In our age when celebrity is often viewed as the ultimate accomplishment, the life of Johannes Brahms is a study of what a burden it can be. He was made famous at age twenty, virtually declared the heir of Beethoven when he knew he had not earned such a prophecy. He spent the rest of his life trying to measure up to the reputation that had been thrust on him. By his own accounting, he would never measure up. But Brahms was a man of immense talent, likewise immense patience and courage and hard-headed common sense. While he had to cope with the usual obstacles to making a career as an artist, plus the resentment of his enemies and his own self-doubts, when all was said and done, he had about as good a career in his lifetime as any composer ever did. He did not have to die to be named one of the “three great Bs” of music, alongside Bach and Beethoven.
His fame was no accident. For one thing, he wrote a good many light pieces, among them the irresistible Hungarian Dances and the ubiquitous “Lullaby,” all of which flew off the shelves. Even if he never admitted it, he knew he was some kind of genius, but he also knew that genius is not enough to make a name. He maintained an air of indifference toward money and glory while managing his career deftly and making lots of money. His efforts included cultivating a stable of powerful friends and champions. If he had been capable of satisfaction at what he had accomplished, which he was not, he would have had a largely pleasant career.
Brahms was born in Hamburg, his father a workaday musician and his mother a seamstress. The family was of peasant stock, as shown by his name, which in German means “Johnny Broom.” His father wanted the boy to learn cello and horn so someday he could play in the Hamburg Philharmonic. But with a strange obstinacy tiny Johannes insisted on playing the piano. By the time he was ten it had become clear that he was a tremendous talent. But now he insisted that he wanted to compose. His teacher reluctantly agreed to look at some pieces the boy had written, and found himself astonished. “I was bound to recognize,” he recalled, “that an exceptional, great, and peculiarly profound talent was dormant in him.” When Felix Mendelssohn died, the teacher declared, “A great master of the musical art has gone hence, but an even greater one will bloom for us in Brahms.” Johannes was fourteen at the time. He would inspire that kind of respect for the rest of his life.
But Brahms’s teens were hardly as pleasant as they sound. The family finances were perennially dicey, and his father declared that if the boy could play piano he had to bring in some money. Johannes was sent to play in waterfront dives that catered to sailors. A longtime Hamburg institution in the St. Pauli district, these pubs conveniently joined the functions of restaurant, bar, dancehall, and brothel. The waitresses, in short, were versatile. (If you want to get some idea of what they looked like, see the label of St. Pauli Girl beer.) The thirteen-year-old was paid to play dance music at the piano. But, as he described with anguish for the rest of his life, he was also abused by the women for the amusement of the sailors. In describing it later, Brahms said that the bars had been terrible but he would not have missed the experience, because it steeled him. Perhaps he believed that. At the time, when it became clear to the family that the boy was in bad shape physically and mentally, he was taken out of the pubs and sent to the country to recover. There Brahms started a lifetime of robust health.
In 1853 a historic career began with an unassuming concert tour. Brahms went on the road with Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi; they drifted from town to town playing violin sonatas plus popular pieces in a style called “Hungarian” or “Gypsy.” This exotic, rhythmically exhilarating music was the jazz of its time, and Brahms was involved with it from then on. Meanwhile he had composed some piano music and songs—brilliant work for his age, if not that much of it. For a sample of his early music, try the lied “Liebestreu,” Op. 3, No. 1. In a dark-toned and agitated piece of remarkable musical and psychological maturity for a composer barely twenty, Brahms sets a text of love’s anguish that is a prophecy of his own bachelor life: a mother sings to her son, “Oh sink your sorrow, my child, in the sea, in the deep sea!… And the love that you carry in your heart, break it off, my child!”
When Brahms and the violinist reached Weimar, they visited Reményi’s mentor Franz Liszt. The famous man was welcoming, played through Brahms’s luscious, faux-demonic Scherzo in E-flat Minor brilliantly at sight. As Liszt went on to play his own B-Minor Sonata, however, Brahms was observed dozing off. Soon began a musical feud that would simmer for decades, Brahms on one side and Liszt and his colleague Richard Wagner on the other.
On the same tour Brahms met violinist Joseph Joachim, a celebrated prodigy who when he was twelve years old had established the Beethoven Violin Concerto in the repertoire. Here began a long friendship and collaboration. Already Brahms had a gift for sitting down at the piano, playing his music, and finding instant and lifelong admirers. That at age twenty he was stunningly handsome, wiry and athletic, with blue eyes and long blond hair, did not hurt. (He did not grow the famous beard until his forties.)
Joachim was close to composer Robert Schumann and his wife, Clara, who was perhaps second only to Liszt among piano virtuosos. The violinist insisted Brahms visit the couple in Düsseldorf. In October 1853, with a pack on his back and walking staff in hand, Brahms knocked on the Schumanns’ door. After he played a few pieces for them, Robert patted him on the shoulder and said vaguely, “We understand each other.” That night Schumann wrote in his journal, “Visit from Brahms (a genius).” From that point the couple more or less adopted Johannes, adding him to their noisy houseful of children. A few months later, Schumann wrote a journal article that essentially declared this twenty-year-old student the heir of Beethoven and the coming savior of German music—by implication, saving it from what Schumann saw as the depredations of Liszt and Wagner, who had turned away from classical forms toward music based on ideas and stories.
