I want to start today by looking at a specific
object. You've probably seen it. It's a bust,
you know, small statue. And it sits on the piano
in, like, almost every music conservatory or
dusty practice room in the world. Oh, okay. I
think I know where you're going with this. It's
an old man. He's got this massive bushy gray
beard that covers half his chest. He looks heavy.
He looks serious. He looks like he's judging
you for missing that F -sharp. Exactly. He is
judging you. I know exactly who you're talking
about. That is the quintessential image of Johannes
Brahms, the old bear. Right, the old bear. And
that image, it carries so much baggage, doesn't
it? When we see that beard, we think of the establishment.
Absolutely. The conservative. We think of the
guy who just stood still while the rest of the
19th century was getting, you know. completely
wild and experimental. He's always framed as
the great conservative, the keeper of the flame
who refused to change. But I've been reading
through the materials we have for today, the
letters, the biographies, the analysis of his
actual impact. And I don't know, I feel like
we've been sold a bit of a lie. Or at least a
very, very incomplete half -truth. Yes. It's
definitely a disguise. Brahms is one of the most
misunderstood figures in music history because
that image of the old conservative hides a man
who was just full of these intense contradictions.
In what way? Well, if you dig into the sources,
you don't find a statue. You find a young, incredibly
handsome virtuoso who apparently turned heads
everywhere he went. You find a guy involved in
a bitter, toxic public feud that makes modern
Twitter beefs look. Tame. Completely tame. And
a prankster. The sources mention that. A huge
practical joker. But more importantly, and this
is the real kicker, beneath the surface of his
traditional music, there was a mind so mathematically
complex and forward thinking. that the people
who eventually broke music in the 20th century?
Modernists. The modernists, like Schoenberg.
They claimed him as their hero. That's the part
that really hooked me. How does the guy who supposedly
hated progress become the godfather of the avant
-garde? It doesn't compute. Right. So, let's
unpack this. For this deep dive, we need to figure
out who Johannes Brahms actually was, beyond
the beard. We need to talk about the war of the
romantics. Oh, yeah. His weirdly heartbreaking
love life with the Schumanns. And why on earth
it took him 15 years to write one symphony. And
we have to talk about the destruction. This is
a man who burned more music than most people
write in a lifetime. Which is terrifying to think
about. What we lost. Okay. But let's go back
to the start. Let's erase the image of the old
man in Vienna and go to Hamburg, 1833. Yeah.
What kind of world does a young Brahms wake up
in? He wakes up in a world of music. But it wasn't
exactly a glamorous one. Not at first. He was
born into a family where music was a trade, you
know, a craft, not just a high art. A working
class thing. Very much. His father, Johann Jakob
Brahms, is actually a fascinating character.
He ran away from his own family in a small town
called Hyde to become a musician. He defied his
parents, walked into Hamburg at age 19, and started
scraping by playing the double bass. So there's
a streak of rebellion in the DNA already. The
father fights for the right to play music. Exactly.
Johann Jakob was a working musician. He played
in militia bands. He played in dance halls. He
did whatever he had to. And he saw his son, Johannes,
as a way to secure the family's fortune. He recognized
that talent very, very early. Now, this brings
up a story I've heard a thousand times. It's
the sort of Oliver Twist version of Brahms. The
myth. The myth. The story goes that the family
was destitute, living in the slums, and that
a preteen Johannes was forced to play piano in
Hamburg's seediest waterfront brothels and bars
late into the night just to put food on the table.
It's gritty. It's dark. It's very dark. And it
supposedly explains why he was so socially awkward
later in life. But the notes here suggest that
might be. Well, total fiction. Yeah, modern scholars
have really taken a sledgehammer to that myth.
It's a compelling narrative, the tortured artist
rising from the gutter. But the facts just don't
line up. The Brahms family wasn't rich, not by
any stretch, but they were solid middle class.
So not starving artists. Not at all. His father
was a member of the Hamburg militia and eventually
got a stable job as a horn player in the Hamburg
Philharmonic. They owned their own home. They
weren't starving. But wait, if they weren't starving,
where did the brothel story even come from? And
more importantly, if they had money, why would
anyone send a 10 -year -old kid to play in a
dive bar? That's the key question, isn't it?
Hamburg at the time actually had incredibly strict
laws about minors entering those kinds of establishments.
