Judging by the reports from concert management switchboards, there are some audience members who would be happy if their concerts contained nothing but Brahms. Perhaps there would be just enough chamber and orchestral music by Brahms to keep them going for a year, but that isn’t really what these people mean. It’s not just Brahms they want – it is also the music that Brahms loved and revered (and from which his own music drew such inspiration: moving back through Schumann, Schubert, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart and Bach).

Whereas Beethoven can sometimes present a puzzle to us (he reshaped Classical forms, but with sovereign artistic independence), we think we know what Brahms is feeling when he writes in the same forms. His music has feeling, even Romantic feeling, but is reassuringly ordered. ‘Brahms cannot exult,’ said Hugo Wolf; and Nietzsche, discussing Brahms’ music, spoke of the ‘melancholy of impotence.’ But to many people, that is exactly what makes Brahms accessible. He has some of their own inhibitions – perhaps their ‘good taste’ too, which can make Wolf and Nietzsche’s hero, Wagner, seem somehow a little disgusting. And yet for all those apparent limitations there seems no limit to Brahms’ musical skill.

Admired perhaps more widely in his own lifetime than any composer since Haydn

It is no accident that Brahms became so widely admired in his lifetime – more widely, perhaps, than any composer since Haydn – at a time when the bourgeoisie were coming to dominate musical life. He shared with that class their respect for history, their educated sense of artistic values, and their need for a canon of masterpieces. His respect for the past could even be something of a hindrance to his own career. Notoriously, when struggling to compose his first symphony, he complained that ‘You can’t imagine what it is like for us to hear the footsteps of that giant behind us.’ Beethoven was intimidating!

Brahms also experienced the pleasures and the pains of a new phenomenon, music journalism. Schumann hailed the young Brahms, in a widely-read publication, as the great hope of German music, ‘he who is to come’ (with Schumann evidently playing John the Baptist to Brahms’ Jesus). Hans von Bülow, a defector from the opposition camp of Wagner and Liszt, made Brahms the third of the three great ‘B’s’ of music, after Bach and Beethoven.

All this was bound to provoke a reaction. Another bourgeois doctrine, that of progress, has it that innovation is good in itself. Brahms, however, was not a conscious innovator, and he founded no school – in a sense he had no successors, and his imitators are mainly second-rate. This is irrelevant to the quality of his achievements, but may have prejudiced those who refuse to assess music by purely musical values.

It is worth emphasising that Brahm’s made himself a master of every aspect of the musician’s craft – ‘made himself’, because after a sound grounding from his Hamburg teacher, Eduard Marxsen, he was largely self-taught. The one hobby which he allowed himself, once he had reliable income, was collecting musical autographs, the manuscripts and first editions of great composers. He collected them because he loved the music they contained, and he understood it better than most. He once wrote to Clara Schumann about two masters of the past, Mozart and Viotti, ‘if only people knew what they give us in drips, they might drink by the gallon from these sources.’ Brahms’ knowledge of the music of the past was extensive and deep, and went back not only to Bach, but to Schütz, Palestrina, and masters of the Renaissance. This knowledge informs virtually everything he composed.

Some works more self-revealing than others

This lonely bachelor truly lived with music, but we know that some of his works are more self-revealing than others. The crisis of the mental illness and death of his revered mentor, Robert Schumann, and his admiration, nay, passion, for Clara Schumann, left its mark on many works: the C minor Piano Quartet, the D minor Piano Concerto, parts of the German Requiem. Later, the Alto Rhapsody was a favourite of the composer’s among his works; he confessed that at one time he used to sleep with a copy of the score under his pillow!

The text for the Alto Rhapsody, from Goethe’s Journey through the Harz Mountains in Winter, meditates on the despair of doubting, self-destructive souls. Brahms wrote the music at a time when he was shaken by the news of the engagement of Clara Schumann’s daughter Julie, with whom he had fancied himself in love, but given no outward indication of his feelings.

So Brahms was not an innovator, at least not in terms of musical form, though his solutions are very personal. He was no mere imitator, however, and his critical faculty, highly developed yet never such as to hinder his creativity, led him to suppress almost everything in his work that isn’t marked by the highest qualities of workmanship and the unmistakable stamp of personal style. And so it is difficult to describe his music. As Henry James once said of Bach, it has ‘the equanimity of a result’. You will hear this in most pieces which he composed. His music defies adequate categorisation, so that the best description of his may be the simple one offered by Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor in the Record Guide:

He is Brahms, a nineteenth-century composer, equally attracted to Classical and Romantic ideals, who settled in Vienna and there found congenial surroundings in which to write music.

Perhaps Brahms’ equal attraction to Classical and Romantic ideals explains why many of us are attracted to his music. He shares his musical inclinations with us, lesser mortals, but lovers of music which has life.