With the article’s publication, the European musical world erupted in gossip and scandal. Some were curious to hear this new phenomenon; others—especially the followers of Liszt and Wagner—despised the intruder already. Wagner sarcastically dubbed him “Saint Johannes.” Brahms was appropriately grateful to Schumann, but at the same time horrified by the burden that had been thrown on him. As he was staying with Joachim and trying to come to terms with this unwanted notoriety, the terrible news arrived of Robert’s attempted suicide and commitment to an asylum.
Schumann’s wife, Clara, was devastated, alone with their seven children, and pregnant. Brahms rushed to her side, took up residence in a downstairs bedroom, helped out with the children and household chores. Over the next months, as they spent their days talking and making music, Brahms began to fall for this tremendous musician fourteen years his senior. So began a miserable two-year odyssey of longing and sorrow and guilt between them. Whether their love was spoken or unspoken, consummated or not, we don’t know. But when Schumann died in 1856, their connection was common knowledge and many, including Clara, expected Brahms to propose. Instead he went back to Hamburg and stayed a bachelor. Yet Clara remained the love of his life; their relationship lasted to the end.
After Schumann’s infamous article, Brahms was knocked off his stride for years. Among the relatively few products of that period is the Piano Trio No. 1 in B Major, from 1854. It begins with an exquisite cello melody of a kind that Brahms would produce for the rest of his career. It is mostly known in a much-revised version he did in 1889, though the revision retained its youthful passion.
The Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor cost Brahms four excruciating years of work before he finished it in 1854. It started as a two-piano sonata he drafted just after Robert’s collapse. The concerto begins on a note of high drama, with an ominous low D in the basses and snarling horns, with wild shivering trills above. That opening is the most turbulent in the concerto repertoire to that time, with an expressive urgency that Brahms rarely attempted again. Surely the impetus for the work came from his years of turmoil with the Schumanns. If the vertiginous opening is applied to the image of a suicidal man leaping into the water, they are almost cinematically apt. The enormous movement continues with a wealth of contrasting themes, the piano writing massive, the soloist given little rest. After a slow movement that Brahms told Clara was “a tender portrait” of her, the finale turns to youthful high spirits and a driving Hungarian/Gypsy voice. Audiences of the time, though, were not ready for huge concertos sometimes tragic in tone. When Brahms soloed in the second performance in Leipzig, he was hissed off the stage. But by his last years he had the satisfaction of hearing this product of his youth applauded everywhere.
After the chaotic years with Robert and Clara, Brahms wanted no more drama in his life. He pulled himself out of his anxieties, found his voice, and settled into a busy life of composing, performing, frequenting brothels, and fighting with his friends. An exemplary composer’s career, really. He gave up any ambitions as a pianist, though kept playing his own music in concerts. In 1863 he moved to Vienna, and before long had the city’s leading critic, the Wagner-bashing Eduard Hanslick, as a friend and champion. Brahms stayed away from overt politicking; Hanslick was the real leader of the Brahms faction in its decades-long struggles with Liszt and Wagner and their Music of the Future followers. As their figurehead however, he was constantly under attack. Given his allegiance to sonata form and other traditional models, Brahms belonged, Liszt declared, to “the posthumous school” of composers.
Of Brahms’s early masterpieces the best-known is Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), finished after years of work in 1868. A skeptic and agnostic, Brahms assembled his own text from scripture and pointedly avoided mention of the eponymous founder of the Christian religion. This is a requiem with no smell of incense or bowing to the altar; it is directed to all humanity. “Selig” (blessed), the chorus begins. At the end of its journey, the music comes to rest again on the word selig. The gentleness and limpid twilight beauty of the opening sets the tone of the whole work. It was an unequivocal success from its premiere, and since then has lived in the heart and soul of the choral repertoire. Singers sometimes speak of performing it as a life-changing experience.
Brahms came to maturity mainly writing chamber music. For a sample, I’ll propose two pieces in quite different directions. The Piano Quintet in F Minor is a work of piercing tragic intensity, from its relentlessly driving opening to its spine-tingling non-scherzo to its finale that begins with a bleak landscape and ends in fury. The relief is the lilting nocturne of its slow movement, where Brahms’s lyricism—partly learned from Schubert, but essentially his own—is on tender display.
Since Brahms never wrote program pieces and rarely left overtly personal elements in his music, his followers have always tended to view him as an abstractionist, his music free of autobiography. He was indeed an intensely guarded and private man, but he never made any such claims, and periodically admitted to friends that his music had been drawn from his life. The exquisite String Sextet in G Major is another work suffused with beautiful lyricism, much of it wonderfully warm, music of love, but woven into it is a vein of piercing regret. The climactic theme of the first movement is made from notes that spell out “Agathe,” the name of a woman Brahms was once engaged to, and jilted. “Here,” he said of the piece, “I have freed myself from my last love.”
