Composer
Johannes Brahms
A Romantic who built his symphonies on Classical-era discipline.
Johannes Brahms carried Romantic-era emotional weight inside tightly disciplined, Classically-influenced structures, at a moment when much of European music was moving toward looser, more programmatic forms. He felt the pressure of that inheritance directly - famously delaying his first symphony for over a decade, and reportedly remarking that a composer couldn't imagine how it felt to hear the footsteps of a giant like Beethoven behind him.
Life in brief
Brahms was born in Hamburg in 1833, the son of a struggling double-bass player. As a teenager he helped support the family by playing piano in the city's taverns and dance halls. In 1853 a concert tour with the violinist Joseph Joachim brought him to the door of Robert Schumann and his wife, the pianist and composer Clara Schumann. Robert was so impressed that he published an article hailing the twenty-year-old as the coming genius of German music.
Months later, Robert Schumann suffered a mental breakdown and was confined to an asylum, where he died in 1856. Brahms stayed close to Clara and her children, and their deep, complicated friendship lasted the rest of their lives. In 1862 he moved to Vienna, which became his home. His German Requiem (1868) made him famous, and the long-awaited First Symphony followed in 1876 - the conductor Hans von Bülow nicknamed it "Beethoven's Tenth." Brahms never married. He died in Vienna in 1897, less than a year after Clara.
Music and style
Brahms's music is rich, warm, and dense, with full, dark-hued textures and a fondness for the middle and low registers. He loved older music - Bach, Handel, the Renaissance masters - and used old techniques such as counterpoint and variation form with complete naturalness. Rhythmically he liked to blur the beat, playing twos against threes. Under the craftsmanship runs a deep vein of lyricism and autumnal melancholy.
He stood on one side of the great musical argument of his day, defending absolute music against the "New German School" of Liszt and Wagner, who believed the future lay in program music and music drama.
His Symphony No. 4 is often held up as a model of how tightly a Romantic-era symphony can be argued, closing with a passacaglia: a Baroque-era technique built on a repeating bass pattern, showing Brahms reaching back centuries for structural discipline even while writing squarely Romantic material.
Key works
- A German Requiem (1868) - not a Latin Mass for the dead but a setting of Bible passages he chose himself, written to comfort the living. See requiem.
- Four symphonies (1876 – 1885).
- Violin Concerto (1878) - written for Joachim, and one of the great violin concertos.
- Two piano concertos - the stormy First and the expansive Second.
- Hungarian Dances - lighter, folk-influenced showpieces that became some of his most widely popular work.
- Chamber music - including the Clarinet Quintet, written late in life for the clarinetist Richard Mühlfeld.
- Lullaby (1868) - the cradle song known the world over.
- Academic Festival Overture (1880) - built from student drinking songs, written to thank a university for an honorary degree.
Legacy
Brahms also wrote extensively for chamber ensembles and solo piano, and is frequently grouped with Bach and Beethoven as the "Three Bs" - a testament to how seriously his contemporaries took his structural rigor. Long seen as a conservative, he was later reclaimed by Schoenberg, whose famous essay "Brahms the Progressive" argued that his techniques pointed straight toward modern music.
Where to start listening: Hungarian Dance No. 5 is immediate and energetic; Symphony No. 4's finale shows his more demanding, architectural side. For Brahms at his most consoling, try the fourth movement of A German Requiem, "How lovely are thy dwellings."