Johannes Brahms

From Philosopedia

Brahms, Johannes (1833—1897)

Brahms, the famed German composer, wrote music in almost every genre except opera. His lieder are worldwide favorites, as are his songs and chamber music.

Biographers dispute whether or not Brahms before his thirteenth birthday “played the piano at night in bars” in low-class dives and brothels surrounding the docks in his native Hamburg. Jan Swafford in Johannes Brahms: A Biography (1998) speculates:

• Johannes was surrounded by the stench of beer and unwashed sailors and bad food, the din of rough laughter and drunkenness and raving obscenity. . . . Between dances the women would sit the pre-pubescent teenager on their laps and pour beer into him, and pull down his pants and hand him around to be played with, to general hilarity. . . . There may have been worse from the sailors. Johannes was as fair and pretty as a girl.

Some, including Kurt Hoffmann in Johannes Brahms und Hamburg (1986), deny he played anywhere at all before he was fourteen. Some say he romanced Robert Schumann’s widow, Clara. Others say Schumann did not attempt suicide because Brahms had sent him a “too-candid” letter lamenting his inability to accompany Clara on the piano because of her absence. Some say Schumann starved to death because of problems Brahms brought on—Schumann once confessed to his diary to homosexual fantasies—others that Schumann died of tertiary syphilis. “Brahms and Schubert, my two favorite gay composers,” wrote Larry Kramer. Most agree that Brahms was difficult, lonely and independent, gruff and tender.

Less than a month after Schumann died, Brahms and Clara traveled with two of the children to Switzerland, after which he returned to Hamburg, never again to be part of the Schumann family. As to why the twenty-three-year-old Brahms did not marry a woman with seven children remains unknown. His attachment to Clara remained strong, and he was not known to have suffered any guilt for his frequenting prostitutes.

Although he is thought by many to have been a Protestant because of his German Requiem, Brahms once said of that work that it should have been called a “Human Requiem.” Brahms was less “religious” than Beethoven. This he reveals in letters to Herzogenberg, in which he wrote that he was a complete agnostic. One critic described his “Four Serious Songs,” written a year before he died, as being his “supreme utterance of noble thoughts.”

Observed Joseph McCabe,

• The words to the first, as a matter of fact, reject and almost ridicule the idea of personal immortality.

Agreeing, the scholarly Paul Edwards has cited Brahms as being a non-theist, that although he wrote much religious music Brahms remained unchurched. At one point in a discussion in which he argued about his non-theistic views, Brahms said, "I am a secular humanist," not a tithe-paying theist nor an anti-theist.

{CE; Freethought History, #21, 1997; JM; RAT; RE; Charles Rosen, “Aimez-Vous Brahms?” The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998; TRI; TYD}