FAMOUS COMPOSERS
FAMOUS COMPOSERS
Monograph Number Six in The Mentor Reading Course
The life of Johannes Brahms was an unsettled and wandering one. It was not until his later years that he chose a definite city for his home.
He was born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833, the son of a double-bass player in a theater, who was his first teacher. His life was uneventful until the age of twenty, when he began his public career with a concert tour in company with Remenyi, the Hungarian violinist.
Joachim, the famous student of Mendelssohn, attended the concert at Göttingen, where Brahms was to play the “Kreutzer” sonata of Beethoven. The piano turned out to be a semitone below the required pitch. Brahms played the piece from memory, transposing it from A to B flat. Joachim discerned what the feat implied, and after the concert introduced himself to the pianist, laying the foundation of a lifelong friendship, through which Brahms met Liszt and Schumann. The latter, after hearing but a few of his compositions, pronounced him “the master of the music of the future.”
The Prince of Lippe-Detmold engaged him as choir director and music master in 1854. He kept the position a few years and then resigned. He then wandered about, giving occasional concerts at Hamburg and Zurich. In 1863 he was appointed director of the Singakademie; but resigned within a year.
He seems to have had no public activity or settled work for the next four years, when he went on a concert tour with Joachim, and later with Stockhausen. In 1871 he began to direct the concerts of the “Gesellschaft der Musik-freunde,” which he continued to do until 1874. He spent the remainder of his life in Vienna, whence he took journeys to Italy in the spring and Switzerland in the summer.
He refused to go to England to take an honorary degree, Doctor of Music, offered by Cambridge University. In 1881 the University of Breslau conferred an honorary Ph. D. on him. Before his death he was granted two more honors. He was created a knight of the Prussian order, “Pour le Mérité,” in 1886, and he gained the freedom of his town in 1889. He died at Vienna, April 3, 1897.
PREPARED BY THE EDITORIAL STAFF OF THE MENTOR ASSOCIATIONILLUSTRATION FOR THE MENTOR. VOL. 1, No. 41, SERIAL No. 41COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY THE MENTOR ASSOCIATION, INC.