walking upstream…
Johannes Brahms
photo: c. brasch · public domain ↗Johannes Brahms
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On May 7, 1833, in a working-class quarter of Hamburg, Johann Jakob Brahms — a tavern and theatre double-bass player — and his wife had a son they named, plainly, after his father. Johannes Brahms took his first piano lessons from Otto Cossel, then studied composition under Eduard Marxsen, and by twenty had written sonatas nobody outside Hamburg had heard. That changed on October 28, 1853, when Robert Schumann broke a decade of silence as a music critic to declare, in the journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, that this unknown young pianist had arrived to carry the German tradition forward. The essay made Brahms famous overnight and left him answering to a standard he spent the next two decades trying to meet — above all in the 21-year labor on his Symphony No. 1, a work critics received, at its 1876 premiere, as an answer to Beethoven's own symphonic legacy.
the sound in question
1885
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98: I. Allegro non troppoJohannes Brahms
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Robert Schumann1830s-40s · Classical / Romantic
On October 28, 1853, after nearly a decade of silence as a critic, Robert Schumann broke it for one twenty-year-old nobody had published, writing in the music journal Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that Brahms had arrived like Minerva springing "fully armed" from Jove's head. The essay made Brahms's name overnight, and Schumann kept coaching from the sidelines: months later he wrote to the violinist Joseph Joachim, meant for Brahms to read, "He must call to mind the beginnings of the Beethoven symphonies; he must try to do something of the same kind." Brahms spent the rest of his career answering both the praise and the assignment.
listen: upstream & here
1852
Bunte Blätter, Op. 99: Albumblatt No. 1Robert Schumann
1854
Variations on a Theme of Robert Schumann, Op. 9Johannes Brahms
listen forBrahms began the piece in 1854 for a grieving Clara Schumann — his friend Julius Grimm nicknamed it "Trost-Einsamkeit," consolation in loneliness — building it directly from her husband's own melody, the Album-Blatt from Bunte Blätter, Op. 99. Play the two side by side: Schumann's spare four-bar tune opens plainly, almost folk-like, before Brahms takes it note for note and drives it through darker variations. Listen for the ninth variation, which quotes another Schumann piece outright, and the tenth, which folds in four bars of a theme by Clara Schumann herself — the young composer working two people's music into one, not merely admiring it from a distance.
Johann Sebastian Bach1720s · Baroque / Classical
In November 1855, the twenty-two-year-old Brahms sat with a manuscript copy of Bach's Art of Fugue and wrote on its flyleaf: "Joh. Brahms, Nov. 1855, Hamburg." His biographer Florence May found the volume among his effects marked with his own pencil corrections, one entry in a self-directed study list built, as she put it, to make him "thoroughly acquainted with the historical development of his art." Two decades later the debt turned audible again: the finale of his 1865 Cello Sonata No. 1 lifts its main fugue subject from another Bach work, the Art of Fugue's Contrapunctus XIII, per Hyperion Records' liner notes.
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1720
Partita for Solo Violin No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1004: V. ChaconneJohann Sebastian Bach
1877
Studies for Piano, No. 5: Chaconne by J.S. Bach (arr. for left hand)Johannes Brahms
listen forBach's Chaconne is a fifteen-minute set of variations for solo violin built on a four-bar bass line — a piece Brahms called "one of the most wonderful and most incomprehensible pieces of music," writing to Clara Schumann in 1877 that picturing himself writing it would have "driven me mad." His own answer wasn't an orchestration but a shrinking: a transcription for piano, left hand alone, published as No. 5 of his Studies. Play it against the violin original and the wiry tension survives the transplant, traded now for the low, grinding weight of a single hand climbing the keyboard alone.
Ludwig van Beethoven1800s–1810s · Classical / Romantic
Brahms grew up with a bust of Beethoven on his boyhood bookcase in Hamburg, and for over two decades — sketches begun around 1855, premiere in 1876 — his Symphony No. 1 in C minor became a private wrestling match with that legacy. When it reached the stage, critic Eduard Hanslick wrote in Vienna's Neue Freie Presse that "no composer has yet approached so nearly to the great works of Beethoven as Brahms in the finale of the C minor Symphony." Conductor Hans von Bülow's "three B's" line — Bach, Beethoven, Brahms — followed soon after, and stuck.
listen: upstream & here
1824
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125: IV. "Ode to Joy"Ludwig van Beethoven
1876
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68: IV. FinaleJohannes Brahms
listen forBeethoven's Ninth Symphony ends with the "Ode to Joy," a broad, hymn-like tune the whole orchestra and chorus build toward across nearly an hour. Brahms's own finale, forty-eight years later, unveils a strikingly similar melody — a rising, chorale-like theme announced after a long, brooding introduction — and the resemblance was audible to the very first audience: an anonymous critic in Vienna's Wiener Zeitung called it a likeness "as of son to father." Play the two themes back to back and the kinship is plain, even if Brahms's road there runs through fog Beethoven's never does.