Three Orchestral Works in Full Score: Academic Festival Overture, Tragic Overture and Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn

by Johannes Brahms

Johannes Brahms was one of music's greatest masters of classical forms, a composer whose individuality expanded and enriched those forms, giving them new variety of mood and a freshness of melodic invention. In writing for the orchestra, Brahms's independent approach brought unusual dramatic power and intensity to his compositions. Those qualities are strikingly evident in three of the most popular and most frequently performed works in the orchestral repertoire, reproduced here in full Academic Festival Overture , Tragic Overture , and Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn.
This volume reprints, complete and unabridged, the scores of all three orchestral works from the authoritative Breitkopf & Härtel edition, still considered the standard source for the music of Brahms. Included is a new English translation of the Editor's Commentary, which also appears in the original German.
The Academic Festival Overture, built upon German student songs, is, according to Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "a very successful and individual pièce de circonstance, " while the Tragic Overture is described as "a gloomy and impressive movement, full of that peculiar sense of foreboding that so many composers … have associated with the key of D minor." Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn is renowned for its spontaneity, melodic invention, and delightfully varied orchestral coloring.
Students, composers, and musicologists will find the handy, inexpensive volume of Brahms's great orchestral favorites a valuable addition to their music libraries and an indispensable reference.

112 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1984

About the author

In 1833, Johannes Brahms was born in Germany. As a teenager playing for drunken sailors in a Hamburg bar, Brahms would prop up books of poetry to read as a diversion. His favorite poet was the anticlerical G.F. Daumer, described by the Catholic Encyclopedia as "an enemy of Christianity". Brahms' works were influenced by such writers as Hoffman, Friedrich Schiller and Robert Burns. He was well-read in philosophy and science, and was an avid hiker who took inspiration from nature. When asked by a conductor to add additional sectarian text to his German Requiem, Brahms responded, "As far as the text is concerned, I confess that I would gladly omit even the word German and instead use Human; also with my best knowledge and will I would dispense with passages like John 3:16." (Jan Swafford, Johannes Brahms: A Biography). A liberal, Brahms ardently opposed anti-Semitism, was approachable even at the height of his fame, and was always generous with his time and charity. Biographer Swafford writes of the young composer: "Though he was to be a freethinker in religion, Johannes pored over the Bible beyond the requirements for his Protestant confirmation." From then on, "Music was Brahms' religion." According to Swafford, Brahms was "a humanist and an agnostic." After nearly 64 years of near perfect health, never even enduring a headache, Brahms succumbed quickly to liver cancer. There was no deathbed conversion. D. 1897.

In his lifetime, Brahms's popularity and influence were considerable; following a comment by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow, he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs". The diligent, highly constructed nature of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers.

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