Tales of Classical Christmas

The great composers of classical music celebrated Christmas just like us: they visited family, they reconnected with friends, they gave presents. While their Christmas stories might involve fewer gift receipts than ours, you might recognize some of your holiday experiences in these stories. Read on for tales of lavish meals, awkward moments and creative ways of getting over the holiday blues.

Bonn, 1790: Haydn Meets Beethoven for the First Time

Portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven.

(Joseph Willibrord Mähler / Wikimedia Commons)

When Ludwig van Beethoven was 20 years old, Santa Claus brought him the chance to meet one of his musical idols. Franz Joseph Haydn was passing through Beethoven’s hometown, Bonn, on his way to London. On the day after Christmas, Bonn’s Elector, Max Franz, invited Haydn to a party in his honor with local musicians. While no records indicate the dinner party’s precise guest list — there was no Evite back then — Beethoven, considered Bonn’s best pianist and emerging composer, was almost definitely there. 

Whatever impression the young Ludwig might have made on the exalted master that Christmas, a year and a half passed before Haydn, stopping again in Bonn, concluded that Beethoven’s unprecedented talent demanded the cultivation of none other than Haydn himself. In November of 1792, Beethoven, his luggage full of scores and sketches, arrived in Vienna as Haydn’s newest pupil, beginning the most significant chapter yet of his instruction.



Mannheim, 1798: Aloysia Weber Swipes Left on Mozart

Aloysia Weber as Zémire in André Grétry's opera “Zémire et Azor,” circa 1784.

The theater singer Aloysia Weber was 17 when she started taking lessons with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in Mannheim, Germany. The 21-year-old composer was soon smitten and wrote her an aria to showcase her talents. But his father Leopold didn’t want this growing infatuation to slow his son’s career and insisted that he leave for the bright lights of Paris.

Mozart returned on Christmas Day the following year for a brief stay at the Weber family home. But the thrill, as they say, was gone.  To Mozart’s dismay, Aloysia pretended not to recognize him! Not one to pout or cry on Christmas, the undeterred composer set his sights on Aloysia’s younger sister, Constanze, and the two eventually married.



Tribschen, 1870: Richard Wagner Nails the Whole Secret Santa Thing

Richard Wagner would never win Husband of the Year, but every once in a while he could bring his “A” game. After his wife Cosima gave birth to the couple’s son Siegfried in 1869, Wagner started working on a new composition. He kept it secret and made elaborate plans to surprise her on her birthday, December 25. That Christmas morning, Cosima Wagner awoke to the sound of a small ensemble on her staircase, playing her husband’s new piece called “Siegfried Idyll.”





Helsinki, 1911: Sibelius Beats the Christmas Blues With Song 

Though Jean Sibelius was not religious, he made an exception once per year for Christmas observances. But the composer wasn’t exactly a sweater-wearing and gingerbread-baking Christmas superfan. In fact, the holiday seemed to put him a remarkable funk: “Immediately after Christmas is over, things improve and life is fun once more,” he told his secretary. Nevertheless, Christmas brought the Sibelius family together: the children would sing songs their father had composed just for the occasion. His carols, which remain an important part of the Finnish holiday tradition, offer no hints of the composer’s dark mood.

Johannes Brahms drinking it up with family in Fellinger, 1896. (UNESCO)

If you wanted to find a composer who looked like Santa Claus, then look no further than Johannes Brahms. Not only did he have the beard, but he also had a joyful and generous spirit every Christmas. Christmas Eve for Brahms found him dining with friends, including an occasional celebration with Clara Schumann alone. Christmas Day, however, brought with it an ironclad tradition. It began with a lunchtime appointment at a tavern called The Red Hedgehog, followed by naptime at a nearby coffeeshop (why is that not still a thing?), and then packing for the annual festival held in his honor by the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen. Brahms kept this Christmas schedule — and Santa beard — until his death.

