Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms

1833-1897

German composer. Born on May 7, 1833 in Hamburg into a family of professional musicians. His father, John Jacques, was able to play a variety of orchestral instruments. Influenced by his father, Brahms loved music since he was a child. He learned violin, cello and French horn from his father, and embarked on the path of music career under his father's guidance. Due to family poverty, he did not attend music school. When he was 13 years old, he worked as an accompanist in a hotel to help his father increase the family income. Forced to make a living, he began to try composing during this period and wrote more than 150 dance music, marches and orchestral arrangements. This honed his writing skills and laid the foundation for his later music creation.

When Brahms was fourteen or five years old, he was able to hold piano solo concerts and began an independent life with music as a career. In 1853, the 20-year-old Brahms left his hometown of Hamburg and traveled and performed throughout Europe with the violinist Remeni. During his travels, he met the Hungarian violinist Joachim, Liszt in Weimar, and Schumann in Dusseldo. This had an important impact on his subsequent creations. He received a lot of help from these senior musicians. Schumann discovered Brahms' amazing musical genius and enthusiastically introduced this talented young musician to the public.

In 1858, Brahms served as a choral conductor in the city of Dietmold and was exposed to choral works of different eras and styles, which later prepared him for the creation of large-scale vocal works (such as "Mezzo-Soprano Rhapsody"). "and "German Requiem", etc.) to lay a solid foundation. In the 1960s, he settled in Vienna, making the music center of Europe his second home. In the first few years in Vienna, he was mainly busy with some music performance activities. He once conducted performances of Bach's "Passion" and Mozart's "Requiem". Later he concentrated on composing music.

Brahms created a large number of works throughout his life, involving almost every field of musical form. The most representative works include four symphonies, two piano concertos, one violin concerto, one Duo Concerto for Violin and Cello, several orchestral overtures, more than twenty Hungarian dances, the "German Requiem" and much chamber music. It can basically be divided into several stages: the early creation from 1848 to 1860 shows a close connection with German folk songs and North German narrative poems. Among them, those violent works including piano sonatas are optimistic, stubborn, brave, and powerful. He began to study folk songs in the 1960s, using chamber music, lyric songs and choruses to express his feelings about the personal spiritual world. The 1970s and 1980s were a mature and prosperous period for creation. He came out of isolation and devoted himself to symphony creation that could most closely contact the audience. His four symphonies, "Violin Concerto", "Second Piano Concerto", "Haydn's Theme" Variations" and two overtures are all works from this period. After 1889, he returned to himself in his later years and was limited to the creation of some motets and chamber music works, reflecting the plaintive mood of loneliness and disappointment.

In the middle of the 19th century, the new romantic artistic trend began to flourish. Brahms tended to classicism and worked hard to maintain and inherit the Beethoven-style classical music tradition. Get nutrition from it. His works are profoundly ideological, solemn in style, rich in harmonies and orchestration techniques, magnificent in symphonies, and elegant in lyrical sketches. Because of his outstanding inheritance and development of German and Austrian classical music, he is considered to be the most outstanding composer of the classical music school in Germany in the second half of the 19th century. In the history of music, he is often ranked alongside Bach and Beethoven, and is called the "Three Bs" in the history of modern music development.