Walking in the footsteps of a giant
Johannes Brahms rose from a poor Hamburg childhood to become the guardian of the great classical tradition in the Romantic age — a composer so revered that conductors spoke of "the three Bs": Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. He is at once the master of monumental symphonies and the author of some of the most familiar tunes on earth: his Hungarian Dances have set feet tapping for a century and a half, and his Lullaby has sung more children to sleep than any melody ever written.
Twenty-one years to a first symphony
When Brahms was twenty, Robert Schumann publicly declared him the future of German music — a blessing that became a burden. Terrified of comparison with Beethoven ("You have no idea how it feels," he confessed, "to hear behind you the tramp of a giant"), the ruthless perfectionist spent twenty-one years polishing his First Symphony, and burned dozens of works he judged unworthy. The wait was vindicated: the premiere in 1876 was a triumph, and the piece was promptly hailed as "Beethoven's Tenth". Behind the gruff beard stood a man of quiet devotion — above all to Clara Schumann, the great love of his life, whom he supported faithfully for forty years without ever marrying her, or anyone else.
Brahms and Prague
No composer from abroad did more for Prague's music. Sitting on the jury of an Austrian state grant in the 1870s, Brahms was astonished by the entries of an unknown Czech named Antonín Dvořák — and instead of guarding his own fame, he launched his rival's: he pressed his own publisher to print Dvořák's music and championed him for the rest of his life, even correcting the proofs of Dvořák's scores while the Czech master was away in America. The friendship ran deep both ways: when Brahms died in 1897, Dvořák travelled to Vienna to walk in his funeral procession. Hear the Hungarian Dances in Prague today and you are hearing the man who gave the city its greatest composer.