Maturity and fame of Johannes Brahms

By the 1870s Brahms was writing significant chamber works and was moving with great deliberation along the path to purely orchestral composition. In 1873 he offered the masterly orchestral version of his Variations on a Theme by Haydn. After this experiment, which even the self-critical Brahms had to consider completely successful, he felt ready to embark on the completion of his Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. This magnificent work was completed in 1876 and first heard in the same year. Now that the composer had proved to himself his full command of the symphonic idiom, within the next year he produced his Symphony No. 2 in D Major (1877). This is a serene and idyllic work, avoiding the heroic pathos of Symphony No. 1. He let six years elapse before his Symphony No. 3 in F Major (1883). In its first three movements this work too appears to be a comparatively calm and serene composition—until the finale, which presents a gigantic conflict of elemental forces. Again after only one year, Brahms’s last symphony, No. 4 in E Minor (1884–85), was begun. This work may well have been inspired by the ancient Greek tragedies of Sophocles that Brahms had been reading at the time. The symphony’s most important movement is once more the finale. Brahms took a simple theme he found in J.S. Bach’s Cantata No. 150 and developed it in a set of 30 highly intricate variations, but the technical skill displayed here is as nothing compared with the clarity of thought and the intensity of feeling.

Gradually Brahms’s renown spread beyond Germany and Austria. Switzerland and the Netherlands showed true appreciation of his art, and Brahms’s concert tours to these countries as well as to Hungary and Poland won great acclaim. The University of Breslau (now the University of Wrocław, Poland) conferred an honorary degree on him in 1879. The composer thanked the university by writing the Academic Festival Overture (1881) based on various German student songs. Among his other orchestral works at this time were the Violin Concerto in D Major (1878) and the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major (1881).

By now Brahms’s contemporaries were keenly aware of the outstanding significance of his works, and people spoke of the “three great Bs” (meaning Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms), to whom they accorded the same rank of eminence. Yet there was a sizable circle of musicians who did not admit Brahms’s greatness. Fervent admirers of the avant-garde composers of the day, most notably Liszt and Wagner, looked down on Brahms’s contributions as too old-fashioned and inexpressive.

Brahms remained in Vienna for the rest of his life. He resigned as director of the Society of Friends of Music in 1875, and from then on devoted his life almost solely to composition. When he went on concert tours, he conducted or performed (on the piano) only his own works. He maintained a few close personal friendships and remained a lifelong bachelor. He spent his summers traveling in Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. During these years Brahms composed the boldly conceived Double Concerto in A Minor (1887) for violin and cello, the powerful Piano Trio No. 3 in C Minor (1886), and the Violin Sonata in D Minor (1886–88). He also completed the radiantly joyous first String Quintet in F Major (1882) and the energetic second String Quintet in G Major (1890).

Final years

In 1891 Brahms was inspired to write chamber music for the clarinet owing to his acquaintance with an outstanding clarinetist, Richard Mühlfeld, whom he had heard perform some months before. With Mühlfeld in mind, Brahms wrote his Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (1891); the great Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (1891); and two Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano (1894). These works are perfect in structure and beautifully adapted to the potentialities of the wind instrument.

In 1896 Brahms completed his Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), for bass voice and piano, on texts from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, a pessimistic work dealing with the vanity of all earthly things and welcoming death as the healer of pain and weariness. The conception of this work arose from Brahms’s thoughts of Clara Schumann, whose physical condition had gravely deteriorated. On May 20, 1896, Clara died, and soon afterward Brahms himself was compelled to seek medical treatment, in the course of which his liver was discovered to be seriously diseased. He appeared for the last time at a concert in March 1897, and in Vienna, in April 1897, he died of cancer.