Leipzig, 1723: The New Guy Makes a Big Impression




There are some people who can vacation and unplug during the Christmas holiday and then there was Johann Sebastian Bach. In 1723, Bach arrived in Leipzig as the new choirmaster of the city’s St. Thomas Church. Determined to make a great first impression during the busiest time of the church year, Bach worked avidly to unveil his first major liturgical composition, his Magnificat, as well as four bonus hymns for that Christmas. Bach hadn’t been the first choice for the Leipzig job (Georg Philipp Telemann was the church’s first pick) but he more than beat expectations and remained happily in Leipzig until the end of his life.

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The Composer and his muse: Clara and Robert Schumann ... and Brahms

She was an eight-year-old Wunderkind; he was an aspiring composer in his teens who saw her at a concert and so admired her playing that he sought piano lessons from her father. When Clara turned 18, Robert Schumann asked Herr Wieck for his daughter’s hand in marriage, but he was vehemently opposed to the union: so began years of agonizing separation and tender correspondence, with many sheets of manuscript exchanged, including some of Schumann’s most affecting Lieder and piano miniatures. He wrote to his yearned-for beloved, “You appear in the Novelletten in every possible circumstance, in every irresistible form... They could only be written by one who knows such eyes as yours and has touched such lips as yours.”

The lovers eventually took Clara’s domineering father to court after he threatened to disinherit her and confiscate her concert earnings. They won love’s battle and were at last married in 1840, the day before her 21st birthday. In celebration of their joyous union, Robert presented his bride with the song cycle Myrthen as a wedding gift – a bouquet or “myrtle of flowers”. He also gave her a marriage diary, in which the couple wrote regular entries for four years (often about their sex life). They settled into a routine: while Robert spent most of his time composing, Clara managed to give concerts and compose a thing or two herself in between running the household and wrangling eight children. 



Brahms

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One of the most frustrated love triangles in Romantic music was formed when Clara began to champion the music of the young composer Johannes Brahms – like her, a piano phenomenon. He quickly became a great friend of the Schumann family. When Robert’s mental health deteriorated, leading to his institutionalization and untimely death in 1856, Brahms moved in with his older mentor Clara to help look after her children while she coped with the loss of her husband.

Brahms, who was mentored by composer Robert Schumann,  launched himself into an extended period of work on his First Symphony shortly after declaring his love for Schumann’s wife Clara. A letter survives in which he declared, “I can do nothing but think of you … What have you done to me? Can’t you remove the spell you have cast over me?

So, did they or didn’t they? Schumann’s biographers frown at the suggestion. But this is the story that Brahm’s letters tell; they start formally “Honored Lady”, a bit later; “Cherished Friend”; finally “Most Adored Being- Every day I greet and kiss you 1000 times” or “Please go on loving me as I go on loving you always and forever”. Living under one roof in Dusseldorf for several months and hiking together along the Rhine valley. Platonic? If you wish. In later life Brahms, secretive and aware of posterity, threw into the Rhine a bundle of Clara’s letters. Platonic correspondence? If you wish. And Clara writes her children, protesting her innocence “I can truly say, my children, that I have never loved a friend as I loved him…( his role during the crisis…) Believe all that I, your mother, told you and do not heed those petty and envious souls who grudge him my love and friendship, trying to bring up for question our relationship, which they neither understand nor ever could.”  Brahms never married and as Clara was lying, crippled with stroke, waiting for the end, he was finishing his 4 Serious Songs “O death how welcome is thy call”. He almost missed the funeral and as he watched Clara being lowered into the grave, where 40 years earlier he had watched Robert being placed, he lost his composure and was sobbing behind the bushes. A few months later he died as a result of a chill he caught while trying to arrive for Clara’s funeral in time.

Piano Quartets in E flat minor, Opus 47 (Robert Schumann) G minor, Opus 25 (Johannes Brahms) were both premiered with the participation of Clara Schumann, guiding muse and one of the most distinguished pianists of the day.

