This course is a biographical and musical study of Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and explores his unique ability to create works of surpassing romantic expressiveness, melodic inventiveness, and harmonic sophistication.
His profoundly beautiful music blends 19th-century Romantic sweep and expressiveness with 18th-century copositional discipline.
He was discovered at the age of 20 and introduced to the European public by Robert Schumann. His unrequited love for Schumann’s wife Clara was the stuff of gossip for years.
A prickly, overly self-critical man with a raucous sense of humor, Brahms was, in turn, instrumental in the discovery and promotion of such composers as Dvorák and Mahler.
These lectures also include excerpts from more than two dozen of Brahms’s works.