Brahms

Johannes Brahms, born on May 7, 1833, in Hamburg and who died on April 3, 1897, in Vienna, was a German composer, pianist, and conductor. Johannes Brahms is considered one of the most important musicians of the Romantic period. Some consider him to be Beethoven's "successor," including Hans von Bülow, who described his first symphony (composed between 1862 and 1876) as "Beethoven's Tenth Symphony."

Brahms spent most of his career in Vienna, where he was a significant figure on the music scene. He composed for piano, chamber music, symphony orchestra, voice, and choirs. Unlike other great classical music composers, Johannes Brahms never composed an opera. Also a virtuoso pianist, he gave the first performance of many of his compositions; he also worked with famous musicians of his time, including the pianist and composer Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms was an uncompromising perfectionist who destroyed many of his works and left some unpublished.

Brahms was both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music extensively used the structures and compositional techniques of Baroque and Classical masters. He was a master of counterpoint, a rigorous compositional method for which Bach is famous, as well as thematic development, a compositional process introduced by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. While many of his contemporaries criticised his music, finding it too academic, his works were later admired by personalities as diverse as the progressive Arnold Schönberg and the conservative Edward Elgar.