They were called animere locale, sort of dance
halls with sailors. If his father had sent him
there, he would have risked his own position
in the militia, his whole livelihood. So it's
not just immoral, it's illegal and stupid. Exactly.
It's likely that the story was an anecdotal exaggeration.
Maybe Brahms later in life joked about playing
in some low class joints, you know, for sailors.
And over time, his biographer spun it into brothels.
To add drama. It just adds drama to his origin
story. It does sound better for the movie version
of his life, I guess. From the brothel to the
concert hall. Yeah, right. So the reality was
more academic. And much more structured. He was
receiving elite training from a very young age.
He studied with a man named Otto Kossel, who
realized the kid was a genius. And then Kossel
passed him on to his own teacher, Edward Markson.
And you cannot understand Brahms without understanding
Markson. Why? Was he just a particularly good
teacher? He was more than that. He was a connection
to the entire timeline of German music. Markson
was a personal acquaintance of Schubert. He knew
the world of Beethoven. And he was absolutely
obsessed with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
The old master. Yes. So he didn't just teach
Brahms how to move his fingers. He indoctrinated
him into the holy trinity of the Germanic tradition.
Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. So by the time he's
10 years old, he's not playing drinking songs
in a bar. He's being groomed as the heir to the
throne. Precisely. At his public debut at age
10, he plays Beethoven's Quintet for Piano and
Winds and a Mozart Quartet. He's a child prodigy,
but he's a serious child prodigy. His parents
actually wanted him to do more flashy stuff,
you know, tour as a wunderkind to make money.
But his teachers put their foot down. They said,
no, he needs to study, not be a circus act. Okay,
so you have this foundation of pure, rigorous
German structure. But Brahms' music isn't just
dry academic exercises. There's a fire in it.
There's this rhythmic aggression. Where does
that come from? That comes from a lucky encounter
in his teenage years. In 1850, a wave of Hungarian
refugees passed through Hamburg after the failed
revolutions of 1848. Among them was this incredible
flamboyant violinist named Ed Remini. And Remini
plays the gypsy style music. Yes, the style angois.
He introduces Brahms to the cartas, these wild
improvisational folk tunes that speed up and
slow down that have these off -kilter rhythms.
For a kid raised on strict Bach counterpoint,
this was like throwing open a window in a stuffy
room. It's the secret ingredient. It is. That
influence never leaves him. It's the reason we
have the Hungarian dances, which became his huge
pop hits later on and made him a ton of money.
But deeper than that... It infected his rhythmic
DNA, gave his music a swagger and a kind of earthy
punch that distinguished him from the other academics.
So we have the ingredients, the discipline of
Beethoven and the fire of the Hungarians. In
1853, Brahms is 20. He's handsome. He's blonde.
He's talented. He goes on tour with Reményi.
And this leads to the moment that changes everything.
This fateful doorstep. The fateful doorstep.
This is the scene. Brahms and Romani are touring
and they meet Joseph Joachim, who is basically
the greatest violinist in the world at that time.
A true superstar. Joachim hears Brahms play,
takes one look at his compositions and just goes,
whoa, you need to meet the Schumanns. Robert
and Clara Schumann. We're talking about the power
couple of romantic music. The absolute royalty.
Robert Schumann was a famous composer, but he
was also the most influential music critic in
Europe. His journal could make or break a career.
And Clara. Clara was one of the greatest pianists
on the planet. A bigger star than Robert in many
ways. Wow. So Joachim writes a letter of introduction
and Brahms travels to Dusseldorf to knock on
their door. I can't even imagine the pressure.
Walking into the home of your idols, he sits
down at the piano, plays some of his early sonatas,
and happens. Robert Schumann is... Thunderstruck.
He doesn't just like it. He sees it as a revelation.
He stops him mid -piece, runs out to get Clara
and says, you have to hear this. No way. They
basically adopt him on the spot. He stays with
them for weeks. They treat him like a son. And
Robert doesn't keep this discovery to himself.
No. And this is where it gets incredibly complicated.