From the early years of his fame, everybody was expecting a symphony from Brahms. He could only fulfill Schumann’s prophecy and officially take up the mantle of Beethoven if he attempted that king of musical forms. Partly for that reason, Brahms took decades to allow a symphony out of the house. What became Symphony No. 1 in C Minor began with a draft of a first movement that he sent to Clara Schumann in 1862. Then, fourteen years passed. “I’ll never write a symphony!” he anguished. “You have no idea how the likes of me feels with the tramp of a giant like him behind you!” The giant, of course, was Beethoven.
Yet over the years Brahms kept hammering away at the piece. The First was finally finished in 1876. It begins on a note of searing drama: keening, searching melodies spreading outward, under them the pounding timpani Brahms always associated with fate. The introduction gives way to an allegro that never flags in its driving, churning energy. Next is a slow movement marked by melting, heart-tugging themes. Then comes a new kind of symphonic movement, an intermezzo that begins with a blithe clarinet theme, developed at length. All the movements lead to the finale, when the tensions of the first movement and the shadowed lyricism of the middle ones find their resolution. The music reaches a breathless climax, then as if with a burst of sunlight through clouds, by way of a French horn we hear the call of an alphorn. It brings us to the main theme, an unforgettable chorale melody. There in a moment of heart-filling C-major beauty the First Symphony turns toward solace, fulfillment, and finally triumph.
After the over fifteen years of struggle on the First, the next two symphonies took Brahms a summer each. (Mostly he composed at various summer resorts and spent the winters revising, copying, performing.) The Third Symphony in F Minor, from 1883, is his most tightly knit, with questions posed in the craggy opening that are finally resolved only in the superb final pages. It begins with two pealing chords in the winds and brass, then a great string proclamation starting in F major; in the next measure the basses rise to an A-flat, violently wrenching the harmony into minor. There is the central musical and expressive drama of the Third: a struggle between major and minor, between anguish and a fine but fraught lyricism. The second movement begins gently in the winds. After a lovely flowering of the theme, the second section is a somber chorale in strange, complex harmonies. In a wash of strings the first theme returns, but not the chorale. Its moment is later. Then the extraordinary third movement, with its soaring cello melody set in a fluttering texture of strings. This movement is like some distilled essence of passion and yearning. I think you never forget the first time you hear it.
The last movement of the Third begins with a murmuring string line, then a more measured theme appears—it is the mysterious chorale theme of the second movement, which finds its climax here. It leads to a powerful, almost desperately surging theme. In the coda of the finale Brahms achieves something remarkable: this tumultuous symphony ends with a long gentle coda that gradually returns, in a magical shimmer of strings, to a gentle falling line in pure F major that is the opening theme of the symphony, stripped of struggle and uncertainty and grief, resolved at last into a whispered farewell.
By his forties Brahms had become the plump, bearded bear that history would remember. He was sunk into his old-bachelor life: private, melancholy, and pessimistic. But he was still sociable enough, with an entourage who doted on him. It doesn’t often show in his music, but Brahms had a subtle and finely tuned sense of humor—usually at somebody’s expense, often at his own expense. A few samples. At a dinner his host tried to play up to him, flourishing a bottle with, “I call this the Brahms of my wines!” Said Brahms: “Let’s have a bottle of Bach, then.” He was rehearsing a string quartet when the violist asked, “How do you like our tempos?” “They’re good,” Brahms said. “Especially yours.” When somebody asked him what he had done that summer, he described his monumental Fourth Symphony thus: “Oh, once again I’ve just thrown together a bunch of waltzes and polkas.” He hated facile compliments, and those who attempted one usually got them back in the face. “How do you write such divine adagios?” cooed one lady at a party. “My publisher orders ’em that way,” Brahms deadpanned.
Brahms died in April 1897. In his last years he was celebrated wherever he went, and it would seem that he could have had no doubts about his place in the history of his art. Being who he was, he doubted it anyway. He was more troubled about his beloved Austro-German culture, which he saw tumbling downhill toward—his word—catastrophe. Unlike many, he understood what lay at the center of it: “Anti-Semitism is madness!” he cried to friends. He could not have imagined what shape the catastrophe would take, but his late works, including the Fourth Symphony, reflect his sense of his culture rushing to destroy itself.
History would paint Brahms as the great abstractionist, but he never saw himself that way. He was intensely connected to the world, and his art rose from and reflected life. Only it was not his style to proclaim epochal agendas, as Wagner and his followers did. Brahms didn’t believe art could change the world, no matter how much the world needed changing. For him music was a private matter, from the heart of the composer to the heart of each listener. He had his own version of Beethoven’s heroic voice, but perhaps his greatest moments are the ones of songful tenderness. In the way those moments reach the heart, he is unsurpassed.
More Brahms: String Sextet in B-flat Major; Schicksalslied; Piano Concerto No. 2; Symphonies 2 and 4; Violin Concerto; Clarinet Quintet in B Minor.