Johannes Brahms 1870 - 1897
By 1868 Brahms had moved to Vienna, the capital of European classical music, and had acquired two more powerful advocates, the Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim and the Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick.(*) Both men saw Brahms as the last best hope of the anti-Wagnerites, and though Brahms admired the older composer's music but disliked his "stilted, bombastic" language and dramaturgy--he would become the unwilling focus of organized opposition to the Wagner cult.
Brahms's long-awaited First Symphony, Op. 68, premiered in 1876, led to claims that he was Beethoven's spiritual heir. (The pianist-conductor Hans von Bulow, referring to Beethoven's nine symphonies, actually went so far as to dub Brahms's First "the Tenth.")
Starting in the early 1870's, Brahms had begun to make a good living through the sale of his music and the ample fees he commanded as a pianist and conductor; for the rest of his days, he lived in middle-class comfort in a small Vienna apartment, remaining unmarried.
After the death of his father in 1872, Brahms conducted the orchestra of the Society of the Friends of Music in Vienna from 1872 to 1875, after which he devoted himself entirely to composition. …