Robert hadn't written a critique in years, but
he sits down and writes an article for his journal,
The Noisite Shrift for Music, titled, Noyamanen,
New Paths. New Paths. In this article, he tells
the entire musical world that this unknown 20
-year -old kid is the one. The one, like Neo
in the Matrix. Basically, it's that level of
hype. He describes Brahms as a young eagle, a
messiah who is fated to express the ideal spirit
of the times. The language is, it's over the
top. He says Brahms sprang forth fully armed
like Minerva from the head of Zeus. Okay, hold
on. Put yourself in Brahms' shoes. You are 20.
You have barely published anything, and suddenly
the most famous critic in the world tells everyone,
stop looking, the Savior is here. That sounds
incredible, but also, wouldn't that just destroy
you? It almost did. It was a curse in disguise.
Brahms wrote to Robert afterwards, and you can
just hear the panic in his voice. He said the
praise aroused extraordinary expectations that
he didn't know how to fulfill. It paralyzed him.
Completely. It triggered this lifelong battle
with crippling self -doubt and perfectionism.
He felt like every single note he wrote from
that day forward had to live up to this impossible
prophecy. And the situation gets tragic really,
really fast, doesn't it? Yeah. Because shortly
after announcing the Messiah, Robert Schumann
collapses. It's absolutely heartbreaking. Robert
had battled mental illness for a long time, auditory
hallucinations, deep depression. We now think
it was likely tertiary syphilis, but of course
it wasn't diagnosed as such then. In 1854, just
a few months after meeting Brahms, Robert throws
himself into the Rhine River in a suicide attempt.
Oh, my God. He's rescued by fishermen, but he
asks to be taken to an asylum. He's institutionalized
for the rest of his life. He dies there two years
later. And Brahms, the young eagle. the chosen
one, suddenly finds himself in a very, very different
role. He drops everything. He moves into an apartment
in Dusseldorf to help Clara. She has seven children,
she's pregnant with their eighth, and her husband
is locked away where she can't even see him.
He wasn't even 21 yet. No. And he becomes the
de facto head of the household. He manages the
finances, he teaches the kids, and he acts as
the go -between visiting Robert in the asylum
because, under the doctor's orders, Clara wasn't
allowed to see him until the very end. This brings
us to the elephant in the room. The relationship
between Brahms and Clara Schumann. I feel like
this is the most debated, most analyzed romance
in music history. It really is. They were living
together, essentially. He was in love with her,
right? I mean, it seems obvious. Oh, deeply.
We have the letters. He wrote to her, I wish
I could write to you as tenderly as I love you
and do as many good things for you as you would
like. He calls her my beloved Clara. The passion
is just pouring off the page. But she was 14
years older than him, and she was his mentor's
wife, his hero's wife. It was a tortured situation,
an impossible triangle. He worshipped Robert.
He was passionately in love with Clara. He was
completely torn between loyalty and desire. But
here is the plot twist that frustrates biographers
to this day. Robert dies in 1856. Brahms and
Clara are finally free. There is no legal or
moral barrier anymore. End. They don't get married.
They don't. That makes no sense. Yeah. If you
love her that much and the obstacle is gone,
why retreat? Did she reject him? Did he get cold
feet? What happened? All the evidence suggests
it was Brahms who pulled back. Once the crisis
was over, the reality of domestic life, of being
a stepfather to seven children, of being tied
down, it seemed to terrify him. He valued his
freedom and his art above everything else. He
chose his work over love. It seemed so. He wrote
later in life that he couldn't bear the fetters
of marriage, so they parted ways, romantically
speaking, though they remained penmates. They
wrote to each other constantly until the day
she died. He sent her every piece of music he
wrote for her approval before he published it.
Wow. It's almost like he needed that unrequited
longing to fuel his music. If he had just settled
down and been a happy husband, maybe we wouldn't
have the Brahms we know. I think that's very
likely true. That tension, that burning restraint
you feel in his music, that's the signature of
his sound. And it might have come directly from
that relationship. So his personal life is a
complete pressure cooker. Yeah. But his professional
life is about to become a literal battlefield.
We need to talk about the war of the romantics.
The great schism. Yeah. And I want to get the
context right here because I feel like people
today. hear classical music and think it's all
the same stuff. But in the mid 19th century,
this was a massive, nasty fight. It was a total
polarization. Think of it like a political divide
today or maybe like the Beatles versus the Rolling
Stones debate, but with, you know, way higher
stakes and philosophical treatises. OK, so who
are the two sides? On one side, you had the new
German school led by Franz Liszt and most importantly,
Richard Wagner. And what was their pitch? Why
were they the cool ones, the radicals? They argued
that the old -form symphonies, sonatas, quartets
were dead, obsolete. They believed Beethoven
had exhausted them in his Ninth Symphony. The
future, they claimed, was programmatic music.
