Brahms's first visit to Vienna towards the end of September 1862 is often taken as inaugurating the major professional change of his life: the move from provincial Hamburg, with its hard upbringing and limited opportunities, to the city of the classic masters, and his subsequent dominance of its musical life as their greatest successor. Yet the reality is otherwise. Brahms settled into Vienna only very slowly and it could not really be called his home for upwards of a decade. These years spanned a difficult transition in both professional and personal life as he sought a career path and a domestic identity. The fight to realise his artistic aims and ambitions, begun in Hamburg was to continue for long years. It was only when he finally became established as a financially independent composer in Vienna, by the mid-1870s, that he really found stability and routine for his composition; prior to this, a pattern emerged rather by default.

It is difficult to know what Brahms first expected of Vienna. He had several contacts in Hamburg who would have encouraged him to make what was still a long journey – for example the composer Carl Peter Grädener (1812–83) and Bertha Porubszky, a Viennese girl who had been a member of his choir – in addition to the wider circle of musicians who performed in Vienna, beginning with his intimates Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim. His first comments leave the issue open. He wrote shortly before leaving to his fellow composer Albert Dietrich, ‘I am leaving on Monday for Vienna! I look forward to it as a child. Of course I do not know how long I shall stay. We will leave it open and I hope to meet you some time during the winter. Pray do not leave me quite without letters’, leaving Dietrich some business addresses rather than a private one or hotel.

Ever since Schumann, in ‘Neue Bahnen’, told the world that a twenty-year-old unknown from Hamburg had played him ‘sonatas, or rather veiled symphonies’ (‘Sonaten, mehr verschleierte Symphonien’), Brahms's works have been open to charges of inconcinnity, or at least ambiguity, of genre. Wagner, in ‘On the Application of Music to Drama’ (‘Über die Anwendung der Musik auf das Drama’, 1879), suggested a contrary formal mismatch: for him the Brahms symphonies were essentially ‘transplanted’ chamber music, ‘quintets and the like served up as symphonies’. This leitmotif was long recycled by Brahms's detractors, and some of his more discriminating friends. All polemics aside, certainly in Brahms the streams of orchestral, chamber and instrumental music flow in unusually close proximity. Seemingly these genres did not require any sharp differentiation in his expressive aims, or the means of their realisation: all partook equally of his highly personal synthesis of romantic, classical and pre-classical techniques, and his ongoing development of post-Beethovenian sonata discourse.

Brahms's orchestral scores, moreover, reflect his development of a genuine and original orchestral style which deployed colour neither for its own sake, nor for merely pictorial or anecdotal effect. His orchestration relates colour to structure, to embody and articulate a dramatic but intricately developing musical argument with the directness and clarity, the identity of idea and expressive medium, of the smaller, ‘purer’ ensembles of his chamber and instrumental works.

Brahms's works for solo piano can be neatly grouped according to the four periods typically discerned within his music. The Sonata Op. 1, Sonata Op. 2, Scherzo Op. 4, Sonata Op. 5, Schumann Variations Op. 9 and Ballades Op. 10 are early pieces, dating from 1851 to 1854; the larger variation sets – Op. 21, Op. 24, Op. 35 – and Waltzes Op. 39 fall within the ‘first maturity’ (1855–76); the Klavierstücke Op. 76 and Rhapsodies Op. 79 belong to the ‘second maturity’ (1876–90); while the last four sets, Opp. 116–19, form part of the late music (1890–6). In addition to these solo works, the two piano concertos date respectively from 1854–9 and 1878–81, and there are of course numerous chamber compositions with piano. But the focus in this chapter is on Brahms's solo piano music, in particular four works serving as cross-sections of the stylistic succession outlined above: the second movement from Op. 5, the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel Op. 24, the Capriccio Op. 76 No. 5 and the Intermezzo Op. 118 No. 6.

