Brahms

Johannes Brahms, born on 7 May 1833 in Hamburg and died on 3 April 1897 in Vienna, is a German composer, pianist and conductor. Johannes Brahms is one of the most important musicians of the Romantic period. Some regard him as Beethoven's "successor", including Hans von Bülow, who described his first symphony (composed between 1862 and 1876) as "Beethoven's Tenth Symphony".

Brahms spent most of his career in Vienna, where he was one of the leading figures on the music scene. He composed for piano, chamber music, symphony orchestra, voice and choir. Unlike other great classical composers, Johannes Brahms never composed an opera. Also a virtuoso pianist, he gave the first performance of many of his compositions; he also worked with celebrated musicians of his time, including the pianist and composer Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim. Brahms was an uncompromising perfectionist who destroyed much of his work and left some of it unpublished.

Brahms was both a traditionalist and an innovator. His music makes extensive use of the structures and compositional techniques of the baroque and classical masters. He was a master of counterpoint, a rigorous compositional method for which Bach is celebrated, as well as of thematic development, a compositional process introduced by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. While many of his contemporaries criticised his music as too academic, his works were later admired by figures as diverse as the progressive Arnold Schoenberg and the conservative Edward Elgar.