Friday Face 5/7!

It’s a special Friday Face this week! Today, May 7, 2021, marks the 188th anniversary of composer Johannes Brahms! birth. Born in Hamburg, Germany, to a free-lance musician and devoted mother, as a teenager he played piano in the St. Pauli Quarter (a “Red Light District) to help pay the family’s bills. Some, most notably his latest biographer, Jan Swafford, credits this “brutal dichotomy between the squalor of his home… and the intensity of his studies” with the enigmatic persona that we know as Johannes Brahms. In 1853, Robert Schumann wrote in New Paths ” He bore all of the outward signs that proclaim to us, “This is one of the elect.” Brahms became the champion of those conservative music lovers who harkened back to the Classical forms of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, as opposed the the “New Music” of Franz Liszt.

Brahms definitely internalized the pressure of being “one of the elect”. Listen to the opening of his Symphony No. 1, with the pounding of the timpani, as if he is shaking his fist at the pressure he feels placed upon him by the expectations of the past, and all of his contemporaries’ attachment to it, as an opening to his symphonic debut.

Brahms eventually settled in Vienna, the music capital of Europe. He stayed close to his family, writing the German Requiem for his mother’s passing in 1868. Try forwarding to minute 43:18 for an especially beautiful soprano solo in “Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit”. (Now you have sadness).

Brahms did not need a gigantic force of chorus, soloists and orchestra to create passionate, ferocious music. His Violin Sonatas, especially when played by Anne Sophie Mutter and Lambert Orkis, are phenomenal expressions of form, lushness and yearning.

To learn more about Johannes Brahms, be sure to check out this link here. Also, watch the video below to hear more of Brahms works.