Source: Limelight Magazine.com

The Composer and his Muse: Johannes Brahms and Soprano Agathe von Siebol

A couple of years before he had started composing the 1st String Sextet, Brahms was still living in his hometown of Hamburg in 1858 when a friend invited him to come check out Göttingen, a college town about 170 miles south. This friend, Julius Otto Grimm, composer, teacher and music director of the local choral society, the Cäcilienverein (Cecelia Club), wrote to him, “If it would please you to have a few good voices lodged in very lovely girls, sing for you, they will take pleasure in being at your disposal. Come quickly!” Odd that Brahms had hesitated, at first.

So, in the midst of working on a serenade originally for a small group of strings and winds, he did so reluctantly, even if it was part of a holiday with Clara Schumann, her five youngest children, her half-brother, composer Woldemar Bargiel and violinist Joseph Joachim. It didn’t, however, take Brahms long to succumb to the charms of the town and especially some of the young ladies in town – one soprano named Agathe von Siebold, in particular.

In addition to having long dark hair, a lush figure, a fondness for practical jokes and a voice that Joachim likened to an Amati violin, Agathe (left) was also studying composition with Julius Grimm who once berated her for some sloppy counterpoint exercises. When Brahms agreed to play a trick on his friend, he wrote out her assignment himself which she duly handed in as her own. Grimm exploded over this “swinish mess” and when Agathe asked “well, what if Johannes had written it,” he said it would be even worse. Here, Brahms had actually screwed it up on purpose, playing a joke on both of them.

At the end of this extended vacation, Brahms returned to Detmold, about 30 miles to the northwest as the crow flies, where he was employed part of the year as a “court musician,” performing with the orchestra there and teaching music to the family of Prince Leopold III. In addition to organizing chamber music concerts, he also conducted a women’s choir for whom he wrote numerous short choral works.

Visiting Göttingen again in 1859, he and Agathe continued their friendship and apparently became secretly engaged. According to his friends, they seemed perfectly happy with each other.

This quote from a memoir Agathe von Siebold

I think I may say that from that time until the present, a golden light has been cast on my life, and that even now, in my late old age, something of the radiance of that unforgettable time has remained.  I loved Johannes Brahms very much, and for a short time, he loved me.

Then he left for two performances of his finally completed D Minor Piano Concerto which was neither a success nor a failure in Hannover but which was frostily received in Leipzig five days later. After a long silence, perhaps three pairs of hands bothered to applaud before the hissing began. Critics called it “banal and horrid.”

By then, returning to see Agathe, Brahms suffered what today would be called “a fear of commitment.” When he wrote to her, "I love you! I must see you again! But I cannot wear fetters! Write me whether I may come back to fold you in my arms, to kiss you, to tell you that I love you!" she responded by breaking off the engagement.

To his friends, Brahms would admit to “playing the scoundrel” to Agathe. Over a decade later, he recalled those days, how he would like to have married but when his music was hissed in the concert hall and so icily received, he realized while this was something he himself could tolerate, returning alone to his room,

“...if, in such moments, I had had to meet the anxious, questioning eyes of a wife with the words ‘another failure’ – I could not have borne that! For a woman may love an artist… ever so much… and if she had wanted to comfort me – a wife to pity her husband for his lack of success – ach! I can’t stand to think what a hell that would have been.”

During the first months in Göttingen , he wrote several songs for Agathe to sing, many of them using a musical motif based on her name spelled out in certain available notes.

In the months following his break-up with Agathe, Brahms composed more songs, still occasionally employing the “Agathe Motive” but setting it to words about parting and lost love.

Brahms would use this “Agathe Motive” again in the 2nd String Sextet which he completed a few years after he and Agathe von Siebold parted ways.

Moving ahead a few years, Brahms had completed two new piano quartets and three versions of his Piano Quintet, before writing to his Göttingen friend Julius Grimm once again, asking how things were “in all the houses where one used to go so happily… of that house and gate – ” which he didn’t need to explain was the house where Agathe von Siebold lived with her father.

Grimm told him “the old Professor had died three years ago” and Agathe had taken a job the past year as a governess in Ireland where she teaches music and German to the daughters of a rich young English family. She had to get away, he said, from “the shadowed pages of her life… what a gloomy lot is that of a girl alone.”