My purpose in isolating these four is not only to complement the broad-brush approach taken by enough other authors to make such a survey redundant here,1 but to explore the tension between what Denis Matthews calls ‘a definite plurality in Brahms’s musical makeup’ (three principal phases, respectively architectural, contrapuntal and lyrical in nature, defined by the use of classical forms in the early sonatas, the rediscovery of Bach and Handel in the variation sets, and the pre-eminence of melody in the late miniatures) and, in contrast, the stylistic unity or integrity apparent from the composer’s very first works for piano through to his late music. As Matthews comments, Brahms’s style ‘was to change little in a lifetime.

Since the completion of the last of them in the summer of 1885, all four Brahms symphonies have enjoyed a more or less regular stay in the core repertory. Though they represent a small output relative to the vast output of chamber music, as well as to the symphonies of his contemporaries and successors, Brahms's symphonies have established a major position in the concert hall; a challenge to orchestras both in balance and in the quality of playing in all departments, they still represent a means by which the highest orchestral standard is judged. Yet for the listener they have an added dimension. Perhaps more than any of the symphonic works with which they might be compared in the later nineteenth century, they embody a complex set of musical statements, gestures or ‘utterances’ that open up different structural interpretations and relations of ideas. For some listeners, the framework for the apprehension of these features is the classical exterior and the secure grounding in an Austro-Germanic musical tradition, giving these works their unique emotional, spiritual and intellectual appeal; others will cite the creativity with which Brahms met the very challenge of symphonic composition after Beethoven, a challenge inseparable from that of symphonic composition in the time of Liszt and Wagner. The aesthetic contradictions and paradoxes inherent in his solutions are an essential part of the works' appeal.

Brahms's biographers have often remarked that these large-scale works were composed within a single decade, 1875–85. To some extent, then, they spring from a single creative impulse. Although traces of it extend as far back as 1862, the First Symphony was not completed until September 1876, the bulk of the composing having taken place in 1875–6. Within the space of a single year, however, the Second Symphony followed. Then there was a lull, as Brahms turned to other projects, among them the Violin Concerto and the Second Piano Concerto, completed in 1878 and 1881 respectively. The Third Symphony was finished during the summer of 1883.

Family background

Brahms's family associations with North Germany were long and deep. His forebears on his mother's side came from Schleswig-Holstein. They can be traced to Itzehoe, Tondem, Leck and Flensburg, and included school teachers, pastors and aldermen, several of whom belonged to the Schleswig-Holstein minor nobility: one of the most famous of them, the engraver Melchior Lorch (1527–86, the creator of the so-called ‘Elbekarte’ which bears his name), was also a prominent portrait painter. Research on the mother's side reveals a line traceable to connections with the Swedish king Gustav Wasa (1496–1560). Brahms's maternal grandfather, Peter Radeloff Nissen, migrated from Itzehoe to Hamburg, where, on 4 July 1789, Brahms's mother, Johanna Henrica Christiane Brahms, was born. The forebears on the paternal side led from Heide in Holstein, the birthplace of Brahms's father, Johann Jacob, to Brunsbüttel and further over the Elbe back to Lower Saxony, to the area between the Elbe and the Weser. It was from there that Peter Brahms, Brahms's great-grandfather, migrated to Holstein around 1750. His son Johann came from Brunsbüttel via Meldorf to Wörden, a suburb of Heide. His firstborn son, Peter Hinrich, Brahms's uncle, later occupied the house that still exists today as the Heide Brahmshaus, (now in the possession of the Schleswig-Holstein Brahms Gesellschaft). In another, strongly built house in the market place in Heide, Brahms's father, Johann Jacob, was born. The paternal forebears were chiefly craftsmen and minor tradesmen.

