "long and in C Minor," which made plain, as Richard Taruskin noted, that he was taking on "the model of models," Beethoven's Fifth. When the finale's resemblance to Beethoven's Ninth was pointed out, Brahms snapped that any dunce could see it. Hans von Bulow dubbed the work "Beethoven's Tenth," and von Bulow later ranked Brahms among the Three Bs, writing to his wife, "after Bach and Beethoven the greatest, the most sublime of all composers." Wagner answered the praise with venom in his essay "On Poetry and Composition," sneering at a composer who donned "the hallelujah periwig of Handel" and a symphony "dressed up as Number Ten." Brahms followed with the Second Symphony in 1877 and the Violin Concerto in 1878, dedicated to Joachim. In 1878 he also unsettled his friends by suddenly growing a beard, warning the conductor Bernhard Scholz, "I am coming with a large beard! Prepare your wife for a most awful sight." Once, in disguise, he introduced himself to George Henschel as "Musikdirektor Muller," then let the room dissolve in laughter, a glimpse of his love of practical jokes.

• 8. Twilight And Afterlife

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  After the Vienna premiere of his Second String Quintet, Op. 111, in 1890, the fifty-seven-year-old Brahms thought he might retire, telling a friend he "had achieved enough." His admiration for the clarinettist Richard Muhlfeld of the Meiningen orchestra revived him, producing the Clarinet Trio and Clarinet Quintet in 1891 and the two Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 120, in 1894. The death of Clara Schumann prompted the Vier ernste Gesange, or Four Serious Songs, Op. 121, in 1896, dedicated to the artist Max Klinger. His final notes came in the Eleven Chorale Preludes for organ, Op. 122, ending with a setting of "O Welt ich muss dich lassen," "O world I must leave thee." In the summer of 1896 he was diagnosed with jaundice and cancer, and his Viennese doctor identified liver cancer, the disease that had killed his father. His last public appearance was on the 7th of March 1897, when he watched Hans Richter conduct his Symphony No. 4 to an ovation after each movement. He died on the 3rd of April 1897 in Vienna at sixty-three, and was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery under a monument designed by Victor Horta. His legacy proved larger than his lifetime. In 1933 Arnold Schoenberg wrote and broadcast an essay, "Brahms the Progressive," recasting the supposed traditionalist as a forward-looking innovator and naming his method "developing variation." In 2005 UNESCO added the Brahms Collection, left to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, to its Memory of the World International Register.