Meaning music that tells a specific story. Exactly.
Music that paints a picture, music that fuses
with poetry and drama, lists symphonic poems,
Wagner's music dramas. They were pushing harmony
to the breaking point. To the young students,
this was exciting. It was rebellious. It was
the future. And on the other side. The traditionalists,
the conservatives, led, philosophically at least,
by Brahms, Joseph Joachim, and Clara Schumann.
They believed in absolute music. Music for music's
sake. Right. Music that doesn't need a story.
Music that stands on its own internal logic and
structure. They believed you could still say
new and profound things within the forms that
Beethoven and Mozart had perfected. So it's structure
versus story. Old forms versus new forms. And
Brahms, who is usually very private, decides
to enter this fight publicly. And it is a complete
disaster, a total PR nightmare. In 1860, Brahms
and Joachim draft a manifesto. It's a public
letter attacking the new German school. What
did it say? It called Liszt's music miserable
weeds that were growing in the garden of music.
Miserable weeds. Wow, that's not subtle. Not
at all. But here's the problem. The manifesto
was leaked to the press before they had gotten
enough signatures to make it look like a powerful...
consensus it ended up with just four names on
it oh no so it looked petty it looked like a
few jealous guys yelling at the popular kids
ouch How did the other side react? They destroyed
them. They published a parody of the manifesto
in their own journal, mocking Brahms as this
backward -looking relic. It totally backfired
and painted him into a corner as the anti -progress
guy for years. Brahms was humiliated. Did he
fight back after that? He learned his lesson.
He realized, I cannot win a war of words with
Richard Wagner because Wagner was a master propagandist,
a genius at manipulating the press. So Brahms
shut up. He never... published another polemic.
He just he decided to let his music be his argument.
But the other side didn't stop. Wagner in particular
was vicious. Oh unbelievably vicious. Wagner
called Brahms a street singer in a masquerade.
He said his music had the stench of the museum.
There were cartoons in the papers. One famous
one shows Brahms' champion, the critic Edward
Henslick, offering incense to a statue of Brahms
like he's a false god, while Wagner's knights
attack from the other side. It was a full -on
culture war. It was tribal. You had to pip aside.
It's wild to imagine composers having stands
and haters like that. Yeah. But despite all the
public insults, Brahms kind of took the high
road, didn't he? He did, and this is what makes
him so fascinating. He actually respected Wagner's
music. helped prepare concerts of Wagner's operas
in Vienna. He owned Wagner's manuscripts. He
was somehow able to say, this man is a genius,
even if his philosophy is wrong, and even if
he hates me personally. That takes an incredible
amount of confidence. Yeah. Which is ironic because
speaking of confidence, let's go back to that
curse of praise. We talked about how Robert Schumann's
prophecy paralyzed him. Nowhere is this more
obvious than in his struggle to write a symphony.
The 15 -year block. It's legendary. Brahms started
sketching ideas for a symphony in 1855. He didn't
finish and premiere his first symphony until
1876. 15 years! That's longer than the Beatles'
entire career. Why? What took so long? It was
the shadow of Beethoven. You have to understand,
in the 19th century, the symphony was the genre.
It was the heavyweight championship of composition,
and Beethoven had set the bar so impossibly high
with his Ninth Symphony that everyone was terrified
to follow it. Right. Brahms famously said, you
have no idea what it is like to hear the footsteps
of a giant thumping behind you. He felt like
an imposter, like he couldn't measure up. He
felt like he's being watched by the ghost of
Beethoven. He was so terrified of mediocrity
that he destroyed his own work relentlessly.
He burned, by his own account, at least 20 string
quartets. 20. That physically hurts me to hear.
Yeah. Imagine what was in those pages. That's
a lifetime's work for another composer. It shows
his impossibly high standard. If it wasn't perfect,
if it wasn't worthy of standing next to Beethoven,
it didn't survive. But when he finally released
the first symphony in 1876, the dam broke. It
was a masterpiece. And what was the reception?
