Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897) was a German composer,
pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period. Born in
Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of
his professional life in Vienna. His reputation and
status as a composer are such that he is sometimes
grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van
Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment
originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor
Hans von Bülow.
Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber
ens...(+)
Johannes Brahms (1833 – 1897) was a German composer,
pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period. Born in
Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of
his professional life in Vienna. His reputation and
status as a composer are such that he is sometimes
grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van
Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment
originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor
Hans von Bülow.
Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber
ensembles, piano, organ, and voice and chorus. A
virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works.
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). Many of his works have become staples of the
modern concert repertoire. An uncompromising
perfectionist, Brahms destroyed some of his works and
left others unpublished.
Brahms has been considered, by his contemporaries and
by later writers, as both a traditionalist and an
innovator. His music is firmly rooted in the structures
and compositional techniques of the Classical masters.
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. The diligent, highly constructed nature
of Brahms's works was a starting point and an
inspiration for a generation of composers. Embedded
within his meticulous structures, however, are deeply
romantic motifs.
Brahms wrote a number of major works for orchestra,
including four symphonies, two piano concertos (No. 1
in D minor; No. 2 in B-flat major), a Violin Concerto,
a Double Concerto for violin and cello, and the Tragic
Overture, along with somewhat lesser orchestral pieces
such as the two Serenades, and the Academic Festival
Overture.
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.
His works in variation form include the Variations and
Fugue on a Theme by Handel and the Paganini Variations,
both for solo piano, and the Variations on a Theme by
Haydn (now sometimes called the Saint Anthony
Variations) in versions for two pianos and for
orchestra. The final movement of the Fourth Symphony,
Op. 98, is a passacaglia. He set a number of folksongs.
His chamber works include three string quartets, two
string quintets, two string sextets, a clarinet
quintet, a clarinet trio, a horn trio, a piano quintet,
three piano quartets, and four piano trios (the fourth
being published posthumously). He composed several
instrumental sonatas with piano, including three for
violin, two for cello, and two for clarinet (which were
subsequently arranged for viola by the composer). His
solo piano works range from his early piano sonatas and
ballades to his late sets of character pieces. Brahms
was a significant Lieder composer, who wrote over 200
of them. His chorale preludes for organ, Op. 122, which
he wrote shortly before his death, have become an
important part of the organ repertoire. They were
published posthumously in 1902. The last of this set is
a setting of the chorale, "O Welt ich muss dich
lassen", "O world I now must leave thee" and were the
last notes he wrote.
Brahms was an extreme perfectionist. He destroyed many
early works – including a violin sonata he had
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 his
first piano concerto. In another instance of devotion
to detail, he laboured 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. Another factor that
contributed to his perfectionism was Schumann's early
enthusiasm, which Brahms was determined to live up to.
Brahms strongly preferred writing absolute music that
does not refer to an explicit scene or narrative, and
he never wrote an opera or a symphonic poem.
Source: Wikipedia
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Brahms)
Although originally composed for string quartet, I
created this Interpretation of the Sonata I in C Minor
(Op. 51 No. 1) for Piano Duo.
