Brahms and some of his works

PITTS SANBORN
Written for and dedicated to the RADIO MEMBERS of THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY of NEW YORK
Copyright 1940 by THE PHILHARMONIC-SYMPHONY SOCIETY of NEW YORK 113 West 57th Street New York, N. Y.
JOHANNES BRAHMS
This pamphlet about the most important compositions in which Brahms employs the orchestra, like its predecessor about Beethoven’s symphonies, makes no claim to originality and no secret of indebtedness to treatises that are open to us all. It is addressed to the radio audience of The Philharmonic-Symphony Society of New York, and its only object is to present in concise form some information concerning an inexhaustible subject that radio listeners may find of service.
By PITTS SANBORN
In the then free city of Hamburg Johannes Brahms was born on May 7, 1833. His parents were in humble circumstances, and Johannes was born in a poor part of the city. But his father was a well-trained musician and an accomplished double-bass player, and his mother, seventeen years his father’s senior, was a woman of fine spirit and unusual intelligence.
From an early age Johannes was clearly destined for a musical career, and at six he had already begun to learn the rudiments of music from his father, who purposed making an orchestral player of him. When he was eight he began to take piano lessons of Otto Cossel, his father feeling he had nothing more to teach the child. Cossel pronounced him an excellent pupil, but complained that he wasted time on his “everlasting composing.”
Two years later Cossel, convinced that he deserved more advanced instruction, took him to his own teacher, Eduard Marxsen, the royal music director in the adjacent city of Altona. Marxsen accepted the new pupil unwillingly, but presently he was impressed with the keenness of the boy’s mind. Beginning with piano lessons, he later studied composition, and Marxsen, thorough about all instruction, encouraged him to compose as well as to perfect himself as a pianist. Incidentally, Johannes became a great reader of books.