Erwin Rommel The desert fox

 

Erwin Rommel

The desert fox

SOURCE: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC HISTORY

 

Born on November 15, 1891, Erwin Rommel was a hero to the Germans and the most respected and feared officer in the British Army, who came to nickname him "the desert fox." But in the end Adolf Hitler forced him to commit suicide accused of participating in a coup.

Biographies

 

Second World War

 

Nazism.

J.M. Sadurni

Historical news specialist

Updated April 29, 2020

Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox, unlike the highest Nazi barons, was born into a middle-class bourgeois family on November 15, 1891. The most famous field marshal of the German army would become an unconditional admirer of Adolf Hitler, although he realized too late that his idol was an unscrupulous criminal.

LEADER, AUSTERE AND ASTUTE STRATEGIST

Attracted by the emerging aviation industry and technological advances, the young Erwin planned to study engineering, but against the opposition of his father, he enlisted in the army, a very attractive option for an ambitious young man at that time. Enrolled in a local unit, Rommel soon stood out for his leadership and in a short time he went from corporal to being promoted to sergeant. Rommel entered the Danzig Military School, where he excelled more in the physical tests than in the theoretical ones.

During his stay at the academy he met what would be his only wife, Lucie Maria Mollin. Rommel's life at that time was practically that of an ascetic: he didn't smoke, he didn't drink, and he never was: he didn't smoke, he didn't drink, and he was never immersed in the nightlife that the other officers enjoyed so much. He was a serious-minded young man, and apparently more given to listening than to arguing.

Rommel's life did not fit in with that of the rest of the officers. He did not enjoy the nightlife, nor did he smoke or drink.

At the outbreak of World War I, Rommel was sent with his regiment to the Argonne area, a region that stretches between the Marne, the Ardennes and the Meuse. He quickly stood out for his courage and was promoted to lieutenant, earning the respect of his men for always being on the front line of combat. In 1915 Rommel was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class and was subsequently sent to the Romanian front. He later received the highest distinction, reserved only for generals, for his cunning on the battlefield: Pour le Mérite.

Photo: Cordon Press

FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH THE FÜHRER

Rommel took very badly the result of the German surrender that culminated in the Treaty of Versailles. From then on, and with a Germany in full revolutionary effervescence, his life was transformed: he went from the turmoil on the battlefield to the tranquility and calm of domestic life with his wife Lucie, with whom he had his only son, Manfred. In 1932, while an instructor at the Dresden Military Academy, Rommel was promoted to Commander. Shortly after, Nazism came to power in Germany.

The first time that Rommel and Hitler met was during the 1935 Easter parade, and it was not exactly a cordial meeting. Rommel learned that for security an SS platoon would form between the Führer and his battalion. This decision greatly annoyed the commander who refused to march. Rommel stated: "This is an insult. If the Head of State doesn't feel safe in front of his own soldiers, I won't have them line up." His reckless decision could have ended in harsh punishment if Heinrich Himmler and Joseph Goebbels had not intervened. Finally, the SS did not form, and Hitler ended up congratulating Rommel and his battalion for their attitude.

Photo: Cordon Press

HIS MOST DEVOTED READER: ADOLF HITLER

HIS MOST DEVOTED READER: ADOLF HITLER

Foto: Cordon press

Rommel was a training freak. He forced his battalion to go up and down a hill up to four times arguing that "sweating saves blood." After his promotion to lieutenant colonel, Rommel had a run-in with Baldur Von Shirach, leader of the Hitler Youth, who had called him for the formation of this group of young people. But very soon Rommel clashed with him and his collaborators because of the dictatorial methods used by the SA. According to Rommel, they looked more like "little Napoleons" than soldiers. His experience in combat earned him the publication of a book in 1937 that is still required reading and study in countless military academies around the world.

