Johannes Brahms

The Teaching Company
In both his life and his music, Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a man of contrasts.
He composed serious Teutonic music and joyful dance music.
He was miserly with himself and exceedingly generous with family and associates.
He was kind to working people and known for his biting, malicious wit in artistic and aristocratic circles.
No one's idea of an easy man to know, Brahms destroyed a good deal of his own work and almost all of his lifetime's correspondence, in later years even collecting his letters from friends so that he could consign them to the flames.
This course links the complexities of Brahms the man with the electrifying music of Brahms the composer through biographical information and musical commentary.
Brahms had vowed early in life to be lonely but free. He never married, owned a home, held a job for more than a few years, or took on a commissioned piece.
In art, he showed a similar independence of spirit. He believed in traditional musical genres and forms as challenges, not as hindrances to expressive freedom but as healthy sources of stimulation for his awesome artistic powers.
Unlike, for example, Beethoven, Brahms did not reinvent his art repeatedly in response to personal emotional crises, but rather found his essential compositional voice while in his mid-20s, and developed it in more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary fashion.