His first symphony took him twenty-one years, because Beethoven had already written nine. He said he could hear the giant's footsteps behind him the whole time.
Brahms was born in 1833 in a poor Hamburg lane. His father made a living on the double bass and horn in taverns and dance halls, and by his teens Brahms was playing piano for money in the dock district to help out.
At twenty he knocked on Schumann's door with his own music under his arm. Schumann listened, then published an article announcing that the man German music had been waiting for had arrived. It made an overnight name of someone who had not yet published a note, and saddled him with an expectation he spent the next forty years paying off.
Months later Schumann broke down, threw himself into the Rhine, was pulled out and committed to an asylum. Brahms moved nearby to help Clara Schumann and seven children. Schumann died two years later; Brahms and Clara went on writing to each other for forty years, and late in life they burned great quantities of those letters between them, so what it actually was cannot be settled and the accounts contradict one another.
He was merciless with himself. The first symphony took twenty-one years to release. By his own account he threw away twenty string quartets before letting one be printed. In his last years he burned manuscripts in batches, thoroughly enough that we do not know what was lost.
He died in Vienna in 1897, eleven months after Clara.
Brahms sounds thick. He rarely lets a tune walk alone — there is usually another layer or two moving underneath, so a second hearing turns up a line the first one missed.
He also likes to hide the beat: threes written to feel like twos, twos that come out as threes. If you cannot find your footing, that is deliberate.
The late piano pieces are a different Brahms — short, slow, thinly voiced, like someone talking quietly to himself nearby. He wrote them around sixty, by which point he was no longer trying to prove anything.
