"Significant Personalities as Turning Points in the Life and Music of Johannes Brahms "

Abstract

"This paper aims to reveal the turning points in the life and work of German composer Johannes Brahms. These main events were influenced by certain figures of the epoch, whose encounters marked the artistic activity of Brahms. In explaining the reasons that lay behind the composition of a work, emotion is one of the most specific criteria. Personal experience becomes the indispensable condition of artistic creation and lays at the core of the creative impulse. The paper is structured according to the following four aspects: the first friends (together with Albert Dietrich and their mentor, Robert Schumann, Brahms contributed to the composition of the FAE Sonata for piano and violin, Julius Otto Grimm is the witness of Brahms’ love for Agathe von Siebold, while Julius Stockhausen emerges as the master of the Brahms lieder), the conductors who became the composer’s close friends and promoted his symphonies (Hermann Levi, Hans Richter, Hans von Bülow, the latter a genuine emissary of Brahms’s works, the author of the Three B syntagm – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms), the Viennese friends (the critic Eduard Hanslick, who characterized the works in Opp. 117-119 as genuine monologues and Joseph Hellmesberger, founder of the quartet name after him, with whom Brahms performed gems of the chamber music repertoire), and the confidants of Brahms, permanent figures in the life of the composer (the surgeon Theodor Billroth and Joseph Viktor Widmann, the author of the memoirs that revealed significant aspects of the composer’s life and works). Keywords: Johannes Brahms, works, life, significant personalities, friends "