Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833. Brahms is one of the great classical composers, often ranked with Bach and Beethoven among the “three B’s” who are pillars of classical music.
Brahms’ father was also a musician, who had pursued a musical career against the wishes of his own parents. For most of Brahms’ childhood, his father worked for the orchestra and opera of Hamburg, Germany, where he played the bass.
Brahms began studying the piano when he was seven. His teacher complained that the boy “could be such a good player, but he will not stop his never-ending composing.” His parents discouraged him from writing music, thinking that he was too promising a pianist to devote any time elsewhere.
They weren’t entirely wrong. Brahms was a very talented pianist, who gave his first public performance at fifteen and his first full recital at sixteen. But he was also a promising young composer, who finished his first piano sonata at twelve. His first composed pieces were published, under a pseudonym, while Brahms was still in his teens. Very few of those pieces survive today; Brahms was a notorious perfectionist, and later did all he could to be sure that his juvenile work was destroyed.
In 1853, while touring as a pianist, Brahms met Joseph Joachim, one of the great violinists of the era, and they became lifelong friends. Joachim gave Brahms a letter of introduction to Robert Schumann, a composer for whom Brahms had great admiration. When they met, Schumann was so impressed with the talent of the young Brahms that he wrote a letter of praise to a major musical journal.
The praise only made the perpetually insecure Brahms even more nervous; Schumann’s letter, he feared, would “arouse such extraordinary expectations by the public that I don’t know how I can begin to fulfill them.” Schumann’s letter, though, did help Brahms to get the first publication of his music under his own name.
In 1854, Schumann attempted suicide and was institutionalized until his death in 1856. Brahms relocated to the city of Düsseldorf to offer emotional support to Schumann’s wife, Clara, a composer and very fine pianist in her own right, and help manage the household when she was away from home touring as a pianist. Brahms and Clara developed an intense friendship; it appears to have been entirely platonic, though Brahms may have wished for it to be more. Aside from a brief engagement in 1859, there is little evidence of any serious romance in his life.
Brahms’ musical career suffered a setback in 1859, when his first piano concerto was premiered. It was so badly received that Brahms, who was the piano soloist for the first set of performances, nearly fled the stage during one performance.
His smaller piano pieces, though, continued to sell well, and Brahms did not give up composing. In fact, when he was awarded the conducting position with one of Vienna’s most prestigious choirs, he gave up the job after only a year, because it took too much time away from his writing.
Brahms’ mother died in 1865, and he was inspired to write a choral work. It was called Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), and it was quite different from the musical requiem settings that had come before it. Brahms entirely abandoned the traditional Latin Requiem text, choosing instead to set several passages from the Bible, and to do so in German. Where the usual Requiem focused on death and the afterlife, with a fair amount of attention to the possible torments that awaited the deceased, Brahms’ focus was on providing consolation and comfort to the living.
Parts of the German Requiem premiered in 1866 and 1868, with the fully completed version arriving in 1869. It was Brahms’ first great international success. Several more major works followed—the first set of Hungarian Dances for piano four hands (that’s two players at one piano; the dances would later be arranged for piano solo, and eventually orchestrated, by Brahms and other composers); the Liebeslieder-Walzer (Lovesong Waltzes), a collection of songs for vocal quartet and piano four hands; and the orchestral piece Variations on a Theme by Haydn.
And in 1873, Brahms finally produced his first symphony. He’d been working on it for twenty years, weighed down by his own perfectionism, and by the weight of Beethoven. The nine symphonies that Beethoven had written between 1800 and 1824 were a tremendous achievement, and every German composer felt pressure to live up to that legacy in writing his own symphonies.
Brahms didn’t run from the comparison. His first symphony bore clear structural similarities to Beethoven’s Fifth, and the big tune at the climax was so obviously reminiscent of the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth that when the comparison was pointed out to Brahms, he replied, “Yes, any ass can see that.”
But the piece withstood the comparison, and was a great success. Though, ever the perfectionist, Brahms made some major revisions, including completely rewriting the second movement, before publishing the score.
Brahms was now at the height of his career, and the next decade was marked by one success after another. He wrote three more symphonies, a second piano concerto, a violin concerto, dedicated to and premiered by his old friend Joseph Joachim, and a pair of orchestral overtures (the Academic Festival Overture and the Tragic Overture).
In 1889, Brahms was visited by a representative of Thomas Edison’s company, and invited to make an early phonographic recording. Brahms’ voice can be heard fairly clearly in his spoken introduction to his playing; sadly, the playing itself is largely drowned out by surface noise on the recording.
By 1890, Brahms was considering retiring from composing to enjoy a “carefree old age” at 57. The impulse was short-lived; a friendship with the clarinetist for a local orchestra led him to write a series of major chamber works for clarinet—a trio, a quintet, and two sonatas—between 1891 and 1894. And in 1896, the death of Clara Schumann led him to write the Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), more settings of Bible verses, originally written for bass and piano, but frequently sung by women as well.
Brahms’ final work, the Eleven Chorale Preludes for organ, was written in early 1896. The last of the pieces is based on the hymn tune “O World, I must leave thee.” That summer, Brahms was diagnosed with liver cancer, the same condition that had killed his father. His condition gradually worsened, and Brahms died on April 3, 1897.
He left a fairly large body of work, though it might have been larger, had he not been such a perfectionist. Brahms once claimed to have written and destroyed twenty string quartets before publishing the first of the three we have. In addition to the pieces listed above, he made significant contributions in piano music, song, and chamber music.
His music was formally conservative, and he did not share the contemporary interest in program music; that is, music that is meant to be descriptive of or “about” something. He greatly admired Beethoven, and was very interested in the music of the Renaissance and the Baroque at a time when those eras were rather out of style.
From Bach and other Baroque masters, Brahms leaned great skill at counterpoint, and he demonstrated unusual flexibility and playfulness with rhythm. He was less interested than some of his younger colleagues in the extreme harmonic changes of the late 19th century, though he was said to have admired Richard Wagner and to have been impressed by some of the early work of Arnold Schoenberg.
Of his contemporaries, Antonin Dvořák was known to be a great admirer; the later composers who cited Brahms as an influence included Bélá Bartok, Anton Webern, and Edward Elgar, who said, “I look at the Third Symphony of Brahms, and I feel like a pygmy.”
Jan Swafford is the author of Johannes Brahms: A Biography; Robert Greenberg teaches the Great Courses class on Brahms and his music. In addition to the specific pieces and recordings linked above, much more of Brahms’ music is available for streaming at Freegaland Hoopla.