Brahms's view of song

Brahms wrote songs throughout his life. They provide a constant backcloth to his larger instrumental works, to which they often relate quite tangibly. A solid core has remained in the repertory since Brahms's time, and they are well represented in the current recording catalogue, as prominent as those of his predecessors Schubert and Schumann, whom he so admired. Yet there has always been a discernible tendency among critics to exclude Brahms from an ultimate canon of great German Lieder composers comprising Schubert, Schumann and Wolf; indeed Brahms is even sometimes included in a list with much lesser figures of the genre such as Mendelssohn, Franz and Cornelius. There are obvious reasons for this. First of all, the fact that Brahms did not set the greatest poems, rather preferring the work of minor figures, whose verse he might more easily transform: from this it is assumed that he lacked the knowledge of or the discernment of the composers who did. Since by this reckoning, great songs are seen as critiques of great poetry, responding to the challenge presented by a poem which is independently known, Brahms's songs are excluded since they offer no such comparisons. To this conclusion is harnessed the fact that Brahms is sometimes seen as displaying awkwardness in the musical rendering of verbal accentuation, a consequence of his emphasis on rounded melody. One might further add in such an assessment that Brahms avoids the lengthy groups or cycles that show a capacity for reflecting psychological development. In short, that he is an instrumentally rather than verbally driven composer.

Music in the public sphere: Brahms and the spectre of Wagnerism

The writing of music history frequently gains its primary impetus from that which we regard in our own time as great music: those works through which we have chosen to define the essential achievement and identity of a composer. Working backwards, so to speak, from a retrospective evaluation of an entire corpus of music, we distort biography and history to fit our judgements, justifying our own tastes through the medium of scholarly historical explanation. In the case of Johannes Brahms, his popularity and renown are now most often associated with his orchestral music. Therefore, among the most carefully scrutinised aspects of his evolution as a composer is his presumedly difficult and sustained struggle with the task of writing a symphony. His first explicit public foray into this genre was completed relatively late in his career. The C minor Symphony was finished and first performed in 1876. Brahms was already well established and world famous. His substantial early reputation throughout Europe obviously did not derive from his work as a composer of symphonies. His most spectacular success before the completion of Op. 68 was achieved with Ein deutsches Requiem in 1868 and (with the added fifth movement) in 1869. The prominent Berlin critic Louis Ehlert, who considered himself a fair-minded but not uncritical Brahms enthusiast, had little doubt, writing in 1880, that the symphonic form was not, and would likely never be, Brahms's forte.

With these nearly mystical words, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in a 'Circular Letter' of Christmas 1939 to the brethren of the Finkenwalde seminary and the pastors of the Confessing Church, describes the task of Christian theology in general and of Christology in particular: to praise the glory of God in the wonder of his incarnation.

It has become customary to regard Christology as the centre of Bonhoeffer's thought. And indeed, the question 'Who is Jesus Christ?' forms the cantus firmus of Bonhoeffer's theological development from the beginning to the end. This question, originally latent in Sanctorum Communio, becomes explicit in Bonhoeffer's academic Christology lectures of 1933, that crucial year of German history in the twentieth century when Hitler came to power. And still in 1944, in his Letters and Papers from Prison, the programmatic question Vho Christ really is, for us today' forms the starting point of Bonhoeffer's new theological reflections.

In these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer we glimpse the creative centre of his paradigm for human behaviour within the church and the state. Through essays, letters and books he explored both traditional and experimental patterns of relating the church which he served to the state, especially the German state during the rule of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis (1933-45). Bonhoeffer's institutional vision, initially focused intellectually and geographically on central Europe, impelled him, particularly during his imprisonment (1943-45), into an expansive love for the world, 'the whole of human life in all its manifestations'.

The Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall discerns Bonhoeffer's 'theology of world-orientation' most vividly in the letters and papers penned in his Tegel prison cell. For Hall this Tegel theology constituted 'a fundamental break with the other-worldliness and world-ambiguity of conventional Christianity'. Yet, at the start of his career, Bonhoeffer had already displayed sensitivity towards the struggles of marginal groups in society (blacks in New York City and poor, troubled teenagers in Berlin), revealing his unwillingness to retreat from reality, even during the early 1930s. As soon as the Nazis began anti-Semitic persecution in April 1933, Bonhoeffer was one of the first Christian theologians to focus on the Jewish issue as central in the church struggle (Kirchenkampf), both within the German Evangelical (Protestant) Church itself and in its fight against Nazi control.

