Great Masters: Brahms — His Life and Music (Audiobooks)

In both his life and his music, Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) was a man of contrasts. Not an easy man to know, Brahms destroyed a good deal of his own work and almost all of his lifetime's correspondence, in later years even collecting his letters from friends so that he could consign them to the flames. This course links the complexities of the man with the electrifying music of the composer through biographical information and musical commentary. Brahms had vowed early in life to be lonely but free. He never married, owned a home, held a job for more than a few years, or took on a commissioned piece. In art, he showed a similar independence of spirit. He believed in traditional musical genres and forms as challenges to expressive freedom, as healthy sources of stimulation for his awesome artistic powers. Unlike, for example, Beethoven, Brahms did not reinvent his art repeatedly in response to personal emotional crises, but rather found his essential compositional voice while in his mid-20s, and developed it in more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary fashion. You discover that Brahms, with a perfectionist's fanatical zeal, wrote, rewrote, and ultimately destroyed more than 20 string quartets before publishing a pair of exceptionally exquisite pieces at the age of 40, breathing new life into the old bones of an exacting chamber music form. You explore why Brahms took 21 years to complete his first symphony—immediately hailed as "Beethoven's Tenth"—and then produced three more in less than a decade. You find that Brahms single-handedly started a second "golden symphonic age" by inspiring younger composers such as Mahler, Bruckner, Sibelius, Elgar, and Dvorák. Brahms found unique ways of combining rigor and formal complexity of older Classical and even Baroque genres and forms (sonata, theme and variations, rondo) with melodic inventiveness, harmonic sophistication, and expressive richness prized in the Romantic Age.

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