- Brahms was the childhood piano teacher of famous film composer Max Steiner.
- A lifelong bachelor, Brahms lived in the same three-room apartment in Vienna for 30 years.
- Brahms never visited England or the United States, despite very lucrative offers to conduct his music there. He was terrified of sea travel.
- On December 2, 1889, Brahms recorded excerpts of two piano pieces onto Edison wax cylinders: his "Hungarian Dance No.1" and Josef Strauss's "The Dragonfly". These are the earliest known musical recordings by a famous composer. NOTE: There is an 1888 Edison recording of composer Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert & Sullivan fame), but only of him speaking.
- Adored the music of his good friend Johann Strauss. When asked for his autograph he would write the main melody of "The Blue Danube" and then add, "Unfortunately NOT by Johannes Brahms".
- Brahms liked to have sardines for breakfast, after which he would drink the oil straight from the can. He also enjoyed cigars and putting cognac in his coffee.
- His favorite opera was Georges Bizet's "Carmen". At its premiere run in Vienna in 1880, Brahms attended all 21 performances and afterwards declared that if Bizet had still been alive, he would have "gone to the ends of the Earth" to shake his hand.
- Brahms composed for symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, piano, organ, voice, and chorus.
- Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period.
- He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
- The family name was also sometimes spelt 'Brahmst' or 'Brams', and derives from 'Bram', the German word for the shrub broom.[.
- His music is rooted in the structures and compositional techniques of the Classical masters. Embedded within those structures are deeply Romantic motifs. While some contemporaries found his music to be overly academic, his contribution and craftsmanship were admired by subsequent figures as diverse as Arnold Schoenberg and Edward Elgar. The detailed construction of Brahms's works was a starting point and an inspiration for a generation of composers.
- Brahms was baptised into the Lutheran church as an infant, and was confirmed at the age of fifteen (at St. Michael's Church, Hamburg), but has been described as an agnostic and a humanist.
- In 1830, he married Johanna Henrika Christiane Nissen (1789-1865), a seamstress 17 years older than he was.
- He worked with leading performers of his time, including the pianist Clara Schumann and the violinist Joseph Joachim (the three were close friends).
- A virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works.
- Brahms has been considered both a traditionalist and an innovator, by his contemporaries and by later writers.
- Against the family's will, Johann Jakob pursued a career in music, arriving in Hamburg in 1826, where he found work as a jobbing musician and a string and wind player.
- Brahms played principally on German and Viennese pianos. In his early years he used a piano made by the Hamburg company Baumgarten & Heins. Later, in 1864, he wrote to Clara Schumann about his attraction to instruments by Streicher.[91] In 1873 he received a Streicher piano op. 6713 and kept it in his house until his death.[92] He wrote to Clara: "There [on my Streicher] I always know exactly what I write and why I write one way or another." Another instrument in Brahms's possession was a Conrad Graf piano - a wedding present of the Schumanns, that Clara Schumann later gave to Brahms and which he kept until 1873. In the 1880s for his public performances Brahms used a Bösendorfer several times. In his Bonn concerts he played on a Steinweg Nachfolgern in 1880 and a Blüthner in 1883. Brahms also used a Bechstein in several of his concerts: 1872 in Würzburg, 1872 in Cologne and 1881 in Amsterdam.
- Many of his works have become staples of the modern concert repertoire.
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