Johannes Brahms
Undoubtedly, Johann Sebastian Bach was the inexhaustible, even unending for many musicians in the nineteenth century and beyond. This way, the presumed re-discovery of Baxh's work by Mendelssohn in 1829, through St Mathieu and after being forgotten for more than half a century, was just a myth! Indeed, even after 1750 and though it was in a different way, the source was still running again and again...
like Mendelssohn, Brahms was born in Hamburg. Did he know the music of north-western organists at the end of the seventeenth century? His Prelude and his Fugue in A minor could let us think so. Moreover, for different reasons, but also in the same way, we find in Brahms this dichotomy between Bach's father-like and the other one, feminine and mother-like perhaps, Clara Schumann's... In Bach as a young child, we also know this wrench for life, when he cruelly lost his mother when he was only nine years old and his father, ten months later? Brahms will confide to the organ these two moments of his existence: first when he wrote three preludes and fugues as well as the fugue in A minor: he was then only 23 years old. And at the end of his life, coming back form Clara's buriement, he wrote his « Eleven Preludes « in chorals. Finally, in a great moment of distress, the eternal support will also ramain, for him, Baxh's music.
The scope of the first of the Eleven Chorals, « mein Jesu der du mich » can be compared to some of the great chorals in Leipzig by Bach. This way, the comparison between the Orgelbüchlein and the ten other chorals by Brahms is very coherent for many reasons.
Although he had a brilliant life as a pianist and a conductor, he confides to the organ at the beginning and the end of his life the main landmarks in his roots as a musician, as well as his main joys and sufferings.
Präludium und Fuge in g moll
Johannes BRAHMS : Intégrale de l’œuvre d’orgue
Orgue de la Votivkirche à Vienne (Autriche)
BNL 112885
Sortie du nouveau CD : Florilegium, Danses baroques, Muffat - Fischer - Kusser, 4 mains