Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was the leading German composer in the traditional forms of instrumental, symphonic, choral, and vocal music in the second half of the 19th century. Growing up in a culture increasingly dominated by programmatic and descriptive music, he reinvigorated the instrumental tradition with the entire range of genres (except for opera), drawing much technical stimulus from the study and performance of “early” music from the Renaissance and Baroque periods—still little known in his time. An acute awareness of historical inheritance led him to severe self-criticism: he took long periods of time to complete works, destroyed much, and left very few documentary traces. Though in style he followed the pervasively lyrical character of the instrumental music of his era, his music has a quality of constant development through variation and an overall structural focus unmatched since Beethoven. Brahms provided a major body of work for performers and listeners that remains central to the repertory today.

Early Years: Joachim and the Schumanns

Brahms was born in 1833, the son of a performing musician in modest circumstances in Hamburg, working with his father and leaving school at age 14. Though little is known of his early years, it is known that his piano studies with a leading Hamburg teacher soon yielded more attention to composition in his mid-teens. Brahms’s contact with the larger musical world opened up dramatically in 1853, at age 20: when on tour as an accompanist, he met the leading young violinist Joseph Joachim and, through Joachim, the composers Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, and Schumann’s wife, the great pianist and composer Clara Schumann. Brahms’s outstanding playing, along with his powerful songs and piano compositions, led Robert Schumann to immediately publish an article hailing Brahms as a great imminent figure in the musical world.

Middle Period: Vienna’s Leading Musical Figure

From the start, Brahms was musically at home in extended forms and was drawn early on to intense study in the traditional disciplines of variation and counterpoint, which manifested itself in his keyboard and unaccompanied choral compositions. At almost 30, he introduced himself to Vienna with two piano quartets of orchestral scope and soon revealed his more convivial side with 16 Waltzes for piano four-hands (1865) and Liebeslieder-Walzer (“Love Song Waltzes”) for piano four-hands with vocal quartet (1869). Broader fame came with a major choral work, Ein deutsches Requiem (“A German Requiem”) (completed 1866–68), which is set to a personal selection of texts from Luther’s Bible and reflects many earlier preoccupations as a student of German choral music.

Brahms: Quartet No. 1 in G minor for Piano, Violin, Viola, and Cello, Op. 25

Brahms: Liebeslieder Walzer for Vocal Quartet and Piano, Four Hands, Op. 52

Late 1871 saw Brahms permanently residing as a confirmed bachelor in Vienna, where he became its leading musical figure, gradually playing and conducting less and composing a stream of major works which steadily entered the concert repertory. A long anticipated first symphony finally appeared in 1876, after at least 14 years of preparation, and was followed by three more symphonies, two major string concertos—one for violin (1878), one for violin and cello (1887)—and many chamber works, representing a wide range of genres, that constitute his largest extended output. His commanding pianism reached its climax in a second piano concerto (1881) of epic proportions that is regarded as one of the most demanding in the literature. Besides all this productivity was a constant output of songs for solo voice and piano.    

Late Period: Retirement and Final Works

After intended retirement at age 57, Brahms entered a final phase, which featured four works with clarinet—the Clarinet Trio, Op. 114 (1891), the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115 (1891), and two Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 120 (1894)—personally inspired by the first clarinet player of the Meiningen Court Orchestra, with which Brahms had premiered his Fourth Symphony (1884–85). Four sets of short piano pieces, Opp. 116–119, saw his return to piano composition, now in often intimate works which draw maximum variation from a minimum of ideas and are often regarded as representing the quintessence of his reflective musical personality.

Brahms: Trio in A minor for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano, Op. 114

Brahms, who was a keen walker and had always enjoyed robust health, died of liver cancer at almost age 64, barely a year after the death of Clara Schumann, to whom he had remained closely attached throughout his life, and whose opinion on his works he often sought. 

Legacy

Brahms was for long classed as a “conservative” and “academic” figure, seen as the polar opposite of the “New German School” of Liszt and his followers. He had many superficial imitators, but the technical individuality of Brahms’s music made it difficult to imitate fully, and he instead became attractive to many 20th century composers of chamber music, most notably Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils, as a “progressive” because of the strictness of his compositional methods. Schoenberg later orchestrated Brahms’s Piano Quartet, Op. 25 (1861), in a version which is now widely performed. 

Though at his death Brahms was seen by many as the last major figure of the Austro- German tradition, from today’s broader perspective, his research interest in Renaissance and Baroque music, his performances of it, and his absorption of its techniques into his own, can be seen as prescient of the increased importance of early music in modern musical culture.

Watching and Listening

Of Brahms’s earlier large-scale chamber works, the Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34 (1864) anticipates the future whilst reflecting elements of Brahms’s youth: a driving scherzo in the Beethoven mold, a lyrical and reflective slow movement, and a finale that comes to an inexorable conclusion with a coda approached from a distant key. Transformed from a discarded version for strings alone, Brahms also published it in a version for two pianos (Sonata for Two Pianos, Op. 34b). 

Brahms retained a love of the traditional “hand horn”’ from youth, which even then was out of date. His Trio for Horn, Violin, and Piano, Op. 40 (1865), explores the special sonority of the hand-stopped instrument to evoke associations with nature, and the work culminates in a romp through the forest in “hunting” style.   

A personal aspect of chamber music and sonic preference inspired the use of the viola in the Two Songs for Alto Voice with Viola and Piano, Op. 91 (1884/1864). First written as a gift to Joachim at the time of his marriage, the second of these begins with the viola playing a traditional lullaby, from which Brahms derives a vocal melody that interacts with the lullaby in reflecting the text. 

The sense of intimacy in late Brahms’s chamber music is represented most fully in the Quintet, Op. 115, for clarinet and string quartet. The mellow quality of the clarinet is often merged with muted strings in music that communicates a sense of resignation and finality, but not without some struggle. The opening of the piece returns at the end of a final set of variations which gradually unveil their relationship, though now transformed with a final pang of Brahmsian regret.

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