Young Brahms… before the Symphonies.

The  Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you.

And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for this one it is… the music of the young Johannes Brahms. I’m going to play you excepts from a handful of works he wrote between the ages of 25 and 35.

But before that I’m going to go off on a quick tangent about musical taste for a moment. Mine specifically… because I’m not going to assume that anyone shares my failings but I have blind spots when it comes to some composers and their works. And Brahms has been one of them. Until quite recently I had decided Brahm was not for me. And I really can’t recall why… though  maybe as a kid I sat through a long symphony or concerto that I couldn’t find a way into… got restless and bored… and half-consciously decided ‘this was not for me’. But, however it happened, Brahms slid a fair way down the list of people to whom I gave listening time. Now fortunately that has changed a little over the years, and preparing this show has been a chance to really immerse myself in some of his music and there is much that is amazing and rewarding… as friends of course had been telling me for some time. Just call me a slow learner.

I’m tempted to say something more about blind spots and known unknowns and hidden quadrants but that would be for a very small audience and it might be better to get to the music. And I’ll save a bit of Brahms’ biography for later in the show.

I’m going to start with the first section of his 1^st Piano Concerto completed when he was just 25. It was an extraordinary compositional leap for someone who up to that point had essentially composed songs and music for solo piano.

And it is now one of the most performed works for piano and orchestra ever written. But it did not begin life that way. In fact at the first performance in Hanover in 1859 there was much hissing and booing... and practically no clapping. Which must have been pretty confronting for the young Brahms who as well as composing it, played the piano part. A performance in Leipzig five days later was even less successful, if that can be imagined.

The piece would be performed sporadically over the next few years but would only find real success in the early 1880s… over two decades after its first performance.

Why was the initial reception so hostile? Well, there were a few reasons but perhaps the most compelling explanation is that it was a very long concerto. Performances of all three sections can get up to 45 minutes duration. This was at the time, and probably remains, one of the longest concertos ever written. But then again this was the era of very long concerts… three to four hours of music in an evening was not unusual so there must have been something more… and I’d argue it was perhaps just how tough it almost always is to perform ‘new’ music.

As the composer and Brahms biographer Jan Swafford points out, the public expected from concertos: "virtuosic brilliance, dazzling cadenzas, not too many minor keys, and not too tragic." Brahms gave them a 45-50 minute symphonic giant.

Ok. Here’s the music in question. Just the first section of Johannes Brahms 1^st concerto for piano and orchestra. It is about 22 minutes long and in this performance the piano is played by Rudolf Serkin and the Cleveland Orchestra is conducted by George Szell. This is really fantastic dramatic music from the very opening and the piano is just electrifying. I really hope you enjoy it.

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That was the first section of Johannes Brahms 1^st concerto for piano and orchestra. The piano was played by Rudolf Serkin and the Cleveland Orchestra was conducted by George Szell.

Ok. A little bit of biography for Brahms. He was born in 1833. His mother, Christiane, was a seamstress and his father, Johann Jacob, was a freelance musician… a double bass player and a horn player in Hamburg. There was not a lot of money in this work and writers describe the family as ‘the working poor’. Not destitute but not far from it. Johann Jakob gave Johannes his first musical training, and then the boy began formal piano lessons at age seven. By his early teens, he was helping support the family by playing piano in taverns and dance halls along Hamburg’s colourful waterfront.

By his 20s he was working as a conductor and a music teacher and, occasionally, a pianist. Crucially, in 1853 he was introduced to the composers Robert and Clara Schumann. They were respectively 23 and 14 years older than Brahms and he was sort of musically adopted by them. The Schumanns’ support was critical to Brahms confidence and his first successes as a composer came with their assistance. But severe mental illness would come to afflict Robert Schumann leading to his death in an asylum only three years the first meeting with Brahms. Critics tend to think that this traumatic time fed into the Piano Concerto I just played you a section from… Brahms had started it the year he met the Schumanns and completed it two years after Robert’s death.

Ok. The next piece I want to play you is from Brahms first String Sextet… that is a work for two violins, two violas and two cellos. Following the disaster of the First Piano Concerto's Leipzig premiere, the Sextet became Brahms's first work to receive enthusiastic public approval. It premiered in Hanover in 1860, and was published in 1862. The work established the string sextet as a significant chamber music form—though the composers Boccherini and Spohr had written earlier examples, Brahms essentially reinvented the genre. The Sextet has remained a cornerstone of the chamber music repertoire, beloved for its sunny disposition and melodic richness.

Here is the Amadeus Quartet joined by William Pleeth and Martin Lovett with the opening section of Brahms 1^st String Sextet. . It is about twelve minutes long.

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That was the Amadeus Quartet joined by William Pleeth and Martin Lovett with the opening section of Johannes Brahms first String Sextet.

Just before we get to some more music I want to say a hello to the people listening to the podcast in Japan, South Korea, Germany and Taiwan. One of the features of the hosting platform I use is a geographical breakdown of where people are listening. When I started the show back in February, I think it is fair to say that the listeners were somehow connected to friends I could pressure into spreading the news and from that I found a small audience in the US, the UK, Spain, Austria, New Zealand and Australia. But I’m not sure that I have any listening leverage in Japan, South Korea, Germany or Taiwan… I am genuinely delighted people are finding the show and, I very much hope, enjoying it. So, I just wanted to say thank you and welcome. And that of course goes to everyone out listening there… wherever you are.

