JOHANNES BRAHMS

A Musician's Son from Hamburg

I was born on 7 May 1833 in Hamburg, into a family where music was simply part of earning a living. My father played double bass, horn and flute, and my mother, Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen, was a seamstress who kept the household together. I started piano lessons with Otto Cossel in 1840, and from 1845 to 1848 I studied with Eduard Marxsen, who taught me to take the craft of composing seriously. That training mattered later, because I never trusted a tune until I had worked it over carefully.

A Letter, an Essay and a Lot of Pressure

In autumn 1853 I knocked on Robert Schumann's door in Düsseldorf with a letter of introduction from my friend Joseph Joachim, and I met Clara Schumann there too. On 28 October 1853 Schumann published an essay called "Neue Bahnen", which means "New Paths", and in it he praised me, a twenty-year-old who hadn't published a note. It was wonderful to be praised like that, and it was also a heavy load to carry, because suddenly everyone expected a masterpiece. Schumann was committed to an asylum near Bonn in February 1854 and died in 1856, and my deep, emotional bond with Clara lasted until her death.

My Home Address in Vienna

Vienna was the city where I finally put down roots, in the middle of all that music. When exactly I settled there depends on who you ask, but I know that in December 1871 I took an apartment at Karlsgasse 4. I kept that apartment for the rest of my life, which tells you something about how little I enjoyed moving house. I could walk, think and compose there, and the city never seemed to mind a grumpy man with a big beard.

Twenty-One Years for One Symphony

The work I'm best known for here is my Symphony No 1, and it took me about twenty-one years to finish. It was first performed on 4 November 1876 in Karlsruhe, under the conductor Felix Otto Dessoff. You can hear the long struggle in the music, which begins with a dark, pounding weight and slowly works its way toward a big, bright, confident tune. After that the other symphonies came much more easily, with the Second in 1877, the Third in 1883 and the Fourth in 1885.

The Ghost of Beethoven and My Bonfire

Writing symphonies in those days meant living in Beethoven's shadow, and I felt that shadow every time I picked up a pen. When Hans von Bülow called my First Symphony "Beethoven's Tenth", I was annoyed, because I didn't want to be compared with anybody. I was just as hard on myself in other ways: I claimed that I had destroyed twenty string quartets before I let my first one be published. I also never married, and I never wrote an opera, so you could say I kept my life as tidy as my scores.

Slowing Down, Not Stopping

In 1889 my hometown of Hamburg made me an honorary citizen, which pleased me more than I let on. By then I was a famous man, and I could look back on my career with some calm. I died in Vienna on 3 April 1897, aged 63, of pancreatic and liver cancer. I was far from the shy young man who had once knocked on Schumann's door, but I was still the same person who wanted every note to be right.

What I Left on the Shelf

After I was gone, people kept playing my music, and they still do today. Many composers were chasing new and startling sounds in my time, and I showed that the old forms could still hold a great deal of feeling. I took great care over structure and craft, and I think you can still hear that care. If a young composer learns from that patience, then my bonfire of unpublished pieces wasn't wasted.

A Gift for the Listener

What I want to give you is some warmth, and a bit of room to think. You don't need to know any music theory to listen to my First Symphony; you only need to be willing to follow a long journey. Let the dark opening unsettle you, and let the bright melody near the end feel like stepping out into daylight. If you come away feeling a little braver than before, then I did my job.