The brilliant backstreet boy

the Brahms grew up among poor, performing in drinking a celebrity dens – and ended up

JOHANNES BRAHMS

BORN 7 May 1833, Hamburg, Germany. DIED 3 April 1897, aged 63, Vienna, Austria.

The complex romantic life of Johannes Brahms – falling in love with unsuitable women and their daughters – can overshadow his legacy as a great composer. During his lifetime, he was ranked as the third great German ‘B’ alongside Bach and Beethoven, though he attracted critics and enemies, not helped by the fact he could be prickly and argumentative. Tchaikovsky called him a ‘talentless b ***** d’.

In recent decades he has fallen slightly out of fashion, compared with the other Bs. But the huge variety of his work – choral pieces, songs, a requiem, piano concertos, chamber music and symphonies – means he is still regarded as one of the finest composers of the 19th century. His music manages to be both traditional and innovative.

He was born in Hamburg in a poor neighbourhood, where cholera outbreaks were frequent. His father was a jobbing musician who played his trumpet and double bass in the music halls and drinking dens of Hamburg. As a child Johannes was a talented pianist who grew up performing in these seedy venues; by his teens he had graduated to concert halls and was scratching a living from performing in Hamburg and touring nearby towns. His lucky break came, aged 20, when he met Joseph Joachim, a violin prodigy based in Hanover.

Joachim, two years older than Brahms and very successful, declared, ‘His compositions already betoken such power as I have seen in no other musician of his age’. Joachim wrote to Robert Schumann, then one of Germany’s leading composers, urging him to meet the young Brahms.

In 1853, Brahms went to Dusseldorf to pay homage to Schumann. At this stage, Brahms was a far cry from the portly, heavily-bearded man he was to become. It is this image of the grand old man of German music, with bushy whiskers, that many of us have of Brahms, mostly because he was photographed this way often in the 1890s. But as a young man he was dashing, clean-shaven and devilishly handsome, with a mane of blond hair. No wonder Schumann’s wife, Clara, then aged 34, is said to have fallen in love with him. In 1854, after Schumann attempted suicide during a bout of mental illness and took himself off to an asylum, Brahms moved into the Schumann house to help Clara with the household accounts and look after the seven surviving Schumann children, while Clara, a pianist, performed to earn money.

Shortly after, he wrote to his friend Joachim saying he loved Clara and: ‘I am under her spell. I often must restrain myself forcibly from just quietly putting my arms around her.’

After Schumann died in 1856, Clara returned the deep affection, writing intense love letters. But nearly all biographers believe their love was platonic and never went further than ardent letters. Brahms would give his manuscripts to Clara for comment before he sent them off to his musical publisher.

Clara for her part became intensely jealous when Brahms would fall for another woman, which he did often – including, astonishingly, Julie, one of her own daughters.

Brahms admired Julie from afar, but he did tell her mother that he loved her daughter, writing a deeply poignant choral and orchestral work, Alto Rhapsody, which he presented to Clara on the day Julie married her husband. Brahms himself never married, though he was a user of prostitutes.

By the 1860s, he had moved to Vienna where, with a bust of Beethoven in his study and a picture of Bach above his bed, he started to write music that paid homage to the past greats while trying to forge a new sound. It took him 15 years to write his first symphony, endlessly ripping works up and starting over. When it premiered in 1876, the conductor Hans von Bulow called it ‘Beethoven’s Tenth’, so close was it to the German master’s Ninth Symphony, written 50 years before.

Other works include his Violin Concerto In D Major, dedicated to Joachim, who premiered the work in 1878, another piece in homage to Beethoven. Brahms’s German

Requiem, completed in 1868, was considered groundbreaking – taking the classical Latin Mass and making it quintessentially German. The text is taken from the German Lutheran Bible but misses any mention of Christ (Brahms was agnostic), which annoyed the clergy at Bremen Cathedral where it was premiered. But it was a big hit, cementing Brahms’s finances and securing his celebrity.

He died in 1897, a year after Clara Schumann, to whom he remained close until the end.