The work pleasantly surprised Hitler, who became his most devoted reader. In this way, Rommel was appointed commander-in-chief of his escort battalion during his visits to Austria, the Sudetenland, Prague and Poland. The result was that Rommel came to deal daily with Hitler, and the influence he exerted on the commander was hypnotic, so much so that he came to "fall in love" with the Führer's virtues after the invasion of Poland. They were glory days. It was still a long way before Rommel realized Hitler's irrational obstinacy, his capricious character, his hysterical attacks and the contempt he felt for his own soldiers, whom he sent on suicide missions, but, above all, After all, the least he would come to bear in the future would be "his infinite imbecility."

Following the publication of his book, Rommel was appointed commander-in-chief of the Führer's escort battalion. At that time, the commander was not yet aware of Hitler's hysterical and irrational character.

THE LEGEND OF ROMMEL AND THE MADNESS OF HITLER

During the time when everything was going well between the two men, Rommel agreed to lead the 7th Panzer Division (known as the Deutsches Afrikakorps) which would be known as the "ghost division" for the surprise, speed and destructiveness with which it subdued his enemies.

The victories on the battlefield followed one after the other and the legend of Rommel grew, even reaching the British lines that christened him the Desert Fox. His successes earned him the highest decoration in the German army: the Cross of Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds after the capture of Benghazi, and his promotion to field marshal, the youngest in German history. But an error in the strategy on the part of the Führer ended up causing the German debacle in the battle of El Alamein. If Rommel managed to control the Suez Canal, London's communications with its colonies in the Middle East would be interrupted and this would be used by Axis forces to seize the region's oil wealth. But the German advance had to be stopped dead by an inconceivable logistical failure: the fuel for the tanks had run out. Foreseeing the coming disaster, Rommel ordered the withdrawal of his men in the face of an imminent massacre. Upon hearing the news, Hitler went mad and issued his eternal and delusional order: "No retreats!"

 

 

A flaw in Hitler's military strategy caused the Panzer division to run out of fuel

That order meant the beginning of the end for the Thousand Year Reich. On June 6, 1944, Hitler's strategic mistakes were exposed on the fateful D-Day, the day the Allies landed on the Normandy beaches. Neither Rommel nor his armored personnel could do anything in the face of this catastrophe; the dream of winning the war had turned into a nightmare in which there was only death and destruction.

FAILED OPERATION

At that point, Rommel was already fed up with Hitler. He considered that he was useless and a madman who had unleashed "a stupid and brutal war". Furthermore, at that time he came to know of the existence of the concentration camps and their monstrous methods. Rommel had never committed a war crime, not even against partisans, the generic name for resistance movements against Nazism. The Field Marshal did not refuse to be the man to bring about Hitler's downfall, but his integrity prevented him from accepting his death. He wanted him to be jailed and tried.

On 17 July, while traveling alone to his headquarters in the French town of Roche-Guyon, his vehicle was strafed by two British Spitfire fighters. The Desert Fox was thrown from the car. His fall left him unconscious and seriously injured: he suffered a quadruple skull fracture, facial injuries, and a blow to his left eye that caused severe swelling.

Photo: Cordon Press

On July 20, the so-called "Valkyrie operation", one of the attempts to end Hitler's life, had failed. Immediately, the regime's repression brought the alleged instigators to the firing squad.

 

To the surprise of many, and despite his seriousness, Rommel began to improve slightly. In the words of Dr. Esch, one of the most popular doctors of the Nazi regime, who worked tirelessly to keep the marshal alive, said: "Rommel overcame the operations with his left eye completely closed, completely deaf in his left ear and with terrible transient migraines. It was the sixth wound he had received in the line of duty."

Rommel, fed up with Hitler, was aware of the horror of the concentration camps and decided to get involved in the fall of the Führer.

TREASON, SUICIDE AND BURIAL OF A LEGEND

By then, Rommel had already lost favor with the Führer after one of those involved had mentioned his name several times during interrogations after the attack and Hans Speidel, also an active collaborator in the plot, testified against him.

