There is no question but that Brahms attracted attention early and among the most demanding listeners.
Once Brahms was set up as Wagner's adversary, he drew vilification or adoration according to allegiance.
Maestro ALSOP: But can you play the opening of--at least the opening of Brahms' 1st Symphony?
Brahms' complete lack of hysteria, even when expressing this Herculean struggle, is extremely appealing to me.
How Brahms is able to depict nature in the horn calls, that's quite unique, I think.
WSJ: The Importance of Second Chances | Yefim Bronfman | Cultural Conversation by David Mermelstein
For him this meant the giants of the German tradition: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms.
Brahms's other great female confidante, Lisl von Herzogenberg, is also brought into sharper focus.
The two fanatical hikers saw each other in several Alpine summers before Brahms's death.
Though Mr Swafford (unlike Mr Carr) gives a few musical examples, he writes mostly about Brahms's life.
Jan Swafford's slablike life of Brahms is more discursive than Mr Carr's book but just as readable.
To chase away rats, Nathaniel had two sticks on which he had scrawled the names Beethoven and Brahms.
Brahms takes us with him on that journey from the depths to the heights in his first symphony.
But Brahms's great late piano pieces and clarinet works, written in his 60s, show the opposite of decline.
The joint ensemble performed works including Brahms's Symphony No 1 and Bizet's Carmen.
Somehow, Brahms was always mature in his writing, even when he was young.
WSJ: The Importance of Second Chances | Yefim Bronfman | Cultural Conversation by David Mermelstein
Mr Swafford is good on the social and political context of Brahms's life.
The mystery surrounding Brahms' personal life which appears to have been pretty much a disaster only adds to his appeal and allure.
To Brahms, this misbegotten programme was mere indulgence, a recipe for chaos.
It may strike an eerie note that a computer could become a more prodigious composer than Mozart, Haydn, Brahms and Beethoven combined.
Yet by 1850 old music was being canonised with or without Brahms.
But Brahms does express emotions, deep and genuine, and even ecstasies, which his formal strategies do not simply control but sustain and maximise.
To me this is Brahms asserting his conviction that he must write this symphony, even though everyone had virtually given up on him.
Brahms, the conservative scholar and Bach-worshipper, is often blamed for contributing to the museum culture which classical music was becoming even in his day.
The contrast amorous and musical with Wagner could not be greater: the wild ecstasies of the love duet by Tristan and Isolde has no parallel in Brahms.
Is that any different, really, than Mozart , who would poke fun at the same form, or Brahms or Schubert or Mahler?
Precisely those qualities, and the integrity which engendered them, won Brahms the esteem of one of the most famous 20th-century progressives, Arnold Schoenberg, the originator of serialism.
Yet it seems typical of the U.S. attitude toward its own culture that the harmonica was dismissed here until Adler proved it could handle Debussy and Brahms.
Even readers unfamiliar with Western classical arrangements can't help but be drawn into the excitement of the "headlong happiness" of Haydn or the missing "melodicity" of Brahms.
The chapter on the Vienna that Brahms reached in the 1870s is a model, and the composer's hopeless love for Clara Schumann is a strong biographical thread.
For Schoenberg, Brahms was a forerunner of modernism, whose commitment to structure provided a way forward from the dead-end to which Wagner's unfettered chromaticism was bound to lead.
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