Brahms returned to Göttingen and stood by that ruined gate, looking at the empty house (such images typical of the lovelorn poetry of the Romantic Age). In September, he composed the devastated and exalted songs of Op. 32 which included the lines “I would like to stop living, to perish instantly, and yet I would like to live for you, with you, and never die.”

That same month, he began the first movement of the 2nd String Sextet. The second movement was based on a Baroque-like gavotte he’d written (part of a collection of tongue-in-cheek dances in the early-1850s) contrasting with a jocose middle section. The original sketch of the slow movement’s variations was written in 1855 and the overall sound is basically “wandering, empty, tragic.” The finale sounds like it might be a proper scherzo with a warm contrasting section with a bit of a dance to it: perhaps a “last dance, at the end of an affair,” as Swafford describes it.

The opening is a gem of a motive – This is Agathe’s Motive - and at its most obvious, climactic point, it is repeated five times. Yet this time, there is another note inserted within the motive – a D (see above) – which helps spell out the word “adé” or “Adieux, Farewell” in the inner voices. One could even sing "Agathe, adé" to this fragment of a melody.

Brahms is certainly saying farewell to Agathe, taking his leave, musically if not emotionally. Yet in the very first song he wrote for her – Op.14 No. 1 of 1858 – this “adé” motive appears when the night-watchman sounds his horn as the lovers part.

We may think of this as purely abstract music with no literary allusions or suggestions of telling a story, the sort of thing Liszt and the New German School espoused. But even Brahms must have had something on his mind, here, when he was writing this – a young girl who used to sing his songs for him and with whom he once contemplated marriage.

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Johannes Brahms: 15 facts about the great composer

Johannes Brahms is one of the Romantic period's most revered and popular composers - but how much do you really know? Here are 15 essential facts about the great man. 

1. Brahms is born!

Johannes Brahms was born on May 7th 1833 in Hamburg, Germany.
jakob brahms, Brahms' father


2. Son to a musical spare man

Brahms' father, Jokob (pictured), found employment as a jobbing musician, mostly getting work from playing the double bass and the French horn.


3. Earning a crust

The young Brahms was forced to play the piano in dance halls to contribute to the family's income as they were so poor.


4. Embarrassing early compositions?

An early starter, Brahms began composing when he was just 11. However, when he was older, he found them a bit embarrassing and destroyed the majority of them.


5. Sleeping on the job

Brahms apparently upset his host when he saw Liszt perform his own Sonata in B Minor at the Court of Weimar. Claiming that he was exhausted from traveling, Brahms fell asleep while the work was being played.



6. New Paths

Robert Schumann was so impressed with Brahms' talent when they met that he was inspired to write an essay entitled 'Neue Bahnen' ('New Paths') which gave Brahms a lot of publicity.



7. Gypsy influence

Brahms met a Hungarian refugee and violinist by the name of Eduard Remenyi (left) in 1850, and was introduced to a whole range of folk and gypsy music that massively influenced his composing style.


8. An epic first symphony

Although Brahms began composing his first symphony in 1854, it wasn't premiered until November 1876, 22 years later. The whole piece underwent severe edits until he was completely happy with it.

 

9. A shoulder to cry on

When Schumann died in 1856, Brahms immediately went to Düsseldorf to be with Schumann's wife, Clara. It's unclear exactly what kind of relationship the two had, but they destroyed a large amount of their letters to each other, possibly suggesting that they had something to hide…



10. The War of the Romantics

The so-called War of the Romantics was basically a musical argument between composers like Wagner and Liszt, who represented a more radical approach to music, and more conservative artists like Brahms and Clara Schumann. As a result, Brahms has always been seen as something of an old-fashioned composer, despite still being extremely popular today.



11. An outdoor type

Brahms was very much an outdoors-y sort. When he wasn't traveling around Europe for concert tours, he was fond of traveling to the hills of Italy for walking holidays and to retreat for solitary composing.



