The Brahms Biography: A Composer By Birth
The Brahms Biography: A Composer by Birth
People are created with certain abilities to enable them to be fantastic in certain areas. If one has steady hands and a way with wood his best area would be a carpenter. If one loved helping others when sick and did not mind bubbling blood she might be a best nurse. If one loved Romantic music and loved to prolifically compose brilliant compositions that person would want with the utmost desire to be another Johannes Brahms.
Now, Johannes Brahms was a German musician born in Hamburg on May 7, 1833. He was born to a family of a mother, a father, and two siblings who also acquired Johann somewhere in their name. Brahms did not have the simplest upbringing having to perform at age 13 in …show more content…
the lowest sorts of sailors’ dance halls, taverns, and restaurants to help with financial problems.
In 1853, Brahms was introduced to the renowned German composer and music critic Robert Schumann. The two men quickly grew close, with Schumann seeing in his younger friend great hope for the future of music; he dubbed Brahms a genius and praised the "young eagle" publicly in a famous article. The kind words quickly made the young composer a known entity in the music world; which began the beginning of a success career for Brahms during in his lifetime.
By the 1870s, Brahms was writing significant chamber works and was moving with great deliberation along the path to purely orchestral composition.
In 1873 he offered the masterly orchestral version of his Variations on a Theme by Haydn. After this experiment, which even the self-critical Brahms had to consider completely successful, he felt ready to embark on the completion of his Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. This magnificent work was completed in 1876 and first heard in the same year. Now that the composer had proved to himself his full command of the symphonic idiom, within the next year he produced his Symphony No. 2 in D Major (1877). This is a serene and idyllic work, avoiding the heroic pathos of Symphony No. 1. He let six years elapse before his Symphony No. 3 in F Major (1883). In its first three movements, this work too appears to be a comparatively calm and serene composition until the finale, which presents a gigantic conflict of elemental forces. Again after only one year, Brahms’s last symphony, No. 4 in E Minor (1884–85), was begun. This work may well have been inspired by the ancient Greek tragedies of Sophocles that Brahms had been reading about at the time. The symphony’s most important movement is once more the finale. Brahms took a simple theme he found in J.S. Bach’s Cantata No. 150 and developed it in a set of 30 highly intricate variations, but the technical skill displayed is nothing compared to the clarity of thought and the intensity of …show more content…
feeling.
Johannes Brahms lived an amazingly productive sixty-four years on earth; creating masterpiece after masterpiece for the public to enjoy.
One might find it odd that a “romantic” musician like Brahms never found the women to marry or is it he never married the women he found. Nonetheless, Brahms apparently did not need a wife to sky rocket to musical success. He died on April 3, 1897, in Vienna due to what is said to be complications with cancer. One must think, sitting down and writing an entire tremendous composition would be strenuous and tedious work but Brahms said, “It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.” That was just the kind of man he was, though; a composer by
birth.
Works Cited
Pogue, David, and Scott Speck. Classical Music for Dummies. Foster City: IDG Books Worldwide, 1997. Print.
Smith, Jane and Betty Carlson. The Gift of Music. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1995. Print.
Sherman, Robert and Philip Seldon. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Classical Music. New York City: Alpha Books, 1997. Print.
"Johannes Brahms." 2014. The Biography Channel website. Mar 12 2014, 11:37 http://www.biography.com/people/johannes-brahms-9223886.
"Johannes Brahms". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 12 Mar. 2014
.
People are created with certain abilities to enable them to be fantastic in certain areas. If one has steady hands and a way with wood his best area would be a carpenter. If one loved helping others when sick and did not mind bubbling blood she might be a best nurse. If one loved Romantic music and loved to prolifically compose brilliant compositions that person would want with the utmost desire to be another Johannes Brahms.
Now, Johannes Brahms was a German musician born in Hamburg on May 7, 1833. He was born to a family of a mother, a father, and two siblings who also acquired Johann somewhere in their name. Brahms did not have the simplest upbringing having to perform at age 13 in …show more content…
the lowest sorts of sailors’ dance halls, taverns, and restaurants to help with financial problems.
In 1853, Brahms was introduced to the renowned German composer and music critic Robert Schumann. The two men quickly grew close, with Schumann seeing in his younger friend great hope for the future of music; he dubbed Brahms a genius and praised the "young eagle" publicly in a famous article. The kind words quickly made the young composer a known entity in the music world; which began the beginning of a success career for Brahms during in his lifetime.
By the 1870s, Brahms was writing significant chamber works and was moving with great deliberation along the path to purely orchestral composition.
In 1873 he offered the masterly orchestral version of his Variations on a Theme by Haydn. After this experiment, which even the self-critical Brahms had to consider completely successful, he felt ready to embark on the completion of his Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. This magnificent work was completed in 1876 and first heard in the same year. Now that the composer had proved to himself his full command of the symphonic idiom, within the next year he produced his Symphony No. 2 in D Major (1877). This is a serene and idyllic work, avoiding the heroic pathos of Symphony No. 1. He let six years elapse before his Symphony No. 3 in F Major (1883). In its first three movements, this work too appears to be a comparatively calm and serene composition until the finale, which presents a gigantic conflict of elemental forces. Again after only one year, Brahms’s last symphony, No. 4 in E Minor (1884–85), was begun. This work may well have been inspired by the ancient Greek tragedies of Sophocles that Brahms had been reading about at the time. The symphony’s most important movement is once more the finale. Brahms took a simple theme he found in J.S. Bach’s Cantata No. 150 and developed it in a set of 30 highly intricate variations, but the technical skill displayed is nothing compared to the clarity of thought and the intensity of …show more content…
feeling.
Johannes Brahms lived an amazingly productive sixty-four years on earth; creating masterpiece after masterpiece for the public to enjoy.
One might find it odd that a “romantic” musician like Brahms never found the women to marry or is it he never married the women he found. Nonetheless, Brahms apparently did not need a wife to sky rocket to musical success. He died on April 3, 1897, in Vienna due to what is said to be complications with cancer. One must think, sitting down and writing an entire tremendous composition would be strenuous and tedious work but Brahms said, “It is not hard to compose, but what is fabulously hard is to leave the superfluous notes under the table.” That was just the kind of man he was, though; a composer by
birth.
Works Cited
Pogue, David, and Scott Speck. Classical Music for Dummies. Foster City: IDG Books Worldwide, 1997. Print.
Smith, Jane and Betty Carlson. The Gift of Music. Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1995. Print.
Sherman, Robert and Philip Seldon. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Classical Music. New York City: Alpha Books, 1997. Print.
"Johannes Brahms." 2014. The Biography Channel website. Mar 12 2014, 11:37 http://www.biography.com/people/johannes-brahms-9223886.
"Johannes Brahms". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2014. Web. 12 Mar. 2014
.