The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001
Brahms, Johannes
(b Hamburg, 7 May 1833; d Vienna, 3 April 1897). German composer. The successor to Beethoven and Schubert in the larger forms of chamber and orchestral music, to Schubert and Schumann in the miniature forms of piano pieces and songs, and to the Renaissance and Baroque polyphonists in choral music, Brahms creatively synthesized the practices of three centuries with folk and dance idioms and with the language of mid- and late 19th-century art music. His works of controlled passion, deemed reactionary and epigonal by some, progressive by others, became well accepted in his lifetime.
1. Formative years.
2. New paths.
3. First maturity.
4. At the summit.
5. Final years and legacy.
6. Influence and reception.
7. Piano and organ music.
8. Chamber music.
9. Orchestral works and concertos.
10. Choral works.
11. Lieder and solo vocal ensembles.
WORKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
GEORGE S. BOZARTH (1–5, 10–11, work-list, bibliography), WALTER FRISCH (6–9, 10, work-list, bibliography)
Brahms, Johannes
1. Formative years.
Brahms was the second child and first son of Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen (1789–1865) and Johann Jakob Brahms (1806–72). His mother, an intelligent and thrifty woman simply educated, was a skilled seamstress descended from a respectable bourgeois family. His father came from yeoman and artisan stock that originated in lower Saxony and resided in Holstein from the mid-18th century. A resourceful musician of modest talent, Johann Jakob learnt to play several instruments, including the flute, horn, violin and double bass, and in 1826 moved to the free Hanseatic port of Hamburg, where he earned his living playing in dance halls and taverns. In 1830, as a condition for gaining citizenship (Kleinbürger), he joined the local militia as a horn player; he also became a member of a sextet at the fashionable Alster Pavilion. Later he played the double bass and occasionally the flute in the Hamburg Philharmonie, obtaining a regular position as a bass player in 1864 through the influence of his son.
Brahms's parents were married in 1830. His elder sister, Elise (1831–92), experienced poor health throughout her life and was supported generously by Brahms, even after her marriage in 1871. The youngest child, Fritz (1835–86), became a musician; after attempting a career as a concert pianist and living in Venezuela, he settled in Hamburg as a music teacher. Although Brahms was not born into abject poverty, circumstances were precarious, because of Johann Jakob's inability to handle the family's hard-earned income sensibly. The family moved frequently, but their living quarters, though cramped and offering little privacy, were always in respectable working-class neighbourhoods. Tension over money, exacerbated by the great difference in the parents' ages, led Brahms's father to leave his elderly wife in 1864.
Despite personal difficulties, both parents were devoted to their children, a feeling reciprocated by Brahms. Both sons were sent to good private elementary and secondary schools, where their studies included history, mathematics, French, English and Latin. The young Brahms became a voracious reader, borrowing books and buying second-hand volumes. His well-used library of over 800 titles (preserved in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna) including poetry, fiction, drama, history, art, philosophy, religion and travel, testifies to an abiding love of learning.
Brahms was given lessons on the piano, cello and horn (the family owned a piano and bought him a cello). From the age of seven he studied the piano with Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel. Within a few years he was accepted for instruction in the piano and music theory, free of charge, by one of Hamburg's leading teachers, the pianist and composer Eduard Marxsen, who conveyed to his young pupil a love and knowledge of the music of Bach and the Viennese Classical composers.
Brahms's first documented performance was as a pianist in a chamber concert in 1843; he played an étude by Henri Herz and took part in a Mozart piano quartet and in Beethoven's Wind Quintet op.16. His first two solo recitals (in 1848 and 1849) included Bach and Beethoven, and fashionable bravura pieces; the second performance received a laudatory press notice. To contribute to the family's income after leaving school, Brahms gave piano lessons, earned reasonable fees playing popular music at private gatherings and in Schänken (respectable working-class places for eating and entertainment), and accompanying in the theatre; he also made arrangements for brass bands and the Alster sextet, and for four-hand piano (some of the last, Anh.IV/6, were published, under the common pseudonym G.W. Marks, by Cranz in Hamburg). The influence of folk and popular music, apparent in his own compositions, had its roots in these activities. (The allegation that Brahms was sent as a boy to play the piano in sailors' bars has been called into question by the recent research of Kurt Hofmann; comments allegedly made by Brahms to Max Friedlaender and Siegfried Ochs provide a basis for this assertion, but testimony from those who knew the young Brahms and his family well speaks to the contrary; laws closely regulating these establishments forbade employment at such a young age.)
