1833–1897 · Germany · Romantic
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) was a German composer, pianist and conductor, one of the central figures of the Romantic era. He never wrote an opera, working instead in almost every other genre, from piano pieces to symphonies. The site holds his songs for voice and piano along with a few solo piano pieces of varying difficulty.
Johannes Brahms was born on 7 May 1833 in Hamburg, into the family of Jakob Brahms, a double bass player at the city theatre. At first the family lived in a cramped apartment and struggled to make ends meet. Johannes had an older sister, Elise, and a younger brother, Fritz. His father was the one who first taught him to play string and wind instruments.
From 1840 the boy studied piano with Otto Cossel, and a few years later Cossel sent his gifted pupil to his own teacher, the composer Eduard Marxsen in Altona. Marxsen worked with him extensively on the music of Bach and Beethoven and quickly recognised the scale of the new pupil's talent. Already at ten the boy was performing at concerts as a pianist: an impresario even offered his parents a tour of America for the boy, but Cossel talked them out of it and persuaded them to let him continue his studies instead. Having finished a private secondary school in 1847, the fourteen-year-old Brahms gave his first public appearance as a pianist in a solo recital.
Brahms's earliest works appeared under the pseudonym "G. W. Marks": in 1849 the Hamburg publisher Cranz issued several of his piano arrangements and fantasies under that name. He later destroyed almost everything from those years. The earliest works he acknowledged as genuinely his — a Scherzo, Op. 4, and a song called "Heimkehr", Op. 7, No. 6 — date from 1851.
In April 1853 Brahms set out on a concert tour with the Hungarian violinist Ede Reményi. In May, in Hanover, they met the violinist Joseph Joachim: Brahms's playing made a strong impression on him, and the two young musicians — Joachim was twenty-two at the time — became lifelong close friends.
Joachim gave Brahms and Reményi a letter of introduction to Franz Liszt, and they set off for Weimar. Liszt sight-read several of Brahms's compositions; they made a strong impression on him, and he wanted to count his guest among his own "New German School" — but Brahms did not succumb to the charm of Liszt's personality and the brilliance of his playing.
Brahms met Robert Schumann in autumn 1853: Joachim had given him a letter of introduction, and Brahms travelled to the Schumanns' home in Düsseldorf. Robert and his wife, the pianist Clara Schumann, had already heard of the young musician from Joachim and received him warmly, becoming among his most devoted supporters. At the end of October that year Schumann published an article in his own journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, calling his guest a musician fated to give the highest and most ideal expression to the spirit of the age — the piece brought the young composer recognition.
Brahms held a deep and lasting attachment to Clara — she was considerably older than him — yet he never proposed to her, even after she was widowed; their close bond lasted until Clara's own death. In February 1854 Robert Schumann suffered a severe mental crisis and was placed in a sanatorium near Bonn, where he died of pneumonia in 1856; throughout this time Brahms lived in Düsseldorf and helped Clara run the household and handle family affairs.
Brahms spent the autumn months of 1857–1859 at the small princely court of Detmold, where he served as a court musician. In the same years, from 1858 to 1862, he conducted an amateur women's choir in Hamburg — though throughout this time he dreamed of becoming conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic.
In the summers of 1858 and 1859 Brahms spent long stretches in Göttingen, where he met the singer Agathe von Siebold and fell strongly for her; in 1859 the two became engaged, but the engagement was soon broken off, and all the composer's later romantic attachments remained brief. In 1862 the post of head of the Hamburg Philharmonic, which Brahms had dreamed of, went to Julius Stockhausen; although the post was finally offered to Brahms himself in 1893, he declined, saying he had grown used to the idea of a different path.
In autumn 1862 Brahms visited Vienna for the first time and spent the whole winter there; the city gradually became his home. In 1863 he took charge of the Vienna Singakademie, surprising audiences with programmes of music by early German masters — Heinrich Schütz, Bach, Giovanni Gabrieli — alongside works by Beethoven and Mendelssohn. The post left him too little time for composing, so in June 1864 Brahms gave up the choir.