 

Although Rommel categorically denied his involvement, on October 14, 1944 Generals Meisel and Burgdorf showed up at his home with an offer: either commit suicide and be buried with all the honors of a heroic field marshal, or he would be killed. arrested, tried and sentenced to death, his family dishonored and their property confiscated. After an hour of interview, the two officers went to the car that was waiting for them and Rommel told his wife: "I have come to say goodbye to you. Within a quarter of an hour I will be dead. They suspect that I took part in the plot to assassinate Hitler. Apparently, my name was on a list made by Goerdeler in which they considered me the future president of the Reich. [...] They say that Von Stülpnagel, Speidel and Von Hofacker have denounced me. It is the method they always use. I answered that I did not believe what they said, that it had to be a lie. The Führer gives me the choice between poison or being tried by a people's court".

Rommel was forced to choose between committing suicide or seeing his honor and his family disgraced. He chose suicide.

 

Rommel left his house and got into the car where Meisel and Burgdorf were waiting for him. Two hundred yards from Rommel's home, General Burgdorf ordered the car to stop and the occupants to get out of the vehicle except himself and the field marshal. Minutes later, the officer got out of the car and called his colleagues who, as they approached, saw Rommel hunched over and lying in the back seat, with his marshal's cap and baton on the floor of the vehicle, in his last moments of agony after having ingested a cyanide pill.

 

Facing public opinion, Rommel was said to have died of a stroke. During his funeral, the Führer, Adolf Hitler, was unable to look at the widow and son of one of Germany's most admired soldiers.

With affection,

Ruben

 

 

 

Phrases about hope

 

Phrases about hope

No matter how long the storm is, the sun always shines through the clouds again.

 

Khalil Gibran (1883-1931) Lebanese poet, novelist, and essayist.

It is necessary to wait, although hope must always be frustrated, since hope itself constitutes happiness, and its failures, however frequent they may be, are less horrible than its extinction.

 

Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) English writer.

At the heart of all winters lives a throbbing spring, and behind each night comes a smiling dawn.

 

Khalil Gibran (1883-1931) Lebanese poet, novelist, and essayist.

If he knew that the world would end tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today.

 

Martin Luther King (1929-1968) American pastor.

If I help just one person to have hope, I will not have lived in vain.

 

Martin Luther King (1929-1968) American pastor

Hope is the dream of the waking man.

 

Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC) Greek philosopher.

Hope is the worst of evils, because it prolongs man's torment.

 

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) German philosopher.

Hopelessness is based on what we know, which nothing is, and hope on what we do not know, which is everything.

 

Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949) Belgian writer.

It is better to travel hopeful than arrive.

 

Japanese proverb

Hope and fear are inseparable and there is no fear without hope, and no hope without fear.

 

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) French writer.

Desire, accompanied by the idea of being satisfied, is called hope; stripped of such an idea, despair.

 

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) English philosopher and political writer.

Hope makes the shipwrecked man wave his arms in the middle of the waters, even when he sees no land anywhere.

 

Ovid (43 BC-17) Latin poet.

Hope, despite his deceit, serves us at least to lead us to the end of existence on a pleasant path.

 

François de La Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) French writer.

 

Our calculations are wrong whenever fear or hope enter into them.

 

Molière (1622-1673) French comedianngrapher.

 

It will never be too late to seek a newer and better world, if we put courage and hope into the effort.

 

Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892) English poet.

 

In each dawn, there is a living poem of hope, and, when we go to bed, let us think that it will dawn.

 

Noel Clarasó (1899-1985) Spanish writer.

Each creature, at birth, brings us the message that God has not yet lost hope in men.

Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) Hindu philosopher and writer

While there is life, there is hope.

 

Saying

A ship should not sail with a single anchor, nor life with a single hope.

 

Epictetus of Phrygia (55-135) Greco-Roman philosopher.

 

Where one door closes, another opens.

 

Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616) Spanish writer.

 

Hope is a flowering tree that sways sweetly to the breath of illusions.

 

Severo Catalina (1832-1871) Spanish journalist and writer.

