Johannes Brahms spent sixteen consecutive summers in Bad Ischl, the Salzkammergut spa town that also drew the Emperor and the Waltz King. In that small house above the town he wrote his Symphony No. 4, his Clarinet Sonatas, and the late piano intermezzi that are among the most personal music he ever composed. The region was his sanctuary for the final two decades of his creative life.
The Story
Brahms first came to Bad Ischl in 1880 and returned every summer until 1896, the year before his death. He rented a small house above the town and kept to a strict routine: composing in the mornings, walking in the afternoons, and socialising in the evenings at the same cafes and villas where the Salzkammergut's summer colony gathered. This colony was remarkable. Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth came for the hunting and the waters. Johann Strauss II had a villa where he composed waltzes, his summers adjacent to Brahms's. The two composers, who represented what critics saw as irreconcilably opposed musical worlds, were in fact warm friends who admired each other's work and spent summer evenings together.
The works Brahms produced in those Bad Ischl summers form some of the greatest pages in the 19th-century repertoire. The Fourth Symphony, completed in 1885, stands as his final orchestral statement and one of the most architecturally rigorous symphonies ever written. The Double Concerto for violin and cello followed in 1887. The Clarinet Quintet and Sonatas came later, in the early 1890s, written for the clarinettist Richard Muhlfeld, whose playing had reawakened Brahms's interest in the instrument. The late piano intermezzi, small pieces of extraordinary emotional depth, are among the most intimate music he wrote, composed in the quiet of the Salzkammergut mornings.
His friend Theodor Billroth, one of the great surgeons of the 19th century and a passionate amateur musician, joined him at the Attersee in those summers. The two would play chamber music by the lake, Billroth at the violin and Brahms at the piano, in what must have been among the most rarefied musical evenings in history. Billroth was among the first to hear new Brahms works, and their correspondence is one of the most revealing documents of how Brahms thought about his own music.
The Salzburg Festival has kept his legacy at the centre of its programming. The Vienna Philharmonic, the Festival's resident orchestra, plays his symphonies and concertos in every major season. The 1978 Karajan recording of the German Requiem, made at the Festival, is one of the landmark documents in the orchestra's history. The Salzkammergut gave Brahms his creative silence; the Festival gives him his continuing Salzburg presence.
