THE position of Johannes Brahms (1833-97), the last great Romantic composer, the first great Modern, continues to be debated 100 years after his death. Does he represent an epilogue to Viennese Classicism, or to Austro-German Symphonism? Does he occupy a lesser place behind Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert? More probably, he should be viewed as a composer looking to the past as well as the future.
As Schumann was quick to detect, Brahms is unique; a traditionalist who revitalised the harmonically-based Classical style while also pointing towards Modernism, as in his Cello Sonata No 2. His diversity is overlooked. Brahms became part of Catholic Vienna, yet was also well capable of being the Protestant composer, as evident in his magisterial Ein Deutsches Requiem which was first performed in 1868.
Death had become his central theme in his motets and songs. But he was to explore it most extensively in his rugged great requiem, his hymn to suffering humanity, which though based on fragments of Luther's Bible, is not liturgical, but is essentially a meditation about how the living confront loss. Yet his lushly romantic Violin Concerto (1879), one of the five major concertos of the 19th-century violin repertoire, reveals little of the requiem's austerity or toughness. The joy and life of his Hungarian Dances are difficult to surpass. Melancholy, though, is central to his work, a melancholy which was also a form of realism. Brahms invariably balances his romanticism with formal exactness. Even a work as buoyant and as innovative as his dazzling Horn Trio in E Flat Major, (1865) contains an elegiac slow movement believed to be commemorating his mother's death earlier that year.
For much of his career he was viewed as Beethoven's musical heir, a fact of which he was personally aware, no doubt finding it as oppressive as it was inspirational.
IT took Brahms more than 20 years to produce his First Symphony. His first attempt at the form in 1854 became his First Piano Concerto. As that work demonstrates, Brahms, a gifted pianist, is a symphonic composer. His four symphonies illustrate the relationship between Romantic piano music and the modern orchestra, as well as the closeness existing for Brahms, between chamber music and the symphony, Schumann described Brahms's piano sonatas as "veiled symphonies". With his First Symphony in 1876, Brahms abandoned the scherzo, so vital to Beethoven's concept of the symphony. His Second Symphony premiered within a year, the third in 1883.
Two years later, he conducted the premiere of the Fourth Symphony - which in its third movement contains his only symphonic scherzo. It was his farewell to the symphony form, returning only once more to orchestral composition with the Double Concerto in 1887. For the last decade of his life he concentrated on chamber music, and his Clarinet Trio and Clarinet Quintet, both written in 1891, are late masterworks.
Acquiring a far wider and deeper knowledge of Bach, Handel and Couperin than Beethoven's generation, Brahms brought an antiquarian's interest to his study of his musical legacy and investigated Renaissance and Baroque music, collecting complete editions of Bach and Handel. His specialist interest went back even further, to his spiritual ancestor, Schutz (1585-1672). Researching folk music was not, for Brahms, a nationalist gesture - he saw it as a way of revitalising and enhancing the expressive potential of the sonata form. While, though drawing on folk music for his songs, of which he wrote more than 200, his best vocal pieces are serious lieder.
This hardworking, most human - and humane - of composers died of liver cancer aged 64, on April 3rd 1897.
