‘Seated at the piano, he began to disclose wonderful regions. There were sonatas, or rather veiled symphonies … His contemporaries salute him on his first journey through the world where wounds may await him, but also palms and laurels.’
(Robert Schumann, October 28th, 1853)

The earliest music on this disc was composed in 1853—the year in which, on May 7th, Johannes Brahms celebrated his 20th birthday—and it was, in many ways, to be the most pivotal year of his life. For the first few months, Brahms continued to live at home in Hamburg with his parents. He was an unknown young pianist, composer and musician who had enjoyed comparatively little public attention and who had never been to any formal institution of musical learning. He left home for the first time just before his birthday, but by the time he was back in Hamburg in time for Christmas he had been thrust into the international spotlight in the most astonishing and unexpected way. There can scarcely be any great composer whose story underwent such a miraculous transformation in so short a time. That journey, which began on April 19th, was to be truly life-changing and would colour every aspect of his subsequent career—for good and bad, happy and sad.

Brahms was born into relative poverty in a slum area of the busy North German Hanseatic port city of Hamburg: he had an older sister and younger brother. It was a loving family unit in which his mother was a home-loving seamstress and his father a jobbing musician, mostly on the horn and double-bass. This itinerant musical background gave young Brahms his first awareness of the profession and he began to learn various stringed instruments under his father’s guidance. But the piano became his passion and his first teacher, Otto Cossel, soon passed him on to the most distinguished local musician, Eduard Marxsen, for tuition in both piano and composition, which Marxsen gave without charging a penny. This was just as well, for the family could never have afforded the lessons; and as early as thirteen, the sensitive young Johannes was sent to earn extra money by playing the piano in various bars or brothels in the dubious shadows of the docks. Attempts have been made over the years to tone down the sheer horror of these ramshackle venues and what happened in them: but it seems pretty likely that Brahms suffered abuse both mental and physical there and never forgot what he saw and felt.

In 1850 Brahms met a colourful young Hungarian refugee-violinist three years older than him, Eduard Remenyi, who’d just arrived in Hamburg and they started giving concerts together. Remenyi was to Brahms as cheese to chalk—flamboyant, rowdy and politically a bit dangerous in dangerous times: the police had him down as one to watch! But it was when, in the spring of 1853, he suggested going on tour as far as Hanover that Brahms accidentally embarked on the biggest adventure of his life. Remenyi had studied in Vienna alongside fellow-Hungarian and child-prodigy Joseph Joachim, but knew that the younger man was far more distinguished as both violinist and musician. Indeed, aged twenty-one in 1852, Joachim had just started in his post as Leader and sometimes Director of the Court Orchestra to the music-loving blind King Georg V of Hanover, who’d ascended the throne in 1851. Having been a protege of Mendelssohn since 1843 and making his London debut in 1844, Joachim was already one of the most influential musicians in Europe—Brahms heard him play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Hamburg as early as 1848. So when Joachim now meets Brahms with Remenyi in Hanover it was the unknown Brahms, at the piano, who made the lasting impression: they were soon to become friends for life, but not quite yet …

To cut a longish story short, Joachim gives Remenyi (and Brahms as his travelling companion) a card to call in Weimar on another great Hungarian Franz Liszt (twenty years their senior), who, having officially retired as the world’s most celebrated pianist, was now holding court with his mistress, the Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein and pursuing his other roles as conductor and composer. Remenyi immediately adored him, but Brahms was lukewarm and—reportedly—fell asleep behind a lavish pot-plant while Liszt played to his admiring devotees: never Brahms and Liszt together they were again, chalk and cheese as personalities, pianists and composers. But Remenyi stayed on to become an acolyte while Brahms returned to look for Joachim who was now enjoying some university life in Göttingen—and it was then and there that they finally became bosom friends. In time, Joachim encouraged Brahms to enjoy a walking-tour down the Rhine via Bonn (homage to Beethoven, naturally) and then to call on the Schumanns—Robert and Clara—in Düsseldorf. With at least two piano sonatas and a scherzo plus some movements of a new sonata in his luggage he duly arrived at Bilker Strasse on September 30th, 1853 and knocked on the door.

When a young girl told him that her parents were out he probably felt that history was repeating itself—in December 1850, when the Schumanns had been in Hamburg, he was persuaded to leave a parcel of his manuscripts for them to see: it was returned unopened from their hotel. But the daughter told him now to come back on the morrow and when Robert then opened the door Brahms was immediately ushered in and invited to play. Before he’d got through a page the composer stopped him, and rushed to get Clara to join them. She wrote that very night: ‘Here is one of those who comes as if sent straight from God. He played us sonatas and scherzos of his own, all of them showing exuberant imagination, depth of feeling and mastery of form. Robert says there was nothing he could tell him to take away or add’. Robert himself was rather more succinct in his diary entry: ‘Visit from Brahms, a genius’. The die seemed cast and the Schumanns virtually adopted the ‘very young man, handsome as a picture, with long blond hair’ as their daughter Marie would describe him. By the end of the year when he went back to spend Christmas with his parents, he not only had three published works to show them but an article by Schumann himself which hailed Brahms as the long-awaited genius: ‘He has come, a young blood at whose cradle graces and heroes mounted guard. His name is Johannes Brahms, from Hamburg, where he has been creating in obscure silence …’ What a Christmas it must have been.