The conductor, Hans von Bülow, immediately called
it Beethoven's 10th. It was the highest possible
praise. Which brings up a funny moment. Critics
immediately pointed out that the big hymn -like
theme in the finale of Brahms' first sounds a
lot like the Ode to Joy from Beethoven's 9th.
It's almost a direct quote. It's very, very similar.
And Brahms' response is legendary. When someone
pointed out to him, he just snapped. Any dunce
can see that. I love that. He's not defensive
at all. He's like, yeah, I did it on purpose.
Deal with it. Exactly. He was saying, I am not
hiding from Beethoven. I am standing on his shoulders.
I am claiming my inheritance. And once that first
symphony was out, the psychological block was
gone. The floodgates opened. And the masterpieces
just poured out. The second symphony, the violin
concerto, the fourth symphony, all these huge
works came out in the next decade. And since
we're talking it has its output during this time,
I have to ask about the academic festival overture.
Because for a guy who was supposedly so serious
and self -critical, this story is hilarious.
It gets to the ultimate hold my beer moment in
classical music. In 1880, the University of Breslau
offered Brahms an honorary doctorate, a very
prestigious thing. They expected him to write,
you know, a dignified musical thank you note.
Something solemn. Something academic. Right.
Instead, Brahms wrote the academic festival Overture.
It starts seriously enough, but then it completely
devolves into a medley of rowdy student drinking
songs he remembered from his youth. You're kidding.
No. The biggest, grandest climax of the piece
is the song Gedimus Igitor. which is basically
a song about drinking and enjoying life before
you turn to dust. So he accepts an honorary degree
by playing the faculty a medley of keg -san anthems.
Yes, and he orchestrated it so brilliantly and
with such joy that they couldn't even be mad.
It's loud, it's boisterous, and it's basically
Brahms winking at the establishment while being
embraced by it. That perfectly leads into the
next big contradiction. We have the prankster,
we have the traditionalist. But let's look at
the title of our deep dive again, The Progressive
Traditionalist. This is the part that really
changes how we listen to him. Years after Brahms
died, Arnold Schoenberg, the boogeyman of modern
music, the guy who invented atonal music, the
scariest modernist of them all, he wrote an essay
called Brahms the Progressive. Why on earth would
Schoenberg, of all people, care about Brahms?
This is the crucial reframing of his entire legacy.
The War of the Romantics was about surface -level
stuff stories versus forms, program music versus
absolute music. But Schoenberg looked at the
engine of Brahms's music. He looked at the internal
wiring. And he realized that Brahms was doing
something incredibly advanced called developing
variation. Okay, developing variation. That sounds
like a textbook term. Can you break that down
for us? How is that different from what, say,
Mozart did? Sure. Think of a pop song or even
Mozart aria. Usually you have a melody, a tune.
You play the melody. Then maybe you repeat it.
Then you go to a chorus. Then you come back to
the melody. It's sectional. It's like building
a house with pre -made bricks. Here's a brick.
Here's another brick. Got it. Verse, chorus,
verse. very clear blocks right Brahms didn't
build with bricks he built like a plant grows
he would start with a tiny musical cell a seed
maybe just two or three notes a tiny interval
and everything that follows in the entire piece
grows organically out of that initial seed so
it's not repeated it's evolved constantly evolving
the melody is never just repeated it's continuously
turning upside down stretching shrinking changing
its rhythm you can trace every branch back to
the trunk and the trunk back to the seed but
they look Totally different on the surface. So
it's an organic, almost biological approach to
composing. Exactly. It's incredibly dense. There's
no filler. Every single note is related to the
core DNA of the piece. Schoenberg loved this
because he saw it as the path to the future music
that was pure structure, total unity, where nothing
was arbitrary. He saw Brahms not as the end of
the old way, but the beginning of the new way.
And it wasn't just the melody and harmony, right?
I've heard that his rhythm was also way ahead
of its time. Oh, miles ahead. We mentioned the
Hungarian influence earlier. Brahms loved a rhythmic
device called hemiola. Hemiola. I've heard the
term, but what does it actually feel like when
you're listening to it? It feels like a stumble
or like the music is tripping over itself. Imagine
you're dancing a waltz. It's in three, right?