The sun has not yet set for the last time.

 

Titus Livy (59 AC-64 AC) Roman historian.

The same hope ceases to be happiness when it is accompanied by impatience.

 

John Ruskin (1819-1900) British critic and writer.

 

Hope is a Christian virtue that consists of despising all the miserable things in this world while waiting to enjoy, in an unknown country, unknown delights that priests promise us in exchange for our money.

 

Voltaire (1694-1778) French philosopher and writer.

 

With affection,

ruben

Johannes Brahms

 

The classical music composers of the 19th century

Johannes Brahms

«Music has healing power. It has the ability to get people out of themselves for a few hours. “Elton John.

German composer

Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica

Karl Geiringer

 

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Jul 18, 2023 • Article History

 

Written by

 

Robert Simpson,

 

Why is Johannes Brahms important?

Johannes Brahms was a German composer and pianist of the Romantic period, but he was more a disciple of the Classical tradition. He wrote in many genres, including symphonies, concerti, chamber music, piano works, and choral compositions, many of which reveal the influence of folk music.

What is Johannes Brahms famous for?

Throughout Johannes Brahms’s career there is a variety of expression—from the subtly humorous to the tragic—but his larger works show an increasing mastery of movement and an ever-greater economy and concentration. Some of his best-known compositions included Symphony No. 3 in F Major, Wiegenlied, Op. 49, No. 4, and Hungarian Dances.

 

What was Johannes Brahms’s family like?

Johannes Brahms was the son of Jakob Brahms, an impecunious horn and double bass player, who was Johannes’s first teacher. Johannes never married, but he had a close relationship with the pianist Clara Schumann, who was married to his champion, composer Robert Schumann.

How did Johannes Brahms become famous?

The violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, whom Johannes Brahms befriended in 1853, instantly realized Brahms’s talent and recommended him to the composer Robert Schumann. Schumann praised Brahms’s compositions in the periodical Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. The article created a sensation. From this moment Brahms was a force in the world of music.

How did Johannes Brahms died?

In 1896, Johannes Brahms was compelled to seek medical treatment, in the course of which his liver was discovered to be seriously diseased. He appeared for the last time at a concert in March 1897, and in Vienna, in April 1897, he died of cancer.

 

Aparment Hamburg 

Johannes Brahms, (born May 7, 1833, Hamburg [Germany]—died April 3, 1897, Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now in Austria]), German composer and pianist of the Romantic period, who wrote symphonies, concerti, chamber music, piano works, choral compositions, and more than 200 songs. Brahms was the great master of symphonic and sonata style in the second half of the 19th century. He can be viewed as the protagonist of the Classical tradition of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven in a period when the standards of this tradition were being questioned or overturned by the Romantics.

 

The young pianist and music director

The son of Jakob Brahms, an impecunious horn and double bass player, Johannes showed early promise as a pianist. He first studied music with his father and, at age seven, was sent for piano lessons to F.W. Cossel, who three years later passed him to his own teacher, Eduard Marxsen. Between ages 14 and 16 Brahms earned money to help his family by playing in rough inns in the dock area of Hamburg and meanwhile composing and sometimes giving recitals. In 1850 he met Eduard Reményi, a Jewish Hungarian violinist, with whom he gave concerts and from whom he learned something of Roma music—an influence that remained with him always.

 

Johannes Brahms

The first turning point came in 1853, when he met the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim, who instantly realized the talent of Brahms. Joachim in turn recommended Brahms to the composer Robert Schumann, and an immediate friendship between the two composers resulted. Schumann wrote enthusiastically about Brahms in the periodical Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, praising his compositions. The article created a sensation. From this moment Brahms was a force in the world of music, though there were always factors that made difficulties for him.

