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Johannes Brahms (May 7, 1833 – April 3, 1897) was a German composer of the
Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, he eventually settled in Vienna, Austria.
 Brahms's
personality
Like Beethoven, Brahms was fond of nature and often went walking in the woods
around Vienna. He often brought penny candy with him to hand out to children. To
adults Brahms was often brusque and sarcastic, and he sometimes alienated other
people. His pupil Gustav Jenner wrote, "Brahms has acquired, not without reason,
the reputation for being a grump, even though few could also be as lovable as he."
He also had predictable habits which were noted by the Viennese press such as his
daily visit to his favourite "Red Hedgehog" tavern in Vienna and the press also
particularly took into account his style of walking with his hands firmly behind
his back complete with a caricature of him in this pose walking alongside a red
hedgehog. Those who remained his friends were very loyal to him, however, and he
reciprocated with equal loyalty and generosity.
He was a lifelong friend with Johann Strauss II though they were very different as
composers. Brahms even struggled to get to the Theater an der Wien in Vienna for
the premiere of Strauss's operetta Die Göttin der Vernunft in 1897 before his
death. Perhaps the greatest tribute that Brahms could pay to Strauss was his remark
that he would have given anything to have written The Blue Danube waltz. An
anecdote dating around the time Brahms became acquainted with Strauss is that the
former cheekily inscribed the words "alas, not by Brahms!" on a fan decorated with
the theme of the famous "Blue Danube" waltz.
Starting in the 1860s, when his works sold widely, Brahms was financially quite
successful. He preferred a modest life style, however, living in a simple
three-room apartment with a housekeeper. He gave away much of his money to
relatives, and anonymously helped support a number of young musicians.
Brahms was an extreme perfectionist. He destroyed many early works - including a
Violin Sonata he performed with Reményi and violinist Ferdinand David - and once
claimed to have destroyed 20 string quartets before he issued his official First in
1873. Over the course of several years, he changed an original project for a
Symphony in D minor into a piano concerto, his first. In another instance of
devotion to detail, he labored over the official First Symphony for almost fifteen
years, from about 1861 to 1876. Even after its first few performances, Brahms
destroyed the original slow movement and substituted another before the score was
published. (A conjectural restoration of the original slow movement has been
published by Robert Pascall.) Another factor that contributed to Brahms's
perfectionism was that Schumann had announced early on that Brahms was to become
the next great composer like Beethoven, a prediction that Brahms was determined to
live up to. This prediction hardly added to the composer's self-confidence, and may
have contributed to the delay in producing the First Symphony. However, Clara
Schumann noted before that Brahms's First Symphony was a product that was not
reflective of Brahms's real nature. She felt that the final exuberant movement was
"too brilliant," as she was encouraged by the dark and tempestuous opening movement
she had seen in an early draft. However, she recanted in accepting the Second
Symphony, which has often been seen in modern times as one of his sunniest works.
Other contemporaries, however, found the first movement especially dark, and
Reinhold Brinkmann, in a study of Symphony No.2 in relation to 19th century ideas
of melancholy, has published a revealing letter from Brahms to the composer and
conductor Vinzenz Lachner in which Brahms confesses to the melancholic side of his
nature and comments on specific features of the movement that reflect this.
Brahms' place in musical history, which so concerned him, has placed him among the
three great "Bs" of German composers: Bach, Beethoven and Brahms.
Source : Some of the information on this page came
from a Wikipedia article and is licensed under the GNU Documentation
License. ©2008 www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Johannes
Brahms - Generator - Biography
