Johannes brahms wife

Johannes Brahms

(1833-1897)

Who Was Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was the great master of symphonic and sonata style in the second half of the 19th century. He can be viewed as the protagonist of the Classical tradition of Joseph Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.

Early Years

Widely considered one of the 19th century's greatest composers and one of the leading musicians of the Romantic era, Johannes Brahms was born May 7, 1833, in Hamburg, Germany.

He was the second of Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen and Johann Jakob Brahms' three children. Music was introduced to his life at an early age. His father was a double bassist in the Hamburg Philharmonic Society, and the young Brahms began playing piano at the age of seven.

By the time he was a teenager, Brahms was already an accomplished musician, and he used his talent to earn money at local inns, in brothels and along the city's docks to ease his family's often tight financial conditions.

In 1853 Brahms was introduced to the renowned German composer and music critic Robert Schumann. The two men quickly grew close, with Schu

Johannes Brahms

German composer and pianist (1833–1897)

"Brahms" redirects here. For other uses, see Brahms (disambiguation).

Johannes Brahms

Brahms in 1889

Born(1833-05-07)7 May 1833

Hamburg

Died3 April 1897(1897-04-03) (aged 63)

Vienna

Occupations
WorksList of compositions

Johannes Brahms (; German:[joˈhanəsˈbʁaːms]; 7 May 1833 – 3 April 1897) was a German composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. His music is noted for its rhythmic vitality and freer treatment of dissonance, often set within studied yet expressive contrapuntal textures. He adapted the traditional structures and techniques of a wide historical range of earlier composers. His œuvre includes four symphonies, four concertos, a Requiem, much chamber music, and hundreds of folk-song arrangements and Lieder, among other works for symphony orchestra, piano, organ, and choir.

Born to a musical family in Hamburg, Brahms began composing and concertizing locally in his youth. He toured Central Europe as a pianist in his adulthood,

Biography

Brahms is a composer of two faces: he simultaneously looks back to the musical past and gazes forward into its future. Reviving and enlarging the classical principles of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, his music was once dismissed as conservative, a reaction against the ‘new music’ of Liszt and Wagner. Yet his astonishing powers of motivic development and variation would eventually influence Schoenberg. Brahms blended Beethovenian dynamism, Schubertian lyricism, a love of German folk song and the strict contrapuntal mastery of the Baroque into a synthesis of phenomenal richness. His example was as vital as Wagner’s in the creation of the music of the modern era. A child of the Romantic era, Brahms combined the movement’s key principles of Sturm und Drang (‘Storm and Stress’) with an understanding of Classical structure. He had a deep knowledge of Baroque style – particularly the works of Schütz, Gabrieli and Handel – a rare interest for a composer of this period, and a profound respect for tradition. In 1895 a festival in the German town of Meiningen was devoted to ‘the th

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