One, two, three, one, two, three. It's a steady
triple meter. okay suddenly bronze will shift
the accent so it feels like one two one two one
two He jams a two feel inside a three bar without
changing the time signature. It creates this
incredible rhythmic friction like the floor is
tilting underneath you for a second. It destabilizes
the beat. Right. And he would layer these things.
He'd have the violins playing in three while
the cellos are playing in two. It completely
blurred the bar lines. Igor Stravinsky, the guy
who wrote The Rite of Spring and changed rhythm
forever, pointed to Brahms as a huge influence
on modern rhythmic thinking. That is mind -blowing.
The conservative Brahms paved the way for Stravinsky
and Schoenberg. It really makes the whole war
of the romantics look silly in hindsight. They
were fighting about the wrong things. They were.
They were arguing about the paint color while
Brahms was redesigning the engine. And there's
one more layer to his progressiveness, and it
actually comes from his obsession with the past.
How does that work? Brahms was a serious music
historian, a scholar. He collected old manuscripts,
Renaissance choral music, Baroque motets. He
edited the works of Couperin and C .P .E. Bach
for publication. He was a nerd for the old stuff.
A total nerd. But he didn't just study it. He
used those ancient techniques to make modern
sounds. Take the finale of his Fourth Symphony.
It's one of the greatest, most emotionally devastating
pieces of music ever written. Yeah. And it's
a Passacaglia. Which is a Baroque form from Bach's
time. Yes. It's a set of 30 variations over a
repeating eight -bar bass line. It was considered
an archaic dead form. Nobody wrote Passacaglias
in the 1880s. It was like a modern filmmaker
deciding to shoot a feature -length silent movie.
But he made it work. He took that rigid, ancient
mathematical structure and filled it with the
most explosive, tragic, romantic emotion imaginable.
He proved that looking backward was actually
a way to move forward. That's a powerful idea.
Innovation isn't always a - about destroying
the past. Sometimes it's about remixing it. Exactly.
He was the master of that. I want to shift gears
to the man himself again. We've established he
wasn't just a statue. But what was he like to
hang out with? Because the stories seem to vary
between sweetest guy ever and absolute jerk.
He was both. He absolutely cultivated a porcupine
exterior to protect a very soft interior. He
was famous for being grumpy and rude at Vienna
dinner parties. There's a classic story where
he's leaving a party, stops at the door, turns
to the whole room and says, if there's anyone
here I have not insulted, I apologize. That is
a legendary exit line. I have to use that sometime.
It is. But that prickly shell was hiding a very
soft center. He was incredibly generous with
his money, often anonymously supporting struggling
musicians and their families. And he was the
one who discovered Antonin Dujac. How'd that
happen? Dujac was a total nobody, a poor musician
from Bohemia entering a state composition contest.
Brahms was one of the judges. He saw Dujac's
score, realized the raw talent, and basically
bullied his own publisher, Simrock, into printing
Dvořák's music. He launched Dujac's career single
-handedly. And we have to talk about the autograph
story. This is my favorite Brahms moment because
it shows he wasn't a snob. He was friends with
Johann Strauss II, the waltz king. Yes, the Blue
Danube guy. You'd think the serious composer
of symphonies would look down on popular dance
music, but Brahms adored Strauss's waltzes. He
openly said he wished he had written them. So
what's the story with the autograph? So Strauss's
wife, Adele, approached Brahms at a party and
asked him to autograph her fan, a common thing
back then. Usually a composer would scribble
a few bars of their own famous music. Brahms
takes the fan, scribbles the opening notes of
the Blue Danube Walt Strauss' music, and writes
underneath it. Unfortunately not by Johannes
Brahms. That is so humble and witty. It shows
a complete lack of ego that you just don't expect
from a great man of that era. It shows he recognized
genius in all its forms, whether it was a Bach
fugue or a perfect Strauss waltz. Speaking of
genius and depth, we had to touch on his spiritual
life. We mentioned the German Requiem earlier.
Drozhok, who was a devout Catholic, once complained
about Brahms, saying, such a great man, such
a great soul, and he believes in nothing. Was
Brahms an atheist? Atheist is probably too strong
a word. He was more of a humanist or an agnostic.
He was baptized Lutheran. He knew the Bible inside
and out. But he was very skeptical of organized
religion in his adult life. He didn't go to church.
And you see this clearly in a German requiem.
How so? Isn't a requiem a mass for the dead?
