In 1777, the German poet Johann von Goethe was traveling in the Harz mountains in the winter. He ascended the Brocken, the highest peak in the Harz, arriving at midday, and gazed out on a white world, with the landscape

Fritz Steinbach (1855-1916), none withstanding Hans von Bülow, was regarded as the foremost conductor of Brahms’ music. We know that they first met when Steinbach attempted to persuade Brahms to take him on as a student in 1875. Brahms declined,

Johannes Brahms was well connected. He befriended and collaborated with hundreds of people during his career, including fellow musicians and composers, publishers and artists, poets whose texts he set to music, and even rulers of certain German states with whom

Johannes Brahms was certainly open to life’s pleasures, and he would never decline a good meal. He once told a friend, “I live in Vienna as if I were in the country,” and he ate his lunch at the same

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) didn’t come from money and spent the summers of his youth playing the piano to entertain guests at summer inns outside Hamburg. He was promoted by Schumann in his role as editor of the Neue Zeitschreift für

At the end of the summer of 1896, Johannes Brahms was displaying some typical jaundice symptoms. The whites of his eyes and the mucous membranes had started to turn yellow. His doctors continued to observe Brahms for several months before

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) discovered the music of Hungary through the Hungarian violinist Ede (Eduard) Reményi, who was in Germany after being banned from Austria following his participation in the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Brahms, 15 at the time of their

In 1879, composer Johannes Brahms and violinist Joseph Joachim took a concert trip through Transylvania to workshop Brahms’ latest work, the Violin Concerto, Op. 77, which had opened to less-than-satisfactory reviews. Although Brahms wasn’t really up for a tour, of