Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor whose four-decade composing career produced one of the foundational documents of late-19th-century European classical music — particularly his four symphonies (composed 1876–1885), his Hungarian Dances (composed 1869–1880), and his German Requiem (composed 1865–1868). He was born Johannes Brahms on May 7, 1833, in Hamburg, Germany, into a German working-class family. His father Johann Jakob Brahms was a Hamburg-area double-bass player at the Hamburg City Theatre, and his mother Christiane Nissen was a homemaker.

His teenage and early-adulthood music career across 1845–1853 — across multiple Hamburg-area piano-performance-and-composition engagements — preceded his 1853 Düsseldorf, Germany meeting with German Romantic-era composer Robert Schumann. His September 30, 1853 first encounter with Robert Schumann at the Schumann family home in Düsseldorf — across which Schumann praised Brahms in his October 28, 1853 essay "Neue Bahnen" ("New Paths") in the German music magazine Neue Zeitschrift für Musik — launched his mid-19th-century German classical-music public profile.

His ongoing 1853–1856 close-friendship-and-romantic-relationship with the Schumann family (across which he supported Clara Schumann, the famous concert-pianist wife of Robert Schumann, after her husband Robert's February 1854 institutionalization for mental illness and his July 1856 institutional death) shaped his later biographical narrative.

His 1862 emigration to Vienna, Austria, and his subsequent ongoing Vienna-area composition career across 1862–1897 produced his 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s European classical-music public profile. His 1865–1868 composition of the German Requiem (Ein deutsches Requiem) — and the subsequent April 10, 1868 Bremen Cathedral first commercial-concert performance — launched his late-1860s European classical-music public profile.

His 1876 first symphony composition — across which he worked on the symphony for approximately 14 years (1862–1876, in part because of his ongoing comparison with Beethoven's nine symphonies) — produced his mid-1870s European classical-music commercial peak. The November 4, 1876 first commercial-concert performance of the First Symphony at the Karlsruhe Court Theatre produced his mid-1870s European classical-music public profile. His subsequent three symphonies — the 1877 Second Symphony, the 1883 Third Symphony, and the 1885 Fourth Symphony — produced his late-1870s and 1880s European classical-music commercial peak. He died on April 3, 1897, at age 63, in Vienna, Austria, of liver-related complications.

His name Johannes is the German-Latin form of John (from the Hebrew Yochanan). Johannes has been climbing in American naming since the 2010s.