Those whose only acquaintance with Dietrich Bonhoeffer is limited to his exciting affirmation about 'Christian secularity' in the prison letters and his inspirational role in the plot to kill Hitler are often astonished to learn that he was also a man of daily, at times childlike, prayer. Some early analysts of Bonhoeffer's theology did, in fact, dismiss his most directly 'spiritual literature', The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together, as deviations from the exemplary activism that reached crescendo pitch in the anti-Hitler conspiracy and his goading the churches to responsible action against the state in the Ethics. These writings, however, were far from being 'devotional' detours. They reflect enduring, faith-filled sources of Bonhoeffer's inner stamina, his profound 'spirituality', without which he could never have persevered in his struggle against Nazism.

Discerning the rhythms of Bonhoeffer's 'spiritual strength', which is the focus of this study, brings us time and again to the intrinsic connection between prayer and action as expressed in his daily meditation on the biblical word, his efforts to form genuine Christian community, and his willingness to be led by God's grace to take Christlike risks to retrieve freedom and justice for a nation under the heel of a cruel dictatorship. These were the 'Powers for Good', to cite a phrase from one of his poems,1 that steadied him in his resistance to Nazism. They also distinguish his Christcentred spirituality from false piety and idolatrous religion.

Theology entered the Bonhoeffer household, embedded as it was in the culture of the German aristocracy, through Paula von Hase, Dietrich's mother. Her mother, a countess, had been a pupil of Franz Liszt and Klara Schumann. This undoubtedly found its way into the artistry Dietrich Bonhoeffer displayed in his piano playing. Paula von Hase's maternal grandfather, the painter Count von Kalckreuth, founded and directed the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar. Her father, son of a professor of church history and historical theology, was a professor of practical theology. A distinctly political and somewhat 'anti-aristocratic' spirit entered into this tradition when Paula von Hase married Karl Bonhoeffer. The democratic republicanism, socialism and patriotism of the German Student Association, founded in 1815, were anticipated by the forebears of Dietrich's father. They had drawn the rulers' wrath and exacted the price of personal suffering of several of Dietrich's ancestors. Eberhard Bethge sums up this legacy and its significance for the young Bonhoeffer in these words:

Perhaps because they provide us with no self-evident hermeneutical key by which to understand them, Bonhoeffer's writings have served as 'a veritable Rorschach test' for late-modern theology. Yet they do not comprise a systematic theology, and even his longer writings did not appear according to any overall plan. One might conclude then that it is his remarkable life, not the substance of his thought and writing, that provides Bonhoeffer's legacy with its coherence, its integrity. But until now, despite the plethora of works that have been and still are being written about him, no one could judge the relative significance of the life and the work, lacking as we have the written legacy in its entirety.

At last, with the emergence of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Werke (DBW) - and with the English translation of this critical edition (DBWE) well underway - we can view the entire written legacy, resisting all temptations to reduce Bonhoeffer's enduring significance to his remarkable biography alone. This literary estate now stands before us, virtually complete, demanding of students at least as much attention as they would grant the life, to which Bonhoeffer's works lend their testimony. His writings provide not only an example of intellectual and theological preparation for the reconstruction of German culture after the war but also a rare insight into the vanishing world of the old social and academic elites. His thought resonates with a prescience, subtlety and maturity that continually belies the youth of the thinker.

From the early 1930s; the Christian witness for peace was one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's most consuming preoccupations; both intellectually and in action. In this, far from being a lone voice, he was but one of numerous Christians in many countries for whom the cause of peace, set against the tragic experience of 1914-18 and the resurgence of nationalism and militarism in the 1930s, was paramount. To isolate Bonhoeffer from the wider movement in which he took part, casting him in the role of sole prophet or hero, would not only be historically unreal; it would also obstruct the view of his distinctive contribution. It was in his sharp theological interaction with his partners in ecumenical peace-work, no less than in his opposition to the menacing political demons of his time, that his critical - and continuing - significance is to be seen. This chapter will concentrate on Bonhoeffer's theological contribution during the critical years 1932-4.

