Johannes Brahms: Violin Concerto

When Brahms was fifteen years old his teacher Marxsen concluded his piano training, and the young musician had to start walking in the world by himself. But this did not mean Johannes to abandone his interest in composition and musical arrangements, while he continued to play in the Hamburg breweries —also occasionally in some house of the aristocracy— and to visit the Baumgartner piano house as often as possible in the absence of one of his own where to practice.

He would also go on concert tours, making up a violin and piano duo with one or the other of the two most renowned violinists of the time, Reményi and Joseph Joachim. With the latter he forged over the years a close friendship that, except for some ups and downs, did last a lifetime. A friendship that was likely built on the healthy obstinacy of Joachim so that Brahms would decide to pay a visit to the Schumans in Düsseldorf, that is, the composer Robert Schumann and his beautiful wife and famous pianist, Clara Schumann.

Brahms, c. 1872
(1833 - 1897)

Determined to take a step that could provide great encouragement to his artistic aspirations, after a few days of travel through the Rhine Valley, the young Johannes, aged 20, arrived in Düsseldorf and knocked on the Schumann's door one day in September 1853, a few months before Robert tried to commit suicide throwing himself, precisely, into the waters of the Rhine.

Preceded by several letters from Joachim, the welcome could not have been more friendly and warm, more simple and cordial. That night, Clara and Robert Schumann invited Johannes to dinner, thus beginning one of the most moving and disrupting relationships that has ever been seen between two artists.
But after the suicide attempt, on February 1854, Robert was admitted to a mental asylum, at his own request. Clara, aged 34, stayed alone, in charge of her eight children. She became the only breadwinner for them, through giving concerts and teaching.

Brahms, Clara's consolation
Aware of the attempted suicide and subsequent confinement, Brahms went to Clara to comfort her without asking anything in return. Initially. But the tavern artist, spoiled in his childhood by a ring of fallen women, stumbled here with a feminine soul and figure about which he was completely unaware. Before the kindness and sweetness of Clara, he was able to respond only in stammering tones, with singular signs of affection that until today we could not say if they were or not reciprocated.
For a while, being Robert in the mental institution, Johannes remained with Clara, almost in the role of a homeowner. But the unconfessed idyll would never be resolved, although it lasted more than forty years.

Concerto for violin and orchestra, in D major
Dedicated to his friend, the violinist Joachim, it was composed in the summer of 1878, probably in the Austrian Alps, in the village of Pörschach, where according to Brahms himself "melodies are everywhere and care must be taken not to step on them when walking". It premiered in Leipzig on January 1, 1879, with Brahms conducting and Joachim as the soloist.

Movements
The concerto follows the standard concerto form, with three movements in the pattern quick–slow–quick (the Allegro giocoso being the most popular):

00:00  Allegro non troppo
24:09  Adagio
32:14  Allegro giocoso, ma non troppo vivace — Poco più presto

The rendition is by Hilary Hahn, with Paavo Järvi conducting the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.

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Brahms: Hungarian Dance No 5

Brahms, early childhood
Fruit of the union of Hersika, a seamstress, and Johann, an extroverted musician who earned his living playing in small orchestras that encouraged provincial life, Johannes Brahms had to leave school two years after he begun conventional studies. His parents had seen in the little boy, at the age of seven, a child prodigy whose musical skills, properly exploited, could take them out of the humble condition in which they lived, in the slums of Hamburg, in the late 1840s.

Brahms, aged 20 (1833 - 1897)

And fortune was on his side. A remarkable piano teacher named Cossel, whom Johann knew purely by chance, offered to teach Hannes — as he was called as a family —  without receiving anything in return. The child Brahms responded to this token of generosity by devoting himself to learning seriously, with tenacity and a large quota of personal sacrifice. Since there was no piano in Brahms' home, he had to contrive to get a kind bourgeois to lend him one. The piano maker Baumgartner, looking to the future, did his utmost to support the child.

Faced with the remarkable progress of the child, Professor Cossel decided Johannes continue his training with whom had been his own teacher, a renowned musical director that far exceeded the artistic stature of Cossel himself.
But this time the guidance had to be paid.

Brahms in the taverns
The increase in family income became an inescapable necessity. Fortunately, the solution was at hand. Johann, an expert in these matters, obtained for Hannes a job in a tavern in the port neighbourhoods of Hamburg.

There, sitting at the piano, little ten-year-old Johannes had the mission of delighting with light melodies the ears of drunken sailors and tender prostitutes. If his audience burned with enthusiasm, he should also play the violin, the violoncello and the horn, instruments that, luckily, he also handled with dexterity.

This pitiful story — which the composer himself undertook to divulge — did not prevent, however, that adult Brahms could later compose melodies full of joy, prominent among them the highly celebrated Hungarian Dances, twenty-one pieces of much liveliness and brilliance, originally written for piano four hands and composed during a period that goes from 1852 to 1869.

Hungarian Dance No. 5, in F sharp minor
The dances were the most profitable for Brahms, and later were arranged for many instruments and ensembles. He also arranged the first ten dances for solo piano, the dance No 5 becoming the most popular. It is based on some czardas written by another composer, which Brahms mistakenly thought they were folk songs.

A version for solo piano, by American pianist Caroline Clipsham.

Below, Bill Edwards, former champion of the USA Old-Time Piano Playing Championship, trying to revalidate the title with a novel version halfway between ragtime and charleston.

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Abbess Liszt: Piano Concerto No 1

Prince Nikolaus was a head-to-toe selfish man. Divorced and remarried, he was not willing for his former wife to do the same. As soon as he learned of Franz Liszt's purpose to marry Carolyne de Sayn-Wittgenstein, he devoted himself full-time to lobby every Holy See's authorities to prevent it. The visit of the Pope's emissary to Carolyne announcing that the marriage authorization was to be revised was the fruit of all his intrigues.

