Johannes Brahms: His fundamental presence in my life

Johannes Brahms, is the man whose music has enriched my life a thousand times. I have my mother to thank for my love of Brahms. My mother loved Brahms beyond words. She listened to his string sextet and the quintets again and again. My father loved the 4 Symphonies, especially the first. However, it was my mother, at so many junctures during my childhood, who played records of his music again and again. She was so obsessed with his string music perhaps because it made her happy during difficult times, almost as a consolation in the times of sadness. However, his music also brought tears of happiness to her eyes. Well, I have to say that she cried easily. She was a highly emotional woman, a woman whose life was not always easy, my loving mother felt the difficulties of life with great depth. 

I can remember my parents listening to the violin concerto upstairs at the home of our neighbor in the house of the Calle Ismael Vazquez, one of the many houses my parents rented until they could afford their own house. The slow movement was imprinted in my memory to the extent that whenever I hear it in any context of my adult life, my memory immediately and inexorable drifts back to the period of time in Cochabamba when we lived at that address. By the way, I have a similar reflex emotional memory with Mahler's second symphony. These two pieces remind me with immediacy of the period of time when I was 11 or 12 years old.

Johannes Brahms had a terrible childhood. His immense talent, not only as a pianist but also as an improviser, was recognised very early on by his parents. His parents, as a result of dire poverty, sent him to play the piano in local bars, essentially to entertain in whorehouses, in the poor neighbourhoods of the Pauli district of Hamburg. He was probably forced to witness terrible seedy scenes as a teenager, much too early, without prior experience, and one will never know to what extent he experienced psychological and possibly sexual abuse as a teenager. Various biographers have claimed that these experiences made him the man he was later on as an adult more than any other experiences, and marked his often difficult personality, but also his extraordinary generosity.

His generosity is to me one of his more persuasive human qualities. It is well known and well documented that he was famous and well-off during his lifetime. Very few of his contemporaries, including Mahler, Bruckner, Mendelssohn, enjoyed the fame and wealth that Brahms enjoyed during his long life, perhaps with the exception of Franz Liszt. Yet for the longest period of time in his long life, he lived in a small apartment in Vienna, an apartment he never owned. He never insisted on surrounding himself with luxury. He criticized Wagner without end for his desire to show off wealth and for his sybaritic and racist tendencies. Around Liszt he was extremely careful and circumspect because of Liszt's ostentatious ways. He gave away huge sums of money, primarily to his brother and mother, but also to friends in need. Some of his friends were either persecuted or shunned. He stood by them. His friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, as a result of his Jewish roots, was intermittently discriminated against. Brahms supported and protected this friend for years. This has always touched me very deeply, especially at a time in the late 19th century, during which anti-semitism was a vogue difficult to avoid among the educated and artistic classes.

My favourite photo of Johannes Brahms

His music touches me in such a profound way that it is difficult for me to think of anything else other than the most sublime thoughts and feelings when I hear his music. I believe I have listend to everything he has ever composed. In my opinion everything he composed is as close to a masterpiece as one can think. It is said that he destroyed more than he composed, particularly early pieces, a fact that to some experts suggests that he was well aware of his future place in the history of music. His Intermezzi, his piano sonatas, his string works, the clarinet and French horn works, his voice pieces, are just extraordinary beyond description. All of them. His lyricism, his voicing, the musical ideas, are all universal and will never cease to inspire me and I am certain generations to come. In my view of the musical universe, comprised of so many geniuses, his music is as close as any composer's music has come to express the highest ideals of love and beauty through the magical language of music. I can only say, that I feel fortunate to have Brahms in my life. He lives deep in my heart.

#perspective #outlook #newlife