I have said before that this is one of my favorite pieces of music, that it is one that can usually cheer me up when I am feeling low or snap me back into a mood of being able to work again when I'm slacking.
And that it captures some of the feeling of what I imagined the "romance" of campus life to be (before I learned that it's not really all sitting around in coffeehouses or beer halls talking about Deep Ideas or being surrounded by charmingly and amusingly eccentric colleagues who do things like conduct the amateur orchestra made up of professors and play with toy trains*)
(*Huge number of bonus points to anyone who gets that allusion.)
The Overture is largely composed of student drinking songs - in a way, it's a bit of a musical joke - Brahms apparently composed it as a joking response to a demand for a "thank you" in the form of a musical composition from the University of Breslau, which had granted him an honorary doctorate the year before.
Wikipedia, which I know isn't always the most reliable source, has it thus:
"Initially, Brahms had contented himself with sending a simple handwritten note of acknowledgment to the University, since he loathed the public fanfare of celebrity. However, the conductor Bernard Scholz, who had nominated him for the degree, convinced him that protocol required him to make a grander gesture of gratitude. The University expected nothing less than a musical offering from the composer. "Compose a fine symphony for us!" he wrote Brahms. "But well orchestrated, old boy, not too uniformly thick!...""
..."Brahms, who was known to be a curmudgeonly joker, filled his quota by creating a "very boisterous potpourri of student drinking songs à la Suppé""
Haha. If that's true I kind of love Brahms for it.
More Brahms:
I wonder if the "real" Brahms would have found that amusing.
1 comment:
Brahms certainly knows how to make a dramatic entrance!
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