7 Johannes Brahms 7In 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 after-
ward 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
Brahms’s music ultimately complemented and counter-
acted 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.