12. Inspired by grief

When his mother died in 1865, Brahms was overcome with grief. It is speculated that this led him to compose his German Requiem, one of the most celebrated works from his career. However, the premiere of the piece was a disaster - the timpanist misread the dynamics as 'ff' (very loud) instead of 'pf' (quiet) and drowned the other musicians out.

 
13. Wagner - not a fan

Perhaps due to their musical opposition to one another, Wagner (pictured) and Brahms weren't exactly best friends when they met in Vienna in 1864, after Brahms moved there to direct the Vienna Singakademie. Wagner later attacked Brahms in the press.


14. Early retirement?

When he was 57, Brahms announced that he was finished with composing. However, he was clearly unable to stop his creativity - he produced some incredible late-period works, especially for the clarinet, like his Clarinet Sonatas, Trio and Quintet.





 

15. Death

Brahms died of either pancreatic or liver cancer (evidence is unclear) on April 3rd 1897. The British composer Hubert Parry (pictured) composed a musical tribute to him, his Elegy for Brahms, in the same year.


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5 of the best symphonies of all time!

These are the greatest symphonies of all time - the biggest, most emotional, most impressive and plain-old flabbergasting works ever written.

Berlioz - Symphonie Fantastique



Is it even a symphony? Isn't it a symphonic fantasy or a tone poem? Does its five-movement structure actually take it a step away from the idiom? It doesn't matter. What matters is that Berlioz ingested a boatload of opium and wrote one of the most insane pieces of music to come out of the romantic period, while managing to make it a total hit and an artistically sound statement.


Mahler - Symphony No. 2 ('Resurrection')



Apart from the Eighth Symphony, this symphony was Mahler's most popular and successful work during his lifetime. It was his first major work that established his lifelong view of the beauty of afterlife and resurrection.


Brahms - Symphony No. 4



When the dust had settled from Brahms' first symphony (he was heavily touted in his day as the successor to Beethoven's top-dog status in symphony land), he set about creating one of the most consistent sets of symphonies in history. The fourth and final, composed up a mountain in 1884, has to be the best one though. It silenced critics who thought Brahms was too musically conservative, it proved to be one of his most emotionally daring works and it sealed his reputation as one of the great masters of the symphony.


Mozart - Symphony No. 41




It was the last symphony that he composed, and also the longest.The 41st Symphony is the last of a set of three that Mozart composed in rapid succession during the summer of 1788 and was also his best. It's no coincidence that it's subtitled 'Jupiter', either: it's a beast. Mozart threw absolutely everything at this epic. Marvel at the five-theme fugal ending! Gasp at the quotations of plainchant motifs! Recoil in wonder at the majesty of it all!

 Beethoven - Symphony No. 9 ('Choral')



Ludwig van Beethoven's final complete symphony. Completed in 1824, the symphony is one of the best-known works in classical music. Among critics, it is almost universally considered one of Beethoven's greatest works, and many consider it one of the greatest compositions in the western musical canon.

The symphony was the first example of a major composer using voices in a symphony, (thus making it a choral symphony). The words are sung during the final movement by four vocal soloists and a chorus. They were taken from the "Ode to Joy", a poem written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785 and revised in 1803, with additions made by the composer. Today, it stands as one of the most played symphonies in the world.


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Stephen Hough Plays Brahms First Piano Concerto Pt. 3

British pianist Stephen Hough (1961-) plays an extended excerpt from the third (final) movement of Brahms' First Piano Concerto with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Ivan Fischer.

Stephen Hough Plays Brahms First Piano Concerto Pt. 2

 

British pianist Stephen Hough  plays an extended excerpt from the first movement of Brahms' First Piano Concerto with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Ivan Fischer.

Stephen Hough Plays Brahms First Piano Concerto Pt. 1

British pianist Stephen Hough  plays an extended excerpt from the first movement of Brahms' First Piano Concerto with the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Ivan Fischer.

Evgeny Kissin plays Brahms-op.118 intermezzos 1,2

Johannes Brahms, Lullaby, sung by Celine Dion