But such amount lobbying efforts had an impact on his state of health. In 1864, the prince left this world. It was the ideal occasion for Liszt and Carolyne to unite in holy matrimony, without any obstacle. But at the same time the love relationship was fading away —Franz, believing that he was not up to that sort of things; Carolyne, just about to be convinced that such an accumulation of difficulties was but a warning of future failure.

This being the case, Liszt made the decision of his life, surprising everyone, friends, colleagues and the audiences. In the year 1865, at 54 years old, the famous pianist and composer was given the "minor religious orders", thus becoming the respected Abbess Liszt. Nonetheless, this did not prevent him from continuing with his career, in his well-known areas of pianist, composer ... and lover, since legend says that he had more than one affair after being given religious orders.

But Franz never stopped maintaining contact with Princess Carolyne. For several years they would exchange thousands of letters, until the day Liszt passed away, on July 31, 1886. Six months later, without fuss, Carolyne went after him.

Piano Concerto N ° 1 in E flat major
In the course of his long life, Liszt wrote two concerts for piano and orchestra. The most celebrated and the one that has most attracted the attention of the public and performers is the first of them. It took about 26 years for Liszt to compose it. The first sketches date back to 1830 when Franz was only 19 years old. In the course of the composer's long and lively life, the concert No. 1 would undergo a series of modifications, culminating, apparently, in 1853 with the latest changes. Two years later the concerto premiered in Weimar with the composer at the piano and his friend Hector Berlioz conducting. With a couple of further modifications, it was published in 1856.

The concerto lasts about 20 minutes and consists in four movements played with no interruption.

The outstanding Argentine pianist Martha Argerich is accompanied by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

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Franz Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No 1

Princess Carolyne was undoubtedly a refined princess but she used to smoke cigars and talk a lot, as the composer and pianist Hans von Büllow, Liszt's son-in-law, married to his daughter Cosima, told everyone. (Perhaps because of being that talkative, Cosima left him later to live life with the love of his life, 25 years her senior, Richard Wagner.)
Apart from that, Princess Carolyne was indeed a good woman who devoted her life to Franz accomplishments, including in that commitment the remote monitoring of the education of the composer's children, besides the wise suggestion that he will abandon the concert tours to devote all his energies to composition.

While all this was going on, Carolyne's request for divorce from her prince and army officer Nikolaus, still awaited the decision of the Holy See, an issue that Carolyne will have favorably resolved only in 1855, ten years after the process started and shortly after Nikolaus had remarried. But, one thing was becoming divorced, obtaining permission to get married, quite another. The church ruled that Nikolaus was right to do so (because he was a Protestant) but Carolyne did not, showing little regard for the princess's devotion to theological studies.

The permission to marry was finally granted to Carolyne in 1860, five years after the divorce. Franz wanted to get married right then, but she suggested to do it in Rome the following year, by the time the composer turned 50, on October 22, 1861.
And so they agreed. But on the 21st, the eve of the wedding, an emissary of the Pope knocked on the door of Carolyne's house in Rome, to announce that a new revision of the procedure was required.

The Mephisto Waltz
The piece popularly known as Mephisto Waltz is the first of four waltzes with the same title composed by Liszt at different times. The piano version – there is one for the orchestra and one for two pianos – was born around 1860 although its harmonic innovations presage the spirit of the music of future composers as Ravel or Prokofiev.
Consequently, I advise patience and willingness in listening to the first two and a half minutes, because it hardly can be assumed as music from the mid-nineteenth century. There are no Love Dream or Consolations here, but Liszt and romanticism, although it may not seem so at the beginning.
With that in mind, enjoy the following comment on Youtube on this piece, a somewhat different opinion about Lisztian "bravery":
"I saw this shit in a bugs bunny episode ... and the piano exploded".

The rendition is by the Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky.

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Franz Liszt: Consolation No 3

Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein with her daughter Marie in 1840

The princess

Many years ago, back in the fourth century, a disciple of the philosopher and theologian St. Augustine dared to ask him what God used to do before creating the universe. Augustine did not hesitate and, impassively, answered that along with creating the universe God had also created time.

The ingenious and accurate answer remained for centuries as immovable truth attracting the attention of theologians and philosophers, among them, Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, who as a pioneer woman of the theology in the XIX century, decided to sink the tooth to this and other matters.

In the mid-1840s, already separated from her husband and officer of the Russian army Prince Nikolaus, Princess Carolyne used to spend all the day long in his native Kyiv to unravel the questions and answers that both Augustine and the distinguished doctor of theology St. Thomas Aquinas had been raising centuries ago.

Franz Liszt visits Kyiv
In the summer of 1847, while working on those matters, she learned that the internationally-famed composer and pianist Franz Liszt was in Kyiv as part of a concert tour throughout Russia, in addition to Austria and Hungary.
We do not know the details but we may assume that Carolyne attended one of the concerts, after which she would have begun to question the amount of time she spent studying Augustine and Thomas. The fact is that Carolyne left Kyiv and went to live with Franz in the city of Weimar, where the famous pianist resided serving as Kapellmeister of the court.

The relationship, extremely complex due to the repeated and unsuccessful attempts to get Carolyne's divorce from the Holy See, will last for fourteen years.

Consolation No. 3, in D-flat major
Composed between 1849 and 1850, at the height of the love affair, the "Consolations", though very typical of Liszt's musical universe, tend to be related to the aesthetics of Chopin's nocturnes, for its spirit and its non-spectacular technique.
Consolation No. 3 is the one that has most attracted the favour of the public, of the six that make up the group.

The rendition, outstanding, is by Tiffany Poon when she was eleven.

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