Johannes Brahms

Brahms was born in Hamburg and settled in Vienna in 1862. Robert Schumann's 1853 article "New Paths" had hailed him as a major new talent. He wrote in the Classical forms while the New German School of Liszt and Wagner was moving away from them: four-movement symphonies, sonata-form chamber music, and Baroque forms such as the passacaglia finale of the Fourth Symphony.

His method, which Schoenberg later called developing variation, is to alter small motifs constantly instead of repeating a tune. Cross-rhythms and a Hungarian and Roma colour add rhythmic vitality, as in the Hungarian Dances, which are built on Hungarian dance tunes in csárdás style. The First Symphony took from 1855 to 1876. Its finale's main tune resembles the Ode to Joy of Beethoven's Ninth, and Brahms is reported to have replied that anyone could see that. The finale's introduction has the alphorn melody he sent to Clara Schumann in 1868 with the note "Thus blew the shepherd's horn today!"

The catalog also covers his choral, chamber and piano music. A German Requiem (1865 to 1868) sets texts he chose himself from the Luther Bible, not the Latin Mass. The Piano Quintet in F minor began as a string quintet and passed through a two-piano version. The Haydn Variations (1873) end in a passacaglia on a five-bar bass. For the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld he wrote the Clarinet Trio, Quintet and Sonatas, and his late piano pieces, Opp. 116 to 119, are mostly intermezzos and capriccios.