The son of Jakob Brahms, an impecunious horn and double bass player, Johannes showed early promise as a pianist. He first studied music with his father and, at age seven, was sent for piano lessons to F.W. Cossel, who three years later passed him to his own teacher, Eduard Marxsen. Between ages 14 and 16 Brahms earned money to help his family by playing in rough inns in the dock area of Hamburg and meanwhile composing and sometimes giving recitals. In 1850 he met Eduard Reményi, a Jewish Hungarian violinist, with whom he gave concerts and from whom he learned something of Roma (Gypsy) music—an influence that remained with him always.

The chief of these was the nature of Schumann's panegyric itself. There was already conflict between the “neo-German” school, dominated by Franz Liszt (Liszt, Franz) and Richard Wagner (Wagner, Richard), and the more conservative elements, whose main spokesman was Schumann. The latter's praise of Brahms displeased the former, and Brahms himself, though kindly received by Liszt, did not conceal his lack of sympathy with the self-conscious modernists. He was therefore drawn into controversy, and most of the disturbances in his otherwise uneventful personal life arose from this situation. Gradually Brahms came to be on close terms with the Schumann household, and, when Schumann was first taken mentally ill in 1854, Brahms assisted Clara Schumann (Schumann, Clara) in managing her family. He appears to have fallen in love with her; but, though they remained deep friends after Schumann's death in 1856, their relationship did not, it seems, go further.

The nearest Brahms ever came to marriage was in his affair with Agathe von Siebold in 1858; from this he recoiled suddenly, and he was never thereafter seriously involved in the prospect. The reasons for this are unclear, but probably his immense reserve and his inability to express emotions in any other way but musically were responsible, and he no doubt was aware that his natural irascibility and resentment of sympathy would have made him an impossible husband. He wrote in a letter, “I couldn't bear to have in the house a woman who has the right to be kind to me, to comfort me when things go wrong.” All this, together with his intense love of children and animals, goes some way to explain certain aspects of his music, its concentrated inner reserve that hides and sometimes dams powerful currents of feeling.

By 1861 he was back in Hamburg, and in the following year he made his first visit to Vienna, with some success. Having failed to secure the post of conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic concerts, he settled in Vienna in 1863, assuming direction of the Singakademie, a fine choral society. His life there was on the whole regular and quiet, disturbed only by the ups and downs of his musical success, by altercations occasioned by his own quick temper and by the often virulent rivalry between his supporters and those of Wagner and Anton Bruckner, and by one or two inconclusive love affairs. His music, despite a few failures and constant attacks by the Wagnerites, was established, and his reputation grew steadily. By 1872 he was principal conductor of the Society of Friends of Music (Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde), and for three seasons he directed the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. His choice of music was not as conservative as might have been expected, and though the “Brahmins” continued their war against Wagner, Brahms himself always spoke of his rival with respect. Brahms is sometimes portrayed as unsympathetic toward his contemporaries. His kindness to Antonín Dvořák (Dvořák, Antonín) is always acknowledged, but his encouragement even of such a composer as the young Gustav Mahler (Mahler, Gustav) is not always realized, and his enthusiasm for Carl Nielsen (Nielsen, Carl)'s First Symphony is not generally known.

In between these two appointments in Vienna, Brahms's work flourished and some of his most significant works were composed. The year 1868 witnessed the completion of his most famous choral (choral music) work, Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem), which had occupied him since Schumann's death. This work, based on biblical texts selected by the composer, made a strong impact at its first performance at Bremen on Good Friday, 1868; after this, it was performed throughout Germany. With the Requiem, which is still considered one of the most significant works of 19th-century choral music, Brahms moved into the front rank of German composers.

By now Brahms's contemporaries were keenly aware of the outstanding significance of his works, and people spoke of the “three great Bs” (meaning Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms), to whom they accorded the same rank of eminence. Yet there was a sizable circle of musicians who did not admit Brahms's greatness. Fervent admirers of the avant-garde composers of the day, most notably Liszt (Liszt, Franz) and Wagner (Wagner, Richard), looked down on Brahms's contributions as too old-fashioned and inexpressive.

Brahms remained in Vienna for the rest of his life. He resigned as director of the Society of Friends of Music in 1875, and from then on devoted his life almost solely to composition. When he went on concert tours, he conducted or performed (on the piano) only his own works. He maintained a few close personal friendships and remained a lifelong bachelor. He spent his summers traveling in Italy, Switzerland, and Austria. During these years Brahms composed the boldly conceived Double Concerto in A Minor (1887) for violin and cello, the powerful Piano Trio No. 3 in C Minor (1886), and the Violin Sonata in D Minor (1886–88). He also completed the radiantly joyous first String Quintet in F Major (1882) and the energetic second String Quintet in G Major (1890).

Brahms's music complemented and counteracted the rapid growth of Romantic individualism in the second half of the 19th century. He was a traditionalist in the sense that he greatly revered the subtlety and power of movement displayed by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, with an added influence from Franz Schubert. The Romantic composers' preoccupation with the emotional moment had created new harmonic vistas, but it had two inescapable consequences. First, it had produced a tendency toward rhapsody that often resulted in a lack of structure. Second, it had slowed down the processes of music, so that Wagner had been able to discover a means of writing music that moved as slowly as his often-argumentative stage action. Many composers were thus decreasingly concerned to preserve the skill of taut, brilliant, and dramatic symphonic development that had so eminently distinguished the masters at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, culminating in Beethoven's chamber music