Intermediate
Clarinet Sonata No.2, Op.120 No.2
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Browse piano sheets by Johannes Brahms on Zen Virtual Piano. After an intended retirement at the age of 57, Brahms entered a final phase featuring four works with clarinet, the Clarinet Trio, Op. 114 (1891), the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115 (1891) and two Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 120 (1894), inspired by the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld. In March 1891 he visited Meiningen, where a private performance by the highly regarded clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld was arranged for him, and he was entranced by Mühlfeld’s sweet tone and moving interpretations. That the inspiration came from a player’s tone and interpretations hints at how much a particular sound can set a composer working. Brahms was born in 1833 in Hamburg, the son of a performing musician in modest circumstances, and worked with his father and left school at age 14. His first journey away from home was a concert tour of North Germany as accompanist to the violinist Eduard Rémenyi, and in 1853, at age 20, he met the leading young violinist Joseph Joachim and, through Joachim, the composers Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann and Schumann’s wife. A school-leaver at fourteen who was meeting Liszt and the Schumanns by twenty shows how sharply his world widened. An acute awareness of historical inheritance led him to severe self-criticism: he took long periods of time to complete works, destroyed much and left very few documentary traces. One way to read that self-criticism is that later listeners received a body of work already filtered by his own judgement. He blended Beethovenian dynamism, Schubertian lyricism, a love of German folk song and the strict contrapuntal mastery of the Baroque into a synthesis of phenomenal richness. Broader fame came with a major choral work, Ein deutsches Requiem (completed 1866–68), set to a personal selection of texts from Luther’s Bible, which moved him into the front rank of German composers. In 1869 he offered two volumes of Hungarian Dances for piano duet, brilliant arrangements of Roma tunes he had collected in the course of the years, and their success was phenomenal: they were played all over the world. Arrangements of tunes he had collected over the years suggest that even his lighter works came from long listening rather than quick invention. He also wrote four sets of short piano pieces, Opp. 116–119, a return to piano composition in often intimate works that draw maximum variation from a minimum of ideas. A piano composer returning to short pieces that draw maximum variation from minimum ideas gives that work a feeling of distillation.
Browse piano sheets by Johannes Brahms on Zen Virtual Piano.
After an intended retirement at the age of 57, Brahms entered a final phase featuring four works with clarinet, the Clarinet Trio, Op. 114 (1891), the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115 (1891) and two Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 120 (1894), inspired by the clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld. In March 1891 he visited Meiningen, where a private performance by the highly regarded clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld was arranged for him, and he was entranced by Mühlfeld’s sweet tone and moving interpretations. That the inspiration came from a player’s tone and interpretations hints at how much a particular sound can set a composer working.
Brahms was born in 1833 in Hamburg, the son of a performing musician in modest circumstances, and worked with his father and left school at age 14. His first journey away from home was a concert tour of North Germany as accompanist to the violinist Eduard Rémenyi, and in 1853, at age 20, he met the leading young violinist Joseph Joachim and, through Joachim, the composers Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann and Schumann’s wife. A school-leaver at fourteen who was meeting Liszt and the Schumanns by twenty shows how sharply his world widened.
An acute awareness of historical inheritance led him to severe self-criticism: he took long periods of time to complete works, destroyed much and left very few documentary traces. One way to read that self-criticism is that later listeners received a body of work already filtered by his own judgement. He blended Beethovenian dynamism, Schubertian lyricism, a love of German folk song and the strict contrapuntal mastery of the Baroque into a synthesis of phenomenal richness.
Broader fame came with a major choral work, Ein deutsches Requiem (completed 1866–68), set to a personal selection of texts from Luther’s Bible, which moved him into the front rank of German composers. In 1869 he offered two volumes of Hungarian Dances for piano duet, brilliant arrangements of Roma tunes he had collected in the course of the years, and their success was phenomenal: they were played all over the world. Arrangements of tunes he had collected over the years suggest that even his lighter works came from long listening rather than quick invention. He also wrote four sets of short piano pieces, Opp. 116–119, a return to piano composition in often intimate works that draw maximum variation from a minimum of ideas. A piano composer returning to short pieces that draw maximum variation from minimum ideas gives that work a feeling of distillation.
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The clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, whom he heard in a private performance at Meiningen in March 1891 and whose sweet tone and moving interpretations entranced him.
An acute awareness of historical inheritance led him to severe self-criticism: he took long periods to complete works, destroyed much and left very few documentary traces.
Two volumes of piano-duet arrangements of Roma tunes he had collected, offered in 1869 and played all over the world.