Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

During his lifetime, Brahms accumulated a sizeable fortune. Although the early days were not without difficulties, his finances then accumulated steadily and virtually uninterruptedly. When he died in 1897, he left behind not only manuscripts of his own works, but also an extensive collection of other composers’ autograph manuscripts (including of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, etc.) as well as bonds worth over 181,000 Gulden.The size of the sum is evident when one compares the rent that he paid his landlady Coelestine Truxa between 1887 and 1897 for his three-room apartment in Vienna’s Karlsgasse, which amounted half-yearly to 347 Gulden and 25 Kreuzer.

Brahms grew up in the Hamburg‘Gängeviertel’, an area of workers, small-scale artisans and tradesmen in modest circumstances [see Ch. 1 ‘Childhood in Hamburg’]. Later on, when he could determine his own lifestyle, luxury still held no appeal.

Throughout his lifetime, Brahms accompanied dozens of singers in a variety of settings, ranging from huge public halls to his friends’ homes, and conducted many others in choirs. Some of those working relationships were one-offs, arising from the widespread practice of including a set of piano-accompanied songs within most concerts and the expediency and cost-effectiveness of using local talent. Others were deep, enduring partnerships; the timbres and interpretative approaches of those singers are surely ingrained in his vocal music. Overall, Brahms’s singers were generally not part of the international operatic elite associated with Verdi, Bizet and Massenet. Figures like Julius Stockhausen (1826–1906) and Raimund von Zur-Mühlen (1854–1931)were almost exclusively concert singers and, later on, teachers. Most hailed from German-speaking territories, reflecting Brahms’s own concert career.

The earliest evidence of Brahms’s activity as a conductor comes from 1847, when as a fourteen-year-old he led a chorus of school children in the small town of Winsen near his native Hamburg. His last reported appearance on a podium was with the Berlin Philharmonic in January 1896, aged sixty-two. Over a span of almost fifty years between these two moments, Brahms conducted a wide range of amateur and professional ensembles in many different locations across the Austrian Empire, Germany and Switzerland.

Brahms’s activities on the podium coincide with the steady rise of the professional conductor during the nineteenth century, embodied in the Austro-German sphere at first by Weber, Mendelssohn, Wagner, Spohr and Spontini, and later by Richard Strauss, Mahler, Richter and Bülow.