Prior to 1963 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was largely known in the English-speaking world as a martyr of the Confessing Church struggle (Kirchenkampf)in Germany, and the author of The Cost of Discipleship. The publication of Honest to God in 1963 in which Bishop John Robinson interpreted Bonhoeffer on the basis of his fragmentary theological reflections in prison, significantly changed this perception. Bonhoeffer became the radical theologian of secular Christianity and was even held responsible for the 'theology of the death of God' which became the rage in some circles at the time. This confusion about the significance of Bonhoeffer's life and thought was compounded by the apparent contradiction between his pacifism during the mid 1930s and his later involvement in the attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Bonhoeffer was a riddle.

The controversy surrounding Honest to God none the less sparked off renewed interest in Bonhoeffer, especially in the English-speaking world. As his friend and biographer Eberhard Bethge later put it, Robinson's 'fascinatingly one-sided' interpretation of Bonhoeffer 'introduced the most fruitful period for the study, translation and publication of all of Bonhoeffer's works in the Protestant, Roman Catholic and secular spheres'.

The Germany of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's lifetime (1906-45) experienced three radical constitutional changes, all of which were to affect Bonhoeffer's formation in crucial ways. His first twelve years saw the Wilhelmine Empire (Kaiserreich), founded under Otto von Bismarck in 1871, reach the zenith of its power and then virtually self-destruct at the end of the First World War in 1918. The Kaiserreich was followed by Germany's first experiment in parliamentary democracy; the ill-fated Weimar Republic. It lasted from 1919 until 1933 when it also collapsed, or more accurately, was destroyed by a combination of hostile attacks from the anti-democratic forces of both the extreme left and the extreme right, on the one hand, and the political inexperience of the supporters of the constitution on the other. Then, out of the political and economic chaos of the end-phase of the Weimar years (1929-33), arose the National Socialist dictatorship of Adolf Hitler, the Third Reich. It was this latter manifestation of the German spirit which Bonhoeffer judged as essentially evil and which left him no alternative but to resist to the death.

It is not uncommon to find that the best-known writings of an author are the most difficult to examine. Familiarity produces its own 'readings' of a text, an audience already clear what its central content amounts to; and certainly clear about any impact the text may have made on them personally. Unlike some of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's earlier texts, the Letters and Papers from Prison have a place in the life of many who, perhaps as a result, come to want to study him further. It is Letters and Papers from Prison that are the home of those evocative phrases, 'a world come of age', 'the religious a priori and 'religionless Christianity', and therefore it is in Letters and Papers from Prison that those who have sought Bonhoeffer's support for their agenda for the interpretation of the Christian faith so as to take account of the changed thought patterns of the contemporary world have found it.

In the midst of these theological explorations there are other phrases of a profoundly evocative quality, such as the reference to God's being 'pushed out of the world on to the Cross',3 that have offered themselves for use in the devotion of many subsequent believers. Here also is an utterly engaging human story, with its insight into the way in which a particular person survived in the uncertain, frightening and potentially demoralising circumstances of imprisonment: we learn of his love for and a little of his taste in music, of the kind of life for which he longed and the way in which he managed the intense loneliness of his situation. At the heart of the letters is a warm human being, a passionate lover of life, with enough capacity to engage his readers (readers he never envisaged), even if they had no particular interest in theology.

Bonhoeffer provided the title of this chapter in his doctoral dissertation, Sanctorum Communio, when he said that theological doctrines such as creation, sin and revelation can only be fully understood in terms of sociality. If the venerable English word 'sociality' does not spring to our lips in everyday speech, that reflects the degree to which practical and philosophical individualism pervades modern Anglo-Saxon culture. But to use 'sociality' as a fundamental category to describe Dietrich Bonhoeffer's theology is not simply to distinguish German from American and British culture. The reason is essentially theological: 'the concepts of person, community and God are inseparably and essentially interrelated'.

This means that articulating a Christian understanding of human sociality is an inner-theological task. What 'person' and 'community' mean is a question of theological anthropology. It is not as if one could take an already developed interpretation of human social existence and then simply pour Christian content into it. For there are many different systems embedding competing world views: in the modern world, theories of social contract, civil rights, utilitarianism and Marxism have powerfully shaped economic and political systems, and the mentality and mores of whole populations. Similarly, philosophy from Aristotle to the Stoics and up to Idealist epistemology and Hegelianism have all developed views of human persons and social life.