In 1868 A German Requiem premiered to great acclaim at Bremen Cathedral — a work Brahms composed in stages: an early sketch of the second movement dates back to 1854, while most of the music was written after his mother's death in 1865. Equally successful premieres followed: in 1876 the First Symphony in C minor, in 1885 the Fourth Symphony in E minor, and in 1891 the Clarinet Quintet.
In early February 1872 Brahms travelled to Hamburg to see his gravely ill father; his father died the next day. That same autumn Brahms became artistic director of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, but the work weighed on him, and he held the post for three seasons.
Brahms carried his First Symphony in C minor for almost fifteen years — work on it went on from about 1861 to 1876, when the piece finally appeared. The symphony features the "Ode to Joy" theme from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and the conductor Hans von Bülow dubbed the new symphony "Beethoven's Tenth". It was followed by the Second Symphony (1877), the Violin Concerto (1878, dedicated to Joachim) and, written in 1880, the Academic Festival and Tragic Overtures. Particular popularity and financial success came to Brahms from his two sets of Hungarian Dances, published in 1869 and 1880 — they grew out of the composer's fascination with "gypsy-style" Hungarian music such as the csárdás, he had discovered in his youth alongside the violinist Reményi.
Formal honours followed too: in 1874 King Ludwig II of Bavaria awarded him Bavaria's own Maximilian Order for Science and Art. In 1879 Brahms received an honorary doctorate from the University of Wrocław; the Academic Festival Overture followed. In 1889 Brahms became an honorary citizen of his native Hamburg.
In 1889 Brahms let Edison's agent Theo Wangemann record him in Vienna: at the piano he performed a shortened take of his earliest Hungarian Dance together with Josef Strauss's piece "Die Libelle" — the spoken introduction is clear, but heavy surface noise all but swallows the playing itself. In 1896 Clara Schumann died. The cycle "Four Serious Songs", Op. 121, was prompted by her death.
In the summer of 1896 Brahms was found to have jaundice and pancreatic cancer, and a Viennese doctor then diagnosed liver cancer — the same illness that had killed his father much earlier. Brahms's last public appearance came on 7 March 1897, when he heard his Fourth Symphony conducted by Hans Richter, and the audience applauded following every one of the four movements. He grew steadily weaker afterwards, and died in Vienna on 3 April 1897 at the age of 63; he is buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery, beneath a monument by the architect Victor Horta, its sculpture the work of Ilse von Twardowski.
Brahms never wrote an opera, yet he touched almost every other genre: from solo and part songs to symphonies, concertos and large-scale choral scores, among which A German Requiem stands out. His output includes piano sonatas, variations and pieces for a single instrument, ensembles involving violin, cello, clarinet and viola, piano trios, quartets and quintets, two piano concertos, a violin concerto and a double concerto for violin and cello. It was his symphonies that brought him particular renown, while the Requiem just mentioned is considered the most powerful music in his output. Folk-song arrangements also occupy an important place in his catalogue, along with pieces that grew out of his fascination with "gypsy-style" Hungarian music.
A substantial part of Brahms's output is vocal lyricism — hundreds of songs and folk-melody arrangements for voice and piano, often on themes of nature and rural life. Songs of this kind make up most of the site's sheet-music library: among them are relatively accessible, intermediate-level pieces such as "Vergangen ist mir Glück und Heil", and more extended ones a notch harder, such as "Die Mainacht". The site also has scores for mixed choir at the same intermediate level, including "In stiller Nacht".
Brahms's solo piano output moved from early sonatas and ballades to late cycles of character pieces; in his last years he wrote very tender, personal music — among the examples cited are his piano intermezzi. From such pieces the site offers two Op. 39 waltzes — an upper-intermediate No. 10 and a harder, advanced-level No. 15 — as well as the second Intermezzo, Op. 118, also at an advanced level and written in the composer's late style. The site also offers the same Op. 39 waltzes arranged for guitar — No. 3 and No. 9, both at intermediate level, giving guitarists their own way into this music.