Johannes Brahms - German Composer, Symphonies, Lieder | Britannica (2024)

inJohannes Brahms

printPrint

Please select which sections you would like to print:

verifiedCite

While every effort has been made to follow citation style rules, there may be some discrepancies.Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions.

Select Citation Style

Feedback

Thank you for your feedback

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

Written by

Robert Simpson Composer. Music Producer, British Broadcasting Corporation, 1951–80. Author of The Essence of Bruckner and others.

Robert Simpson,

Karl Geiringer Professor of Music, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1962–73. Coauthor of Haydn: A Creative Life in Music.

Karl GeiringerAll

Fact-checked by

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree. They write new content and verify and edit content received from contributors.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Article History

Quick Facts

Born:
May 7, 1833, Hamburg [Germany]
Died:
April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now in Austria] (aged 63)
Notable Works:
“A German Requiem”
“Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80”
“Four Serious Songs”
“Hungarian Dances”
“Liebeslieder waltzes”
“Piano Quartet in G Minor”
“Serenade No. 1 in D Major, Op. 11”
“Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68”
“Symphony No. 2 in D Major”
“Symphony No. 3 in F Major”
“Symphony No. 4 in E Minor”
“Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56”
“Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77”
Movement / Style:
Romanticism

See all related content

Brahms’s music complemented and counteracted the rapid growth of Romantic individualism in the second half of the 19th century. He was a traditionalist in the sense that he greatly revered the subtlety and power of movement displayed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with an added influence from Franz Schubert. The Romantic composers’ preoccupation with the emotional moment had created new harmonic vistas, but it had two inescapable consequences. First, it had produced a tendency toward rhapsody that often resulted in a lack of structure. Second, it had slowed down the processes of music, so that Wagner had been able to discover a means of writing music that moved as slowly as his often-argumentative stage action. Many composers were thus decreasingly concerned to preserve the skill of taut, brilliant, and dramatic symphonic development that had so eminently distinguished the masters at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating in Beethoven’s chamber music and symphonies.

Brahms was acutely conscious of this loss, repudiated it, and set himself to compensate for it in order to keep alive a force he felt strongly was far from spent. But Brahms was desirous not of reproducing old styles but of infusing the language of his own time with constructive power. Thus his musical language actually bears little resemblance to Beethoven’s or even Schubert’s; harmonically it was much influenced by Schumann and even to some extent by Wagner. It is Brahms’s supple and masterful control of rhythm and movement that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries. It is often supposed that his sense of movement was slower than that of his most admired predecessor, Beethoven, but Brahms was always able to vary the pace of his musical thought in a startling manner, often tightening and speeding it without a change of tempo. It is a question of subtlety in command of tonality, harmony, and rhythm, and no 19th-century composer after Beethoven is able to surpass him in this respect. At all periods in Brahms’s work one finds a great variety of expression—from the subtly humorous to the tragic—but his larger works show an increasing mastery of movement and an ever-greater economy and concentration. Ultimately, Brahms’s power of movement stems partly from a source that may seem paradoxical. He was the most deeply versed of Classical composers in the music of the distant past, and he took the lessons he learned from the polyphonic school of the 16th century and applied them to the forms and the instrumental and vocal resources of his own time. Thus it was by way of a new approach to texture, drawn from very old models, that he revitalized a 19th-century rhythmic language that had been in danger of expiring from textural and harmonic stagnation.

In his orchestral works Brahms displays an unmistakable and highly distinctive deployment of tone colour, especially in his use of woodwind and brass instruments and in his string writing, but the important thing about it is that colour is deployed, rather than laid on for its own sake. A close relationship between orchestration and architecture dominates these works, with the orchestration contributing as much to the tonal colouring as do the harmonies and tonalities and the changing nature of the themes. As in the concerti of Mozart and Beethoven, such an attitude to orchestration proves in Brahms to be peculiarly adapted to the more subtle aspects of the relation between orchestra and soloist. The Classical concerto had achieved in Mozart’s mature works for piano and orchestra an unsurpassable degree of organization, and Beethoven had further extended the genre’s scale of design and range of expression. The higher subtleties of such works inevitably escaped many subsequent composers; Felix Mendelssohn had “abolished” the opening orchestral tutti, or ritornello, and had been followed in this regard by many other lesser composers. Brahms saw that this was essentially debilitating and set himself to recover the depth and grandeur of the concerto idea. Like Mozart and Beethoven, he realized that the long introductory passage of the orchestra, far from being superfluous, was the means of sharpening and deepening the complex relationship of orchestra to solo, especially when the time came for recapitulation, where an entirely new and often revelatory distribution of themes, keys, instrumentation, and tensions was possible. Many of Brahms’s contemporaries thought him reactionary on this account, but the result is that Brahms’s concerti have withstood wear and tear far better than many works thought in their day to outshine them.

At the other end of the scale, Brahms was a masterly miniaturist, not only in many of his fine and varied songs but also in his terse, cunningly wrought, intensely personal late piano works. As a song composer, he ranged from the complex and highly organized to the extremely simple, strophic type; his melodic invention is always original and direct, while the accompaniments are deeply evocative without ever being merely picturesque. The late piano music, usually of small dimension but wide implication, is generally expressive of a profound isolation of mind and heart and is therefore not readily approachable, while its apparent overall tone and mood may seem to the superficial ear monotonous. But each individual piece has a quiet and intense quality of its own that renders the occasional outburst of angry passion the more potent; the internal economy and subtlety of these works is extraordinary.

Brahms’s musical range is finally attested by his choral music. His choral writing combines the commonsense solidity of George Frideric Handel’s with a contrapuntal skill worthy of Bach—yet it achieves total independence. A German Requiem, one of the choral masterpieces of its period, shows all his characteristics in this field together with an ability to integrate solo and tutti with the same kind of subtlety as in the concerti. The spaciousness and grandeur of this work’s lines and the power of its construction place Brahms’s underlying melancholy within the scope of a large, objective, nonreligious humane vision. Thus he is distinct from the self-regarding Romantic; his essential quality is perhaps stoicism.

Karl Geiringer Robert Simpson The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Johannes Brahms - German Composer, Symphonies, Lieder | Britannica (2024)
Top Articles
Latest Posts
Recommended Articles
Article information

Author: Moshe Kshlerin

Last Updated:

Views: 5868

Rating: 4.7 / 5 (57 voted)

Reviews: 88% of readers found this page helpful

Author information

Name: Moshe Kshlerin

Birthday: 1994-01-25

Address: Suite 609 315 Lupita Unions, Ronnieburgh, MI 62697

Phone: +2424755286529

Job: District Education Designer

Hobby: Yoga, Gunsmithing, Singing, 3D printing, Nordic skating, Soapmaking, Juggling

Introduction: My name is Moshe Kshlerin, I am a gleaming, attractive, outstanding, pleasant, delightful, outstanding, famous person who loves writing and wants to share my knowledge and understanding with you.