Page 240 - ESSENTIAL LISTENING TO MUSIC

Figure 14.4
Johannes Brahms in his early thirties. Said an observer of the time, “The broad chest, the Herculean shoulders, the power- ful head, which he threw back energetically when playing—all betrayed an artistic personality replete with the spirit of true genius.”
could be traced to single individual: Beethoven (see Chapter 10). Beethoven had set a new standard for orchestral length, power, and complexity—a level that now seemed unsurmountable. Wagner asked why anyone after Beethoven bothered to write symphonies at all, given the dramatic impact of Beethoven’s Third, Fifth, and Ninth. Wagner himself wrote only one, and Verdi none. Some composers, notably Berlioz and Liszt, turned to a completely different sort of symphony, the program symphony (see Chapter 12, “Program Music”), in which an external scenario determined the musical events; others wrote tone poems that were never longer than a single movement. Not until the late Ro- mantic period, nearly fifty years after Beethoven’s death, did someone emerge as his successor in the genres of the symphony and concerto. That figure was Johannes Brahms.
Johannes Brahms (1833–1897)
Brahms (Figure 14.4) was born in the north German port city of Hamburg in 1833. He was given the Latin name Johannes to distinguish him from his father Johann, a street musician and beer-hall fiddler. Although Johannes’s formal ed- ucation never went beyond primary school, his father saw to it that he received the best training on the piano and in music theory, with the works of Bach and Beethoven given pride of place. While he studied these masters by day, by night Brahms earned money playing out-of-tune pianos in “stimulation bars” on the Hamburg waterfront. (Between 1960 and 1962, The Beatles went to Hamburg to play in the descendants of these strip joints.) To get his hands on better instru- ments, Brahms sometimes practiced in the showrooms of local piano stores as customers strolled past.
Brahms first caught the public’s attention in 1853, when Robert Schumann published a highly laudatory article proclaiming him to be a musical messiah, the heir apparent to Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Brahms, in turn, embraced
Robert and his wife, Clara (see Figure 11.5), as his musical mentors. After Robert was confined to a mental institution, Brahms became Clara’s con- fidant. Indeed for a while he moved into the Schumann home. His respect and affection for Clara ripened into love, despite the fact that she was four- teen years his senior. Whether owing to his (apparently) unconsummated love for Clara or his intense focus on his music, Brahms remained a bach-
elor all his life.
Disappointed first in love and then in his attempt to gain a conducting
position in his native Hamburg, in 1862 Brahms moved to the musical me- tropolis of Vienna. He supported his modest lifestyle—very “un-Wagnerian,” he called it—by performing and conducting. His fame as a composer increased dramatically in 1868 with performances of his German Requiem, which was soon sold to amateur choruses around the world. In this same year, he composed what is today perhaps his best-known piece, the simple yet beautiful art song identi- fied by English speakers as “Brahms’s Lullaby” (see Chapter 3, “Strophic Form,” and Download 5). Honorary degrees from Cambridge University (1876) and Breslau University (1879) attested to his growing stature. After Wagner’s death
218 chapter fourteen late romantic orchestral music
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