Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Joseph Joachim was a Hungarian violinist, conductor, composer and teacher who made an international career, based in Hanover and Berlin. A close collaborator of Johannes Brahms, he is widely regarded as one of the most significant violinists of the 19th century.
The Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, was composed by Johannes Brahms in 1878 and dedicated to his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. It is Brahms's only violin concerto, and, according to Joachim, one of the four great German violin concerti:
The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the most seductive, was written by Max Bruch. But the most inward, the heart's jewel, is Mendelssohn's.
Joseph Joachim Raff was a German-Swiss composer, pedagogue and pianist.
The Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15, is a work for piano and orchestra completed by Johannes Brahms in 1858. The composer gave the work's public debut in Hanover, the following year. It was his first-performed orchestral work, and his first orchestral work performed to audience approval.
Felix August Bernhard Draeseke was a composer of the "New German School" admiring Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner. He wrote compositions in most forms including eight operas and stage works, four symphonies, and much vocal and chamber music.
Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 10 in E♭ major is a hypothetical work, assembled in 1988 by Barry Cooper from Beethoven's fragmentary sketches for the first movement. All the sketches assembled were clearly intended for the same symphony, which would have followed the Ninth, since they appear together in several small groups, and there is consensus that Beethoven did intend to compose another symphony. Cooper's score was first performed at a concert given in 1988 by the Royal Philharmonic Society, London, to whom Beethoven himself had offered the new symphony in 1827. The score is published by Universal Edition, Vienna, and appeared in a new edition in 2013. In 2019, artificial intelligence technology was used to reconstruct the third and fourth movement of the symphony, which premiered on 9 October 2021, titled Beethoven X: The AI Project.
Freiherr Hans Guido von Bülow was a German conductor, virtuoso pianist, and composer of the Romantic era. As one of the most distinguished conductors of the 19th century, his activity was critical for establishing the successes of several major composers of the time, especially Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms. Alongside Carl Tausig, Bülow was perhaps the most prominent of the early students of the Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist and conductor Franz Liszt; he gave the first public performance of Liszt's Sonata in B minor in 1857. He became acquainted with, fell in love with and eventually married Liszt's daughter Cosima, who later left him for Wagner. Noted for his interpretation of the works of Ludwig van Beethoven, he was one of the earliest European musicians to tour the United States.
The "War of the Romantics" is a term used by some music historians to describe the schism among prominent musicians in the second half of the 19th century. Musical structure, the limits of chromatic harmony, and program music versus absolute music were the principal areas of contention. The opposing parties crystallized during the 1850s. The most prominent members of the conservative circle were Johannes Brahms, Joseph Joachim, Clara Schumann, and the Leipzig Conservatoire which had been founded by Felix Mendelssohn. Their opponents, the radical progressives mainly from Weimar, were represented by Franz Liszt and the members of the so-called New German School, and by Richard Wagner. The controversy was German and Central European in origin; musicians from France, Italy, and Russia were only marginally involved. Composers from both sides looked back on Beethoven as their spiritual and artistic hero; the conservatives seeing him as an unsurpassable peak, the progressives as a new beginning in music.
A Faust Symphony in three character pictures, S.108, or simply the "Faust Symphony", is a choral symphony written by Hungarian composer Franz Liszt inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's drama, Faust. The symphony was premiered in Weimar on 5 September 1857, for the inauguration of the Goethe–Schiller Monument there.
The two Serenades, Op. 11 and 16, represent early efforts by Johannes Brahms to write orchestral music. They both date from after the 1856 death of Robert Schumann when Brahms was residing in Detmold and had access to an orchestra.
The symphonic poems of the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt are a series of 13 orchestral works, numbered S.95–107. The first 12 were composed between 1848 and 1858 ; the last, Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe, followed in 1882. These works helped establish the genre of orchestral program music—compositions written to illustrate an extra-musical plan derived from a play, poem, painting or work of nature. They inspired the symphonic poems of Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Richard Strauss and others.
Franz Liszt composed his Prometheus in 1850, numbering it No. 5 in his cycle of symphonic poems when he revised it in 1855. The work is based on the Greek myth detailing the Titan Prometheus' theft of fire from the gods and is numbered S.99 in the Searle catalogue.
The Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein was a German musical association founded in 1861 by Franz Liszt and Franz Brendel, to embody the musical ideals of the New German School of music.
"Music of the Future" is the title of an essay by Richard Wagner, first published in French translation in 1860 as "La musique de l'avenir" and published in the original German in 1861. It was intended to introduce the librettos of Wagner's operas to a French audience at the time when he was hoping to launch in Paris a production of Tannhäuser, and sets out a number of his desiderata for true opera, including the need for 'endless melody'. Wagner deliberately put the title in quotation marks to distance himself from the term; Zukunftsmusik had already been adopted, both by Wagner's enemies, in the 1850s, often as a deliberate misunderstanding of the ideas set out in Wagner's 1849 essay, The Artwork of the Future, and by his supporters, notably Franz Liszt. Wagner's essay seeks to explain why the term is inadequate, or inappropriate, for his approach.
Max Erdmannsdörfer was a German conductor, pianist and composer.
Symphony No. 1 in D major, An das Vaterland, Op. 96, was composed by Joachim Raff between 1859 and 1861.
Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 140, was composed by Joachim Raff in Weimar in 1866. It is one of the three Raff symphonies that does not carry a descriptive title. It is dedicated to Ernest II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. It was premiered in Weimar in 1867 and was published two years later in Mainz. A few years later the symphony received its second performance in the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Raff's baton. A typical performance lasts for about 37 minutes.
Symphony No. 5 in E major (Lenore), Op. 177, was composed by Joachim Raff between 1870 and 1872. It is generally regarded as his best symphony and the most frequently performed and recorded today. It was inspired by Gottfried August Bürger's ballad Lenore, set during the Seven Years' War.
Symphony No. 4 in G minor, Op. 167, was composed by Joachim Raff in the spring and summer of 1871, during the time of the Franco-Prussian War. The work was published in October 1872. Like his Second Symphony, it does not carry a descriptive title and there is no evidence that Raff had a particular programme in mind when he wrote the symphony.
