Number 7: Brahms

Johannes Brahms' was a complex man, and his music often seems torn between  deep pathos and rigorous discipline. The result is an often otherworldly beauty, as evident in Brahms' most famous piece, his lullaby.

Brahms' life was soap-operaesque, and would provide good fodder for a television biopic. He spent much of his youth destitute, playing the piano at brothels, and perhaps this can partly explain his lifelong pathological relationships with women, particularly his relationship with his mentor and good friend Robert Schumann's wife Clara (soon to be widow, after Robert died relatively young following a tragic bought of mental illness). Brahms had a number of ill-fated loves, including Clara's daughter it appears. But as best as his biographers can tell, his only intimate relationships were with the prostitutes that lined the wooded parks of downtown Vienna. There is a sense of loss in much of Brahms' works, and perhaps his forever failing love life is part of the story. Certainly the stormy opening to his first piano concerto seems inspired by emotional unrest; a great mind trying to seize control over a chaotic situation.

But Brahms' music is far more than just a soap-opera accompaniment. Perhaps as much as any other composer, Brahms was a perfectionist, and his scores exhibit great attention to detail and craft. The ending of his first symphony is a perfect example of this precision. Expansive but economical themes come in close succession, with tightly unwinding development leading to a truly splendid finale. Here is a taste:

Brahms, although known as something of a musical stick-in-the-mud (he was often derided by the followers of Wagner and the new more loose and romantic style of composing that was in vogue during the last half of the 19th Century), was in his own way quite an innovative composer. The gypsy musicians Brahms heard in the parks of Vienna inspired wonderfully exotic passages that occur throughout Brahms' Clarinet Quintet, as in this brief sample:

But perhaps above all Brahms was a composer of uniquely graceful emotional depth, as in his German Requiem. There is sadness, and rage, and joy, in this piece, but it is most striking for its simple tenderness and grace. Music like this, music at its best, can expand our emotions, maybe even our capacity to experience life itself.

Brahms. Number 7.