The enthusiasms of Brahms's formative years were the poetry of the German romantics, the novels of Jean Paul and E.T.A. Hoffmann, and the music of Bach and Beethoven. He immersed himself in the poetry of Eichendorff, Heine and Emanuel Geibel; he adopted as his pseudonym ‘Johannes Kreisler, jun.’, after the archetypal emotionally erratic young composer in Hoffmann's Kater Murr and Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier whose music is fragmentary, bizarre and painfully expressive; and he included in his first solo concerts a Bach fugue and Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata, the latter a work that, together with the Hammerklavier Sonata, informs the opening phrases of his C major Piano Sonata op.1 (1853). In the early 1850s Brahms assembled his favourite remarks on life, art and music by prominent poets, writers, philosophers and musicians in a series of chapbooks he entitled the Schatzkästlein des jungen Kreislers.
Brahms's love of folklore – including folk poetry, tales and music – began during these early years. By the late 1840s he had begun to compile manuscript collections of European folksongs; a notebook of German folk maxims dates from 1855. Linked to this interest was his liking for poems and tales from the age of chivalry. Over the years he acquired popular books such as Tieck's Die schöne Magelone and the old German legends of Faust and Siegfried; Herder's collections of folksongs, Arnim and Brentano's Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and several volumes by J.L. and W.C. Grimm; the Nibelungenlied and the Edda; Kretzschmer and Zuccalmaglio's Deutsche Volkslieder (the source for the majority of the folklike tunes he arranged for choir and as solo songs); collections of old English, Scottish and Danish ballads; and popular literature from around the world in German translation. The slow movement of the Piano Sonata in C op.1 was based on a German folksong recast by Brahms as a Minnelied; the comparable movement in the F minor Piano Sonata op.2 (1852) was inspired by a genuine Minnelied poem by Count Kraft von Toggenburg.
When Hungarian political refugees on their way to the USA passed through Hamburg after the suppression of the revolutions of 1848, Brahms was exposed to the style hongrois, a blending of Hungarian musical gestures and gypsy performing style. His lifelong fascination with the irregular rhythms, triplet figures and use of rubato common to this style can perhaps be traced to his encounter at this time with the Hungarian expatriate violinist Ede Reményi. Another lasting impression was made by Joachim's performance of Beethoven's Violin Concerto with the Hamburg orchestra in 1848. Two other works that greatly interested Brahms were Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and Mozart's Don Giovanni.
Although Brahms's first extant works (the song Heimkehr op.7 no.6 and the E minor Scherzo for piano, op.4) date from 1851, he began composing several years earlier. Evidence exists of a Piano Sonata in G minor (mid-1840s), a Fantasia ‘on a beloved waltz’ for piano (by 1849), at least one piano trio and a ‘Lied-Duet’ for cello and piano (by 1851). During vacations in Winsen an der Luhe in 1847–8 he wrote several choral works and arranged folksongs for the men's choir he conducted. His musical confidante, Luise Japha, recalled many songs. By autumn 1853, in addition to the sonatas and songs that were his first published works, his portfolio included a string quartet in B minor and a violin sonata in A minor. All these youthful efforts fell victim to Brahms's intense self-scrutiny, which he continued to exercise throughout his life. As late as 1880 he destroyed the first movement of a newly composed piano trio in E after showing it to friends.
Brahms as a youth in Hamburg was recalled by acquaintances as shy and reserved, thoughtful and self-effacing; but he was candid and already very much his own person. Slender, with delicate features, long fair hair, radiant blue eyes and a high voice, he projected a somewhat androgynous image. One also discerns a dual nature in his early works: sensitive settings of poems about the problems of young maidens co-exist with highly energetic instrumental allegros and scherzos suggestive of the athletic prowess of the teenage boy.
Brahms, Johannes