With all the Latin prayers? A traditional Catholic
requiem is a prayer for the dead, praying that
their souls get into heaven, avoiding judgment
and hellfire. It's all about the afterlife. Brahms
tossed out the Latin liturgy completely. He wrote
his own text. He handpicked his own texts from
Martin Luther's German translation of the Bible.
And every single passage he chose is focused
on comforting the living. That's a huge shift.
It's not about the soul departing. It's about
the people left behind who are crying. Exactly.
The very first line is, Blessed are they that
mourn, for they shall be comforted. It's psychological,
not theological. He even told a conductor that
he would have gladly swapped the word German.
in the title for Human, he wanted it to be a
universal message of comfort for anyone suffering
loss regardless of their faith. That makes it
feel much more modern. Yeah. It's about the human
condition, not dogma. Which is why it still hits
people so hard today. It's for us. Let's move
to the final chapter of his life. Brahms is getting
older. He's achieved everything. He's rich. He's
famous. The war has mostly cooled down. In 1890,
at age 57, he decides to retire. He thinks he's
tapped out. He really did. He wrote his will.
He started throwing away incomplete manuscripts.
He told his publisher, I'm done. I've achieved
enough. I'm just going to eat well and enjoy
my vacation. He felt the creative well was dry.
But the universe had other plans. And those plans
involved a clarinet. Right. In 1891, he takes
a trip to the court of Meiningen and hears the
principal clarinetist, a man named Richard Muehlfeld.
And something about the sound of that instrument,
that mellow, hollow, autumnal quality just captivated
him. It unlocked one last door in his creativity.
It's his Indian summer. It is a beautiful one.
He comes out of retirement and writes the clarinet
trio, the gorgeous clarinet quintet and two clarinet
sonatas. And these pieces are just sublime. They're
less stormy. me than his early stuff they're
nostalgic sad but so deeply beautiful it's the
sound of a man looking back on his life and saying
goodbye and the goodbye came relatively soon
after that it did in 1896 he was diagnosed with
liver cancer the same disease that had killed
his father he deteriorated very quickly His last
public appearance was in March 1897, just a month
before he died. Where was it? He went to the
Musikverein in Vienna to hear a performance of
his own Fourth Symphony. That must have been
an incredibly emotional night. It was overwhelming.
The audience knew he was dying. He was sitting
up in the director's box looking pale and frail.
And after every single movement of the symphony,
the entire audience erupted into applause looking
up at him. Tears were streaming down his face.
It was the public telling him, we understand.
We love you. Thank you. Wow. That gives me chills.
What a way to go. He died on April 3rd, 1897.
He was buried in the Vienna Central Cemetery
right near Beethoven and Schubert. He finally
took his place physically among the giants he
spent his whole life looking up to. And history
cemented that place pretty quickly. The conductor
Hans von Bülow coined that fountains phrase,
the three Bs. Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, the holy
trinity of German music. It solidified him as
the third pillar of that great lineage. the rightful
heir. So as we wrap this up, let's try to summarize
what we've learned. Brahms wasn't just the bearded
statue on the piano. No, he was the bridge. He
was the one who proved that you didn't have to
burn down the library to write a new book. He
showed that you could take the strict, ancient
forms of the past, the counterpoint, the sonata,
the passacaglia, and fill them with a modern,
complex, emotional language. He paved the way
for modernism not by breaking the rules, but
by mastering them so completely that he exhausted
their possibilities from the inside out. It brings
me to a final provocative thought for you, for
our listeners. We live in a world today that's
defined by remix culture. We sample old songs.
We reboot old movies. We archive everything.
We often create by recontextualizing the past.
In that sense, is Brahms actually the first true
modern artist, a creator who built new worlds
strictly by remixing the DNA of his musical ancestors?
He didn't invent the forms. He evolved them into
something new. That's a fascinating way to look
at it. He was the ultimate synthesizer. He proved
that the past is never really dead, if you know
how to talk to it. If you want to hear that synthesis
in action, I want everyone to go listen to the
finale of the Fourth Symphony. Don't just let
it wash over you. Really listen and try to hear
that eight -bar bass line hidden underneath,
holding up that massive, tragic, romantic storm.
It's a trip. It certainly is. A masterpiece.
That's it for this deep dive into the progressive
traditionalist. Thanks for listening, and we'll
catch you on the next one.