![]() ![]() The young Brahms gave a few public concerts in Hamburg, but did not become well known as a pianist until he made a concert tour at the age of nineteen. Jan Swafford has contributed to the discussion.įor a time, Brahms also learned the cello. After his early piano lessons with Otto Cossel, Brahms studied piano with Eduard Marxsen, who had studied in Vienna with Ignaz von Seyfried (a pupil of Mozart) and Carl Maria von Bocklet (a close friend of Schubert). Some modern writers have suggested that this early experience warped Brahms’s later relations with women, but Brahms scholars Styra Avins and Kurt Hoffmann have questioned the possibility. Early biographers found this shocking and played down this portion of his life. Owing to the family’s poverty, the adolescent Brahms had to contribute to the family’s income by playing the piano in dance halls. He studied piano from the age of seven with Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel. Johann Jakob gave his son his first musical training. Initially, they lived near the city docks, in the Gängeviertel quarter of Hamburg, for six months, before moving to a small house on the Dammtorwall, a small street near the Inner Alster. Johannes Brahms had an older sister and a younger brother. In 1830, he married Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen (1789–1865), a seamstress never previously married, who was seventeen years older than he was. He was proficient in several instruments, but found employment mostly playing the horn and double bass. The building was destroyed by bombing in 1943.īrahms’s father, Johann Jakob Brahms (1806–72), came to Hamburg from Dithmarschen, seeking a career as a town musician. Brahms’s family occupied part of the first floor (second floor to Americans), behind the two double windows on the left hand side. Photograph from 1891 of the building in Hamburg where Brahms was born. The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms’s works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers. While many contemporaries found his music too academic, his contribution and craftsmanship have been admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. ![]() Brahms aimed to honour the “purity” of these venerable “German” structures and advance them into a Romantic idiom, in the process creating bold new approaches to harmony and melody. He was a master of counterpoint, the complex and highly disciplined art for which Johann Sebastian Bach is famous, and of development, a compositional ethos pioneered by Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and other composers. His music is firmly rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Baroque and Classical masters. Brahms, an uncompromising perfectionist, destroyed some of his works and left others unpublished.īrahms is often considered both a traditionalist and an innovator. Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire. ![]() He worked with some of the leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends). A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works. ![]() He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the “Three Bs,” a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.īrahms composed for piano, chamber ensembles, symphony orchestra, and for voice and chorus. In his lifetime, Brahms’s popularity and influence were considerable. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria. Johannes Brahms (–3 April 1897) was a German composer and pianist. ![]()
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