Back to the music. I mentioned Clara Schumann a little earlier and I just want to touch on the incredibly important role she played in Johannes Brahms life. When they met she was already an established composer and successful concert pianist. In the years after Robert Schumann’s death she would champion Brahms work on the stage and he in turn would compose many pieces for her. They would remain dear friends for the rest of their lives and it is hard to envisage Brahms achieving what he did without her lifelong creative support.

In 1861 in honour of Clara’s 42^nd birthday Brahms, then 28, presented her, his ‘beloved friend’, with his ‘Variations on a Theme by Handel’ for Piano. It is in 26 sections… It starts with the theme, taken from a Georg Friedrich Handel Harpsichord sonata written in the early 1700s and then Brahms uses that material in what Claude described for me as “perhaps the finest synthesis of Baroque formal discipline with Romantic expressive depth in the piano literature”. I’m just going to play you the theme and then  selection of the variations and the final Fugue. Here is the pianist Anatol Ugorski. Johannes Brahms ‘Variations on a theme by Handel’.

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That was Anatol Ugorski playing a selection from Brahms’ ‘Variations on a theme by Handel’.

And in case you are curious I want to let you know that the next episodes of ‘Classical For Everyone’ will be a Sunday Night Special featuring Philip Glass out in a couple of days and then what I’m calling ‘Forgotten Vivaldi’ in about a week’s time.

There’s already been perhaps too much talking in this week’s episode featuring the music of the young Johannes Brahms so I am going to leap into the next piece of music. Probably Brahms most popular piece of music for small spaces or ‘chamber music’ for fans of the term… his Piano Quintet from 1864. Here again is the Amadeus Quartet and they are joined by the pianist Christoph Eschenbach with the third section. It is about seven minutes long.

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That was the Amadeus Quartet joined by the pianist Christoph Eschenbach with the third section of Brahms Piano Quintet.

So what was Brahms actually doing to support himself in these years between the ages of 25 and 35?. Well, he was perhaps a good example of how the role of a composer was radically changing through the nineteenth century. Simplifying it, if you think of Haydn as the employee of a Prince and Beethoven as receiving annuities from aristocrats; Brahms was making a sort of middle class freelance living. No one thing gave him permanence or stability. There would be some conducting work with a small orchestra in the court at the city of Detmold, he would receive some royalties from the publication of his piano music, and he’d give some piano performances… and more often than not missing out on positions he applied for. But in 1863 he was appointed conductor of the Vienna Singing Academy… where he would do an enormous amount to resurrect the choral works of J S Bach, Mendelssohn and Beethoven. And he would later write some extraordinary choral music of his own. But more about that in a moment. Brahms would be based in Vienna… the centre of the German speaking musical world… for the rest of his life.

Ok, some more music. The combination of Natural Horn, Piano and Violin is an unusual one and there is a moving reason why Brahms chose to write a work for that group of instruments in 1865. He wrote his Horn Trio during a retreat near Baden-Baden in Germany's Black Forest, following the death of his mother Christiane from a stroke in February.

He had received an urgent telegram from his brother but arrived too late to say goodbye—a loss that profoundly affected him. Brahms told a friend that the opening theme came to him "on wooded heights among fir trees" during walks in the forest. The work was written specifically for the three instruments Brahms had learned as a young man, taught by his father who was a professional horn player. Brahms drew on a theme he'd composed twelve years earlier and near the end of the section I am going to play you, he incorporated a German folk song his mother had sung to him.

Here are Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano; Itzhak Perlman, violin; and Barry Tuckwell, horn, with the third section of Brahms Horn Trio. It is about 7 minutes long.

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That was Vladimir Ashkenazy, piano; Itzhak Perlman, violin; and Barry Tuckwell, horn, with the third section of Brahms Horn Trio.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. I have another couple of pieces coming up but before I get to them I want to give you a little information that I hope you find useful…If you would like to get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net. And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes.

I hope you have enjoyed this episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’ on the music of the young Johannes Brahms.  If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts.. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright, to finish this episode I have I have some choral music… specifically the opening of his ‘A German Requiem’ completed in 1868 when Brahms was 35. The title itself suggests something about the innovative nature of this work. Requiems generally took as their texts the Latin service for the dead. And they were quite specifically written for performance as part of a religious service and the focus was on the deceased… essentially one very long prayer for their peace and rest in the afterlife. The word ‘requiem’ means… ‘rest in peace’.

But Brahms wrote his own text, adapting it from the Lutheran bible and shifted the focus to the living… to those left behind. The German Requiem begins with the words… ‘Selig sind, die da Leid tragen’… which translate as ‘Blessed are they, those who bear suffering’. He doesn’t exclude care for the dead but there is more solace for the survivors. His intention was also for it to be a work for the concert hall. For its day the work is also surprisingly lacking in specific Christian iconography. A deity is sung to but in very general terms.

Here is the opening section of Johannes Brahms ‘A German Requiem’. It is about 10 minutes long and in this performance Otto Klemperer conducts the Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra.

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That was the opening section of Brahms ‘A German Requiem’. Otto Klemperer conducted the Philharmonia Chorus and Orchestra.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’.