The boldly ambitious and gesturally grand five-movement Sonata No 3 in F minor had been completed during the idyllic October month spent in Düsseldorf with the Schumanns and was almost immediately accepted for publication as his Opus 5 when Brahms took several works to Leipzig in November. A year later it was given its first performance in a recital by Clara in Magdeburg. But between publication and premiere the greatest calamity and tragedy of their lives came to shatter the entire Schumann family and their intimate circle: Robert attempted suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine and then voluntarily entered an asylum at Endenich near Bonn, where he would die two years later in 1856. In the immediate aftermath of this catastrophe Brahms became a saviour to Clara and an active guardian to the family—there were now seven children to support, one only born a matter of months after Schumann’s collapse. But Brahms also threw himself into composition and immediately completed the significant and symbolically-entitled ‘Variations on a Theme of Schumann’, Opus 9. The subject was taken from the fourth of Schumann’s Bunte Blätter, a collection of 14 short piano pieces, published as Opus 99 in 1850, but composed separately at any time between 1834 and 1849. Clara herself had written a set of variations on the same theme in 1853—and she would write of Brahms’s set that he brought each one, as composed, to comfort her in her terrible grief. The Sonata was pre-disaster—the Variations post-disaster: and in them, somehow, Brahms seems to come of age, creatively speaking. The impact of this music is profound and his earlier exuberance is here tamed into a reflective power which is eloquent of a sudden, unlooked for maturity.

What actually happened between Johannes and Clara in those terrible years will forever remain shrouded in mystery and supposition. It seems beyond doubt that they fell deeply in love with each other—but faced with their joint devotion to Robert, both alive and dead—it seems highly improbable that this love was ever consummated in the physical sense and most probable that it remained platonic. For a brief period after Robert’s death, when they were on holiday during the summer of 1856 it does seem as if more was contemplated: what was spoken, however, was never revealed and they seemed to agree that they would live apart thereafter, though remaining the closest of friends. Clara never married again and Brahms never did. For the rest of their lives they corresponded and the relationship was closest in terms of sharing the music that Brahms went on to compose. When Clara heard the glorious String Sextet No 1, Op 18 at its first performance—on October 20th 1860 in Hanover, led by Joachim—she immediately asked Brahms to transcribe the slow movement’s Bach-inspired set of D minor variations for her, and in this he happily obliged. It remained a personal piece and wasn’t published until 1937; but although not part of the official canon it nevertheless was a piece Brahms loved playing in private for special friends until the end of his life.

Our discs now move ahead over thirty years to the spring of 1892. Brahms first visited Vienna in 1862 and for the next seven years he dabbled with living there, finally settling in the Austrian capital in 1869. The rhythm of his life now established itself consistently—Vienna and serious copying and score-preparation in the winter, plenty of concert tours around Europe (never England!) during the autumn and spring seasons and summers spent in a variety of Austrian, Swiss and Italian lake resorts where he did the real work of composing, often when walking in the open air. One of his favourite haunts was the fashionable spa town of Bad Ischl in north-west Austria not far from Salzburg and where the Emperor Franz Joseph and family passed every summer from 1853 until 1914, describing it as his ‘Heaven on Earth’. Brahms first visited Ischl in 1880, returned in 1882 and then spent every summer there between 1889 and 1896. Many works were written in these beautiful surroundings, including the String Quintet No 2, Op 111 in 1890 which he declared would be his last composition, after which he wrote his Will. But hearing the great clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld at Meiningen in 1891 quickly brought him out of retirement for a rich harvest of late chamber works. Then in 1892 he wrote from Ischl to a friend in Vienna asking for a supply of manuscript paper: he was going to compose piano music!

The seven Fantasies, Opus 116 and the three Intermezzi, Opus 117 were composed during this summer of 1892 and, even if, as some have suggested, they might have their origins in earlier sketches they nevertheless represent Brahms’s first works for piano since the two popular Rhapsodies, Opus 79 of 1879. After the big canvas of the Sonata No 3 in 1853 he never returned to the sonata as a form for solo piano, preferring mainly his beloved variations. But now he turned to the miniature—in his own unique formulation—and created in Op 116 a dazzling collection of contrasting gems, designated Capriccio and Intermezzo. Few of these have gained popularity as individual recital items and are perhaps best heard as a coherent set, almost as if building a multi-movement quasi-sonata. The first of Op 117 immediately became a concert favourite and remains, arguably, the most beloved among Brahms’s piano pieces. It is a serene lullaby and leads, in the set, to two further explorations in the same vein. In a rare moment of unlocking his private thoughts he described these as ‘the lullabies of my grief’. In summer 1893 he then wrote two further sets of Piano Pieces—more varied in scope—and dedicated Opus 118 to Clara. She was also deeply fond of the first in the Opus 119 set, which she described as ‘ grey, pearl-veiled and very precious’. It isn’t far-fetched at all to think of these as Brahms’s conscious swan-songs for piano and written with Clara’s private enjoyment in mind above anything else.

Johannes and Clara met for the last time at her home in Frankfurt in the autumn of 1895 when it’s known that she played many of these valedictory pieces to him. This time another daughter, Eugenie, found them sitting together in a moment of deep personal communion. In March 1896 Clara suffered a stroke and died two months later. Brahms was already settled in Bad Ischl and now rushed frantically to Frankfurt, but somehow got on the wrong train and had to go back and board the right one: he missed the funeral and so struggled on for the burial next to Robert in Bonn. It is said that the entire journey took him forty hours and left him in a terrible state. He returned to Ischl a broken man: less than a year later he was dead too and was buried in Vienna not far from Beethoven and Schubert. His funeral was one of the largest Vienna had ever seen and a moving recognition that the city was bidding farewell to the greatest composer of his generation.

Geraint Lewis © 2024