Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was born in Hamburg in May 1833, the son of a town musician who taught him piano, violin and horn from childhood. He earned an early living playing in the city’s dockside taverns and accompanying touring musicians; a 1853 tour with the violinist Eduard Reményi brought him to the attention of Joseph Joachim, who introduced him to Robert and Clara Schumann. Schumann’s published endorsement that October — declaring Brahms a young master in waiting — set the public weight he carried for the rest of his career.

His output covers four symphonies, two piano concertos, the Violin Concerto and Double Concerto, the *German Requiem*, four sets of *Liebeslieder-Walzer*, three string quartets, the piano quintet, the clarinet quintet and trio, and a substantial body of solo piano music and lieder. He held the post of director of the Vienna Singverein from 1863 and of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde from 1872 to 1875, after which he held no further institutional post and lived off composing and performing income. He never married, though he sustained a lifelong close attachment to Clara Schumann.

Brahms died in Vienna in April 1897 of liver cancer, less than a year after Clara Schumann’s death. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his symphonic, chamber and choral works.