Brahms' choral music falls into three broad categories: "antiquarian," where the influence of J.S. All this experience led to the composition of a number of choral works, among the finest of their time. Brahms had previously led a women's chorus in Hamburg and an amateur choir at the Detmold court. He was turned down by his native town, Hamburg, to direct the city orchestra but was accepted by the Vienna Singakademie. He was seen in opposition to Berlioz and Wagner as well (both of whom he admired), and this precipitated the so-called Brahms-Wagner split of the latter Nineteenth Century – the fight between the Wagnerites and the "Brahmins." It says much for Brahms' stature, and he's not yet thirty, that he becomes a (very unwilling) pole in this argument.Īround this time, Brahms began to seek conducting positions. He objected mainly to the tone poems of Liszt, but the quarrel got away from him. The editorial contended that the marriage of literature and music was the only true path for the "music of the future." Brahms, who saw himself as a musician of the future, contended that music should proceed on its own logic, rather than essentially Mickey-Mouse a literary plot. In 1860, infuriated by an editorial in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Brahms and the composer-violinist Joachim published a reply. It comes out most in his choral music, but it runs through his instrumental music as well (the finale to the Haydn Variations and the Fourth Symphony, for example), often when you least expect it. However, it also turned Brahms into a contrapuntal master, perhaps the best since Bach. Some of these found their way into later pieces. He turned to a study of strict counterpoint – canon, fugue, invertible counterpoint – writing a series of exercises and polyphonic works. In the aftermath of the concerto fiasco, he temporarily lost his publisher (Breitkopf & Härtel), but eventually hooked up with Simrock, who remained his major publisher.Ī creative block afflicted Brahms during the mid-1850s. The Piano Concerto, one of his most turbulent, Sturm und Drang works, was actually booed and hissed at its premiere, which wounded the composer but also stirred him to revise. In the 1850s, Brahms turned from chamber music to orchestral music for the first time and produced, the first Serenade, the Piano Concerto #1, and the second Serenade. Nevertheless, Clara remained, notwithstanding occasional tiffs, perhaps Brahms' closest musical advisor and confidante, up to her death in 1896. For his part, Brahms, although capable of temporary infatuations, deliberately kept himself away from marriage, for he believed in the incompatibility between an artistic career and a family. For many years, romantic rumors circulated about Brahms and Clara, but Clara seems never to have regarded Brahms as anything more than a devoted son. Brahms took care of the household so Clara could earn money as a touring pianist. Brahms became attached to the Schumann family, especially, after Schumann's insanity and death, to Schumann's wife Clara and daughter Julie. Schumann, for his part, raved over the compositions Brahms had shown him and published an influential article ("Neue Bahnen," "New Paths") which praised the young man as having "sprung, like Minerva, fully-armed from the head of the son of Cronus." Schumann had put his finger on a major quality of Brahms' music: its ability to convince you of its artistic completeness and abundance and its apparently easy seamlessness and inexorable flow. In 1853, Brahms met Schumann, whose music he had at first dismissed during a short-lived infatuation with the school of Liszt, and then enthusiastically studied. Most of his early music concentrates on the piano and on chamber music featuring the piano – no surprise there. One finds in early Brahms a cultivation of the bizarre, a strain which he ruthlessly excised from his decades-later revisions of early work. Hoffmann and Callot, as well as the poetry of Eichendorff and Heine and folk and medieval sources, influenced him most. As far as his composing went, the more fantastic Romantics like E.T.A. He made his first public appearance as a ten-year-old pianist, playing an etude by Herz and participating in chamber works by Mozart and Beethoven. The son of a musician, Brahms received piano, cello, horn, harmony, and composition lessons from an early age. One can view Brahms, for example, with his deep artistic attachment to German folklore and older music, as a German nationalist. Broadly speaking, one can distinguish five lines of development: the Beethoven- Mendelssohn- Schumann-Brahms Liszt- Wagner- Bruckner- Strauss folk-lore nationalism Italian opera and French, both operatic and symphonic. The music of Johannes Brahms (April 3, 1897) represents the furthest development of one strain of Nineteenth-Century Romanticism.
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