Robert Shuman

 

The chief of these was the nature of Schumann’s panegyric itself. There was already conflict between the “neo-German” school, dominated by Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, and the more conservative elements, whose main spokesman was Schumann. The latter’s praise of Brahms displeased the former, and Brahms himself, though kindly received by Liszt, did not conceal his lack of sympathy with the self-conscious modernists. He was therefore drawn into controversy, and most of the disturbances in his otherwise uneventful personal life arose from this situation. Gradually Brahms came to be on close terms with the Schumann household, and, when Schumann was first taken mentally ill in 1854, Brahms assisted Clara Schumann in managing her family. He appears to have fallen in love with her; but, though they remained deep friends after Schumann’s death in 1856, their relationship did not, it seems, go further.

 

The nearest Brahms ever came to marriage was in his affair with Agathe von Siebold in 1858; from this he recoiled suddenly, and he was never thereafter seriously involved in the prospect.

Clara Shuman

 The reasons for this are unclear, but probably his immense reserve and his inability to express emotions in any other way but musically were responsible, and he no doubt was aware that his natural irascibility and resentment of sympathy would have made him an impossible husband. He wrote in a letter, “I couldn’t bear to have in the house a woman who has the right to be kind to me, to comfort me when things go wrong.” All this, together with his intense love of children and animals, goes some way to explain certain aspects of his music, its concentrated inner reserve that hides and sometimes dams powerful currents of feeling.

 

Between 1857 and 1860 Brahms moved between the court of Detmold—where he taught the piano and conducted a choral society—and Göttingen, while in 1859 he was appointed conductor of a women’s choir in Hamburg. Such posts provided valuable practical experience and left him enough time for his own work. At this point Brahms’s productivity increased, and, apart from the two delightful Serenades for orchestra and the colourful first String Sextet in B-flat Major (1858–60), he also completed his turbulent Piano Concerto No. 1 in D Minor (1854–58).

 

By 1861 he was back in Hamburg, and in the following year he made his first visit to Vienna, with some success. Having failed to secure the post of conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic concerts, he settled in Vienna in 1863, assuming direction of the Singakademie, a fine choral society. His life there was on the whole regular and quiet, disturbed only by the ups and downs of his musical success, by altercations occasioned by his own quick temper and by the often virulent rivalry between his supporters and those of Wagner and Anton Bruckner, and by one or two inconclusive love affairs. His music, despite a few failures and constant attacks by the Wagnerites, was established, and his reputation grew steadily. By 1872 he was principal conductor of the Society of Friends of Music (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde), and for three seasons he directed the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. His choice of music was not as conservative as might have been expected, and though the “Brahmins” continued their war against Wagner, Brahms himself always spoke of his rival with respect. Brahms is sometimes portrayed as unsympathetic toward his contemporaries. His kindness to Antonín Dvořák is always acknowledged, but his encouragement even of such a composer as the young Gustav Mahler is not always realized, and his enthusiasm for Carl Nielsen’s First Symphony is not generally known.

 

In between these two appointments in Vienna, Brahms’s work flourished and some of his most significant works were composed. The year 1868 witnessed the completion of his most famous choral work, Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), which had occupied him since Schumann’s death. This work, based on biblical texts selected by the composer, made a strong impact at its first performance at Bremen on Good Friday, 1868; after this, it was performed throughout Germany. With the Requiem, which is still considered one of the most significant works of 19th-century choral music, Brahms moved into the front rank of German composers.

 

Brahms was also writing successful works in a lighter vein. In 1869 he offered two volumes of Hungarian Dances for piano duet; these were brilliant arrangements of Roma tunes he had collected in the course of the years. Their success was phenomenal, and they were played all over the world. In 1868–69 he composed his Liebeslieder (Love Songs) waltzes, for vocal quartet and four-hand piano accompaniment—a work sparkling with humour and incorporating graceful Viennese dance tunes. Some of his greatest songs were also written at this time.

 

Maturity and fame of Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major

By the 1870s Brahms was writing significant chamber works and was moving with great deliberation along the path to purely orchestral composition. In 1873 he offered the masterly orchestral version of his Variations on a Theme by Haydn. After this experiment, which even the self-critical Brahms had to consider completely successful, he felt ready to embark on the completion of his Symphony No. 1 in C Minor. This magnificent work was completed in 1876 and first heard in the same year. Now that the composer had proved to himself his full command of the symphonic idiom, within the next year he produced his Symphony No. 2 in D Major (1877). This is a serene and idyllic work, avoiding the heroic pathos of Symphony No. 1. He let six years elapse before his Symphony No. 3 in F Major (1883). In its first three movements this work too appears to be a comparatively calm and serene composition—until the finale, which presents a gigantic conflict of elemental forces. Again after only one year, Brahms’s last symphony, No. 4 in E Minor (1884–85), was begun. This work may well have been inspired by the ancient Greek tragedies of Sophocles that Brahms had been reading at the time. The symphony’s most important movement is once more the finale. Brahms took a simple theme he found in J.S. Bach’s Cantata No. 150 and developed it in a set of 30 highly intricate variations, but the technical skill displayed here is as nothing compared with the clarity of thought and the intensity of feeling.

 

Gradually Brahms’s renown spread beyond Germany and Austria. Switzerland and the Netherlands showed true appreciation of his art, and Brahms’s concert tours to these countries as well as to Hungary and Poland won great acclaim. The University of Breslau (now the University of Wrocław, Poland) conferred an honorary degree on him in 1879. The composer thanked the university by writing the Academic Festival Overture (1881) based on various German student songs. Among his other orchestral works at this time were the Violin Concerto in D Major (1878) and the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major (1881).

 

By now Brahms’s contemporaries were keenly aware of the outstanding significance of his works, and people spoke of the “three great Bs” (meaning Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms), to whom they accorded the same rank of eminence. Yet there was a sizable circle of musicians who did not admit Brahms’s greatness. Fervent admirers of the avant-garde composers of the day, most notably Liszt and Wagner, looked down on Brahms’s contributions as too old-fashioned and inexpressive.

 

Brahms remained in Vienna for the rest of his life. He resigned as director of the Society of Friends of Music in 1875, and from then on devoted his life almost solely to composition. When he went on concert tours, he conducted or performed (on the piano) only his own works. He maintained a few close personal friendships and remained a lifelong bachelor. He spent his summers traveling in Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. During these years Brahms composed the boldly conceived Double Concerto in A Minor (1887) for violin and cello, the powerful Piano Trio No. 3 in C Minor (1886), and the Violin Sonata in D Minor (1886–88). He also completed the radiantly joyous first String Quintet in F Major (1882) and the energetic second String Quintet in G Major (1890).

 

 

Final years

In 1891 Brahms was inspired to write chamber music for the clarinet owing to his acquaintance with an outstanding clarinetist, Richard Mühlfeld, whom he had heard perform some months before. With Mühlfeld in mind, Brahms wrote his Trio for Clarinet, Cello, and Piano (1891); the great Quintet for Clarinet and Strings (1891); and two Sonatas for Clarinet and Piano (1894). These works are perfect in structure and beautifully adapted to the potentialities of the wind instrument.

 

In 1896 Brahms completed his Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), for bass voice and piano, on texts from both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, a pessimistic work dealing with the vanity of all earthly things and welcoming death as the healer of pain and weariness. The conception of this work arose from Brahms’s thoughts of Clara Schumann, whose physical condition had gravely deteriorated. On May 20, 1896, Clara died, and soon afterward Brahms himself was compelled to seek medical treatment, in the course of which his liver was discovered to be seriously diseased. He appeared for the last time at a concert in March 1897, and in Vienna, in April 1897, he died of cancer.

Aims and achievements of Johannes Brahms

Brahms’s music complemented and counteracted the rapid growth of Romantic individualism in the second half of the 19th century. He was a traditionalist in the sense that he greatly revered the subtlety and power of movement displayed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with an added influence from Franz Schubert.

 The Romantic composers’ preoccupation with the emotional moment had created new harmonic vistas, but it had two inescapable consequences. First, it had produced a tendency toward rhapsody that often resulted in a lack of structure. Second, it had slowed down the processes of music, so that Wagner had been able to discover a means of writing music that moved as slowly as his often-argumentative stage action. Many composers were thus decreasingly concerned to preserve the skill of taut, brilliant, and dramatic symphonic development that had so eminently distinguished the masters at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating in Beethoven’s chamber music and symphonies.

Strauss and Brahms
 

Brahms was acutely conscious of this loss, repudiated it, and set himself to compensate for it in order to keep alive a force he felt strongly was far from spent. But Brahms was desirous not of reproducing old styles but of infusing the language of his own time with constructive power. Thus his musical language actually bears little resemblance to Beethoven’s or even Schubert’s; harmonically it was much influenced by Schumann and even to some extent by Wagner. It is Brahms’s supple and masterful control of rhythm and movement that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries. It is often supposed that his sense of movement was slower than that of his most admired predecessor, Beethoven, but Brahms was always able to vary the pace of his musical thought in a startling manner, often tightening and speeding it without a change of tempo. It is a question of subtlety in command of tonality, harmony, and rhythm, and no 19th-century composer after Beethoven is able to surpass him in this respect. At all periods in Brahms’s work one finds a great variety of expression—from the subtly humorous to the tragic—but his larger works show an increasing mastery of movement and an ever-greater economy and concentration. Ultimately, Brahms’s power of movement stems partly from a source that may seem paradoxical. He was the most deeply versed of Classical composers in the music of the distant past, and he took the lessons he learned from the polyphonic school of the 16th century and applied them to the forms and the instrumental and vocal resources of his own time. Thus it was by way of a new approach to texture, drawn from very old models, that he revitalized a 19th-century rhythmic language that had been in danger of expiring from textural and harmonic stagnation.

 

In his orchestral works Brahms displays an unmistakable and highly distinctive deployment of tone colour, especially in his use of woodwind and brass instruments and in his string writing, but the important thing about it is that colour is deployed, rather than laid on for its own sake. A close relationship between orchestration and architecture dominates these works, with the orchestration contributing as much to the tonal colouring as do the harmonies and tonalities and the changing nature of the themes. As in the concerti of Mozart and Beethoven, such an attitude to orchestration proves in Brahms to be peculiarly adapted to the more subtle aspects of the relation between orchestra and soloist. The Classical concerto had achieved in Mozart’s mature works for piano and orchestra an unsurpassable degree of organization, and Beethoven had further extended the genre’s scale of design and range of expression. The higher subtleties of such works inevitably escaped many subsequent composers; Felix Mendelssohn had “abolished” the opening orchestral tutti, or ritornello, and had been followed in this regard by many other lesser composers. Brahms saw that this was essentially debilitating and set himself to recover the depth and grandeur of the concerto idea. Like Mozart and Beethoven, he realized that the long introductory passage of the orchestra, far from being superfluous, was the means of sharpening and deepening the complex relationship of orchestra to solo, especially when the time came for recapitulation, where an entirely new and often revelatory distribution of themes, keys, instrumentation, and tensions was possible. Many of Brahms’s contemporaries thought him reactionary on this account, but the result is that Brahms’s concerti have withstood wear and tear far better than many works thought in their day to outshine them.

At the other end of the scale, Brahms was a masterly miniaturist, not only in many of his fine and varied songs but also in his terse, cunningly wrought, intensely personal late piano works. As a song composer, he ranged from the complex and highly organized to the extremely simple, strophic type; his melodic invention is always original and direct, while the accompaniments are deeply evocative without ever being merely picturesque. The late piano music, usually of small dimension but wide implication, is generally expressive of a profound isolation of mind and heart and is therefore not readily approachable, while its apparent overall tone and mood may seem to the superficial ear monotonous. But each individual piece has a quiet and intense quality of its own that renders the occasional outburst of angry passion the more potent; the internal economy and subtlety of these works is extraordinary.

Viena

With affection,

Ruben