JOHANNES BRAHMS
FAMOUS COMPOSERS
JOHANNES BRAHMS
Monograph Number Six in The Mentor Reading Course
The life of Johannes Brahms was an unsettled and wandering one. It was not until his later years that he chose a definite city for his home.
He was born in Hamburg, May 7, 1833, the son of a double-bass player in a theater, who was his first teacher. His life was uneventful until the age of twenty, when he began his public career with a concert tour in company with Remenyi, the Hungarian violinist.
Joachim, the famous student of Mendelssohn, attended the concert at Göttingen, where Brahms was to play the “Kreutzer” sonata of Beethoven. The piano turned out to be a semitone below the required pitch. Brahms played the piece from memory, transposing it from A to B flat. Joachim discerned what the feat implied, and after the concert introduced himself to the pianist, laying the foundation of a lifelong friendship, through which Brahms met Liszt and Schumann. The latter, after hearing but a few of his compositions, pronounced him “the master of the music of the future.”