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Portrait of Johannes Brahms (Hamburg, 1833-Vienna, 1897), German conductor and composer, Engraving

Top 10 Interesting Facts about Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg Germany, and died April 3, 1897, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now in Austria]). He was a German composer and pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote symphonies, concerti, chamber music, piano works, choral compositions, and more than 200 songs. 

Brahms was the great master of symphonic and sonata style in the second half of the 19th century. He can be viewed as the protagonist of the Classical tradition of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven in a period when the standards of this tradition were being questioned or overturned by the Romantics.

Here are the top 10 interesting facts about Johannes Brahms.

1. Brahms began playing piano at the age of 7

The son of Jakob Brahms, an impecunious horn and double bass player, Johannes showed early promise as a pianist. He first studied music with his father and, at age seven, was sent for piano lessons to F.W. Cossel, who three years later passed him to his own teacher, Eduard Marxsen. 

Brahms is also believed to have begun composing early in his life but destroyed his early compositions. He did not become famous as a composer until April and May of 1853 when he was on a concert tour as accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Eduard Rem茅nyi.

2. Brahms turning point came when he met the violin virtuoso, Joseph Joachim

Johannes Brahms, German composer, pianist and conductor by Fritz Luckhardt –

The first turning point came in 1853 when he met the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, who instantly realized the talent of Brahms. Joachim in turn recommended Brahms to the composer Robert Schumann, and an immediate friendship between the two composers resulted. Schumann wrote enthusiastically about Brahms in the periodical Neue Zeitschrift f眉r Musik, praising his compositions. The article created a sensation. From this moment Brahms was a force in the world of music, though there were always factors that made it difficult for him.

3. Brahms鈥檚 works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire

Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, voice, and chorus. A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. He worked with leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire.

4. Brahms has been considered both a traditionalist and an innovator

Sheet of music 2 of Johannes Brahms by Monozigote –

His music is rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. Embedded within those structures are deeply romantic motifs. While some contemporaries found his music to be overly academic, his contribution and craftsmanship were admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. 

The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms’s works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. Therefore Brahms has been considered both a traditionalist and an innovator, by his contemporaries and by later writers.

5. In Hamburg Brahms established a women’s choir for which he wrote music and conducted

After the publication of his Op. 10 Ballades for piano, Brahms published no further works until 1860. His major project of this period was the Piano Concerto in D minor, which he had begun as a work for two pianos in 1854 but soon realized needed a larger-scale format. Based in Hamburg at this time, he gained, with Clara’s support, a position as a musician to the tiny court of Detmold, the capital of the Principality of Lippe, where he spent the winters of 1857 to 1860 and for which he wrote his two Serenades. In Hamburg, he established a women’s choir for which he wrote music and conducted. To this period also belong his first two Piano Quartets (Op. 25 and Op. 26) and the first movement of the third Piano Quartet, which eventually appeared in 1875.

6. Brahms’s personal life was troubled

Portrait of Johannes Brahms by C. Brasch –

The nearest Brahms ever came to marriage was in his affair with Agathe von Siebold in 1858; from this, he recoiled suddenly, and he was never thereafter seriously involved in the prospect. The reasons for this are unclear, but probably his immense reserve and his inability to express emotions in any other way but musically were responsible, and he no doubt was aware that his natural irascibility and resentment of sympathy would have made him an impossible husband. 

He wrote in a letter, 鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 bear to have in the house a woman who has the right to be kind to me, to comfort me when things go wrong.鈥� They never saw one another again, and Brahms later confirmed to a friend that Agathe was his last love.

7. Cambridge University offered to grant honorary degrees of Doctor of Music to both Brahms and Joachim

In May 1876, Cambridge University offered to grant honorary degrees of Doctor of Music to both Brahms and Joachim, provided that they composed new pieces as theses and were present in Cambridge to receive their degrees. Brahms was averse to traveling to England and requested to receive the degree in absentia, offering as his thesis the previously performed in November 1876 symphony.

But of the two, only Joachim went to England, and only he was granted a degree. Brahms acknowledged the invitation by giving the manuscript score and parts of his first symphony to Joachim, who led the performance at Cambridge on 8 March 1877. 

8. Brahms’s first symphony, Op. 68, appeared in 1876

Johannes Brahms’ personal belongings in Vienna by Kad谋 –

During the decade it evolved very gradually; the finale may not have begun its conception until 1868.  Brahms was cautious and typically self-deprecating about the symphony during its creation, writing to his friends that it was long and difficult, not exactly charming and, significantly long and in C Minor, which, as Richard Taruskin points out, made it clear that Brahms was taking on the model of models for a symphony.

Despite the warm reception the first symphony received, Brahms remained dissatisfied and extensively revised the second movement before the work was published. There followed a succession of well-received orchestral works: the Second Symphony Op. 73 in 1877, the Violin Concerto Op. 77 in 1878, dedicated to Joachim who was consulted closely during its composition, and the Academic Festival Overture was written following the conferring of an honorary degree by the University of Breslau and Tragic Overture of 1880. 

9. The early Romantic composers had a major influence on Brahms

In particular, Schumann encouraged Brahms as a young composer. During his stay in Vienna in 1862鈥�63, Brahms became particularly interested in the music of Franz Schubert. The latter’s influence may be identified in works by Brahms dating from the period, such as the two piano quartets Op. 25 and Op. 26, and the Piano Quintet which alludes to Schubert’s String Quintet and Grand Duo for piano four hands.

The influence of Chopin and Mendelssohn on Brahms is less obvious, although occasionally one can find in his works what seems to be an allusion to one of theirs (for example, Brahms’s Scherzo, Op. 4, alludes to Chopin’s Scherzo in B-flat minor; the scherzo movement in Brahms’s Piano Sonata in F minor, Op. 5, alludes to the finale of Mendelssohn’s Piano Trio in C minor)

10. Brahms鈥� large choral work A German Requiem was composed during three major periods of his life

His large choral work A German Requiem is not a setting of the liturgical Missa pro defunctis but a setting of texts which Brahms selected from the Luther Bible. The work was composed in three major periods of his life. 

An early version of the second movement was first composed in 1854, not long after Robert Schumann’s attempted suicide, and this was later used in his first piano concerto. The majority of the Requiem was composed after his mother’s death in 1865. The fifth movement was added after the official premiere in 1868, and the work was published in 1869.