Johannes Brahms' Cultivation of Musical Architecture

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Johannes Brahms, a striking individual of unmistakable character, is defined by his compositions as meticulous and enlightened. His comprehensive grasp on classical and baroque form, with his familiarity of counterpoint and musical development, allowed him to effortlessly traverse and cultivate upon the musical architecture laid out by the likes of Bach and Beethoven. Born in Hamburg in 1833, he was the son of Johann Jacob Brahms, who travelled from North Germany, in which the family name “Brahms(t)” propagated (Musgrave 4). His father being a musician by profession instigated Brahms into his own domain of music. With Brahms’ first instruments being the violin, cello and the natural horn (predecessor of the French horn), it was discovered that the genius possessed absolute pitch and had also developed a system of notation on his own even before formal introductions into music (Musgrave 9). His astonishing understanding of musical rudiments was further cemented at age seven by his first teacher Otto Friedrich Willibald Cossel, with piano literature ranging from Bach to Schubert to Clementi (Musgrave 10). The young gifted talent quickly matured, with his compositions being sedulously characterized in craft similar to the seasoned taste of aged liquor. Following in the wake of Beethoven, his style of romanticism seemed restrained, and viewed as being confined to classical forms. With his preference towards absolute music, his works demonstrated “as [Ian] McEwan/ [Clive] Linley would have it, at the intersection of emotion and reason” and of “powerful intellect and of passionate expressivity” (Platt and Smith 4). However, being the headstrong romantic that he is, he manipulated the limiting factor into an area of expanse, in which he...

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... Joseph Joachim (Brahms’ good friend and virtuoso violinist) and Clara Schumann represented the conservatives, while the progressives were lead by Franz Liszt (in which Brahms been acquainted with earlier) and Richard Wagner (Burnett 111). While the main disagreement between the two parties were that the radical progressives favoured new styles in writing and form, Brahms was “passionately convinced that he was upholding the great and noblest traditions of German art and German music” (Burnett 112). However, deemed a conservative, Brahms’ work offers a conflicting view. Despite Brahms being grounded in tradition, there is a rationale of why he is not a sole classicist; his love of expression and this manifestation through his works as purpose to advance German works into the romantic light, is enough to deem him as a progressive, rather than a grounded conservative.

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