Posted on 06/08/2012 5:58:40 PM PDT by AZamericonnie
From this early era also came the first song from Johannes Brahms that would not end up in the fireplace. Why this is so becomes obvious from the entry of the vocalist after a short piano introduction. This is an astonishing song coming from a teenager. There is no sense of a boy trying out a style. It’s heartfelt and written with absolute assurance.
Well kinda ... min is 7c max of 17c ...having some breezy cloudy days, sun coming but cool, around 8c at night and 21c daytime ... 21c is about 70f ...
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Thank you for being active in your local Tea Party. I wish
I had the courage to do so...I am a basically lazy person. LOL!
....and thank you for expanding our horizons! :)
Mary,Jesse and Baby G.are here.Stars are bright.Last chance till middle of August but funny thing I took the first sip of wine and thought of you.:)
From this developed a professional friendship. Jo and Eddie played through the violin sonata repertory, and Jo developed an interest in gypsy music, something that was to follow him the rest of his life. Eddie introduced Jo to some of the other musicians based in Hamburg – until one day the rumor of an arrest warrant sent Eddie skedaddling to America.
Two years later, Eddie popped back into town, and he and Brahms picked up their friendship, with Jo accompanying him at a concert. From this came the offer from Remenyi: “Let’s go on the road and do this for a living.” Brahms leapt at the offer. For one thing, it would mean a trip to Hanover to see Remenyi’s friend, Joseph Joachim, the great non-showboating violinist of his era, a consummate musician who would end up becoming one of Brahms’ best friends. Thus began the Jo and Eddie Show.
On the road, Eddie was forever hot-dogging on stage, but Brahms was exactly the opposite. Jo would maintain a steely professionalism at the piano. While Eddie wowed the crowds, Jo wowed the critics. Brahms had the whole repertory memorized and never used sheet music. One day, finding the concert piano tuned a half-tone flat, Jo transposed the Beethoven Violin Sonata in C minor up to C# minor on the fly.
The great violinist Joseph Joachim had worked with Franz Liszt at Weimar until he got tired of Liszt’s antics on stage. From there he had changed direction, befriending Robert and Clara Schumann. Robert published the dominant German language music journal of the day, the equivalent of our “Rolling Stone”, “Downbeat” or “Gramophone”. Clara had been one of the top teenage piano prodigies of the era before she married Bob and started pumping out babies – a lot of them.
Eddie brought Jo to Joachim, and the violinist was blown away by the music played at his piano by this blond, blue-eyed, wiry, but physically awkward 20 year old boy from Hamburg. At that moment, Joachim saw the direction German music would take.
As soon as the local police heard that Eddie was in town, the two ran for Weimar, with an introduction to Franz Liszt written by Joachim.
Franz Liszt lived in a home that resembled a high class cathouse, and Brahms recognized this immediately from his days in Hamburg’s waterfront dives. Sex is sex no matter where you go. Liszt surprised Brahms by flawlessly sight-reading the Scherzo in E-flat minor from the handwritten manuscript. But Liszt quickly recognized that Brahms was not inclined to enlist in the army of Liszt, Berlioz and Wagner, and because of that, no real friendship developed.
With Eddie tired of being upstaged by his more professional accompanist, the Jo and Eddie Show ended, and Brahms went to Göttingen to study with Joachim at the university. This would develop into the most important professional friendship of his life.
One day Joachim wrote an introduction for Brahms to Robert and Clara Schumann and sent him off to Düsseldorf. It was to lead to the biggest break of his life.
Robert Schumann was stunned by what he heard Brahms play at his piano, and Clara was equally impressed. The couple invited Brahms to stay for a month and handed him off to the top music publishing firm in the German world. Bob’s article about Jo in his magazine branded him the Messiah of the new paths of music. It was too good to be true.
The blow came when Bob tried to drown himself, and Clara found herself pregnant once again. Jo settled in to stabilize the household while Bob went into an asylum, and once again Jo found himself composing. He also began falling in love with Clara, who was 14 years older than he.
The four ballades of the Opus 10 show Brahms writing short piano pieces and avoiding the grand gesture. The third and fourth pieces in this sequence are written in A-B-A format. The middle sections inhabit a very strange tonal world and have an otherworldly character about them.
That should come at the beginning of Week #3. The 14 year stint in chamber music is for Week #2.
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While Jo was teaching Bob and Clara’s brood how to swing from chandeliers, slide down bannisters and do acrobatics on the lawn, Clara was concertizing with Joachim and Jenny Lind at the court of the minor nobility at Detmold. Clara’s unhappiness at her husband’s condition was offset somewhat by her ire at being upstaged by Lind.
Following Detmold, Jo and Clara took a long hike by foot along the Rhine that lasted for over a hundred miles and five days. It was an idyllic, romantic adventure. Ken Russell, in his novella Brahms Gets Laid, drawn from a failed screenplay, argues that this was where Jo and Clara finally tumbled into bed. Jan Swafford, in his definitive biography of Brahms, argues that Brahms’ idealization of Clara, i.e. his Madonna Complex, made the consummation of this relationship impossible. Love can be messy sometimes.
With Clara back in Düsseldorf with the kids, Brahms needed to raise money for himself, so he went on the road as a concert pianist, specializing in the piano concertos of Beethoven and doing better than he expected. But he was beginning to understand that he needed a base, and that might be the job of conducting. Jo began immersing himself in the music of Bach and the works of the Italian Renaissance masters. Clara went on the road again, and Jo settled in to take care of the Schumann children.
Robert’s death in the summer of 1856 put an end to his close relationship with Clara, for her availability made her too dangerous. It would now be purely professional. Clara couldn’t figure him out. Brahms could be a cad when dealing with women.
Jo found a gig at Detmold as the artistic director and house pianist of their three month music festival, a job he held for three successive years. During those thee years, from 1856 to ‘59, Brahms agonized over his piano concerto. It had a strange gestation.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was one of the most important – and destructive – pieces of music ever written. So many composers heard that amazing finale and said, “Hey, I can do that!” They couldn’t. Mendelssohn tried, and his Second Symphony was a noble failure. Brahms barely got into it before he realized he was in way over his head. He downsized the work to a sonata for two pianos. He up-sized it to a piano concerto.
What Brahms didn’t realize was that the nature of the piano concerto had changed. Beethoven’s final concerto, the “Emperor”, had come four decades earlier, and it had been the last word, a work based on great musical ideas. Since then, the piano concerto had degenerated into a showpiece for the pianist to show off his chops, and sometimes the three movements were strung together into one. Great musical ideas were not supposed to be a part of it. Audiences who bought tickets to the premiere of Brahms’ piano concerto were expecting a short, light showpiece that would show off Brahms’ technique. What they got was something else entirely.
The first performance in Hanover wasn’t a disaster. The opening theme was far too similar to the opening of the Beethoven Ninth except for the different time signature. It was full of great musical ideas and lasted almost an hour. The audience was merely puzzled.
But the second performance in Leipzig was a shipwreck. In that era, it was customary to applaud between movements, something that is not done today. At the end of the first movement, there was a deadly silence from the audience. Brahms began to sweat. There was a deathly silence at end of the second movement. Brahms began to sweat more profusely. At the end of the finale, a half dozen people applauded – and then the hissing began. It sounded like a huge flock of geese. They hissed Brahms right out of the Leipzig Gewandhaus.
The reviews in the press were brutal. What was worse was that the only people to embrace the concerto were Liszt, Berlioz, Wagner and the entire New Music crowd. That was humiliating.
To make it even more confusing for Brahms, he performed his new concerto in Hamburg – and it was a huge hit! “Hometown boy makes good.” Nothing made sense anymore.
This is one of those pieces where you have to concentrate, and it won’t be easy to swallow that behemoth of a first movement (21 minutes), which is the heart of the piece. The picture of Brahms in the video is the composer in his Fifties, and it’s not the way he looked in 1859 when he was 26. He was still the short blonde-haired blue-eyed boy who couldn’t grow a beard to save his life.
The drum roll that opens the movement sounds like the voice of God. Brahms starts off his exposition with that theme he borrowed from Beethoven, and it’s incredibly tense. At 3:40 the piano comes in, working its way around that first subject. The first notes of the second subject at 6:12 remind me of the opening notes of “Home on the Range”. At 10:10 he starts his development section, taking his themes apart and putting them back together in different combinations. At 13:01 he begins his recapitulation in the wrong key, re-composing it. Brahms was not one for copy-and-paste! At 15:49, when the second subject comes in at the correct key, there is a wonderful sense of release. Brahms had an unerring sense of musical architecture. The coda that starts at 19:25 is like a freight train that has lost its air brakes and is hurtling down a grade with ever increasing speed. It’s unstoppable until it slams into a solid wall of D minor at the end.
If you want to bookmark this and listen later, I’ll understand. It’s pretty intense, and you just have to go with it.
Brahms: Piano Concerto #1 in D minor, Op. 15, first movement
Awwwww....your having a very special night & I am so very honored you thought of me my darlin. My love to you & all your LARGE beautiful family! *Hugs*
....a lot! :)
G’Day, Janey...((HUGS))...go Marines!!
Thanks, Janey’s Dad’s friends!! Great pictures!!
The one thing he’d learned was how to orchestrate. He did this the hard way, and he was surprised when the concerto sounded so good at the Hanover rehearsal. Another piano concerto? No, it would be another 25 years before he ventured into those shark-infested waters.
He was back in Hamburg because Daddy Brahms had gotten tired of being married, and Jo now had to take care of his elderly mother, wastrel brother and retarded sister. Life had dealt him a busted flush, and he needed to make a living for his family.
At a rehearsal of the women’s half of the Hamburg Academy chorus, the conductor asked if the ladies would like to sing something by Brahms. There was immediate enthusiasm for the project.
Why?
Brahms had been busy writing for voice to beguile the occasional women in his life, and some of his songs were quite good. At least Brahms didn’t consign them to the fireplace. This one is a short gem.
Brahms turned to his studies of the Renaissance masters to produce a piece for female choir that is striking in that it sounds genuinely antique.
Brahms didn’t stint in writing for men either. This one is striking for its use of wind choir and tympani in its accompaniment. He had developed a strong sense of writing for massed voices, and those who followed his music appreciated it.
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