Volltext Seite (XML)
PROGRAM NOTES by Burkat Program Note Service Copyright © by Leonard Burkat JOHANNES BRAHMS (Born May 7,1833, in Hamburg; died April 3, 1897, in Vienna) Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80 Brahms, who had been a charity scholar and when a young man had worked as a harborside barroom Pianist, grew up with no formal ad- vanced education. He had his only taste of young Student life during a few weeks of 1853, when his friend, Joseph Joachim, was attending a series of summer lectures in history and philosophy at the University of Göttingen. Brahms visited him there, and the two young musicians spent a good part of their time together at what were then the usual Student pastimes —drinking beerand singing boisterous songs — and some un- usual ones: They tried out each other's compositions and they played chamber music together for hours on end. By 1876, Brahms’s fame was so great that Cambridge University offered to confer the honorary degree of Doctor of Music on him, but it was required that he accept in person, and despite the urgings of all his friends, he could not bring himself to make the long voyage across the Channel. In March, 1879, when the German University of Breslau (now Wroclaw, in Poland) offered him an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree, he quickly wrote a note of acceptance and thanks — on a postcard. A friend pointed out that a musical acknow- ledgement would be appropriate, so that summer he composed the Academic Festival Overture and then, thinking this too insignificant a work to stand alone, he wrote acompanion piece, the Tragic Overture. Brahms went to Breslau to conduct the two works on January 4,1881. It was the first performance of the Academic Festival Overture, but the Tragic Overture had been performed in Vienna two weeks earlier. The Academic Festival Overture is the most cheerful, light-hearted work in the long list of Brahms’s compo sitions, “a jolly potpourri,” he once said, but it is more accurately described as a Symphonie medley of four songs that were populär with the singing groups that used to meet then in the beer-halls of German university towns. The songs are: Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches haus (“We Had Built a Stately House"), which had liberal-political associations, Hört, ich sing' das Lied der Lieder (“Listen, I Am Singing the Song of Songs"), the freshmen’s song Was kommt dort von der Höh? ("What’s Coming From UpThere?”),andfinally —continued on page XI
