Essential Brahms
"Aimez-vous Brahms?" asked François Sagan in the title of her 1959 novel. The question has often been raised since: Johannes Brahms is a composer who to this day can conjure up often contradictory images and inspire varied reactions. He was born into a lowly musical household in Hamburg in 1833 and died in Vienna in 1897, having run the gamut from youthful firebrand to respectable – even stolid – figure of the Austrian capital’s musical establishment.
Read more…A master of all traditional compositional forms – orchestral, instrumental and vocal – Brahms represented for many formalism and order against the avant garde developments of the so-called New German School. He collected manuscripts and had a musicological interest in composers from earlier eras, rooting much of his music in older forms – the rousing, viscerally exciting Chaconne that concludes the Fourth Symphony, for example. But the traditionalist label tells only part of the story: Brahms’s early works are fired with youthful passion and zeal and his piano writing reflects his own virtuosity as a performer. He was hailed as a modernist by Arnold Schoenberg and, despite the forbidding reputation he later acquired, produced music (especially his songs and later piano and chamber works) that was often deeply personal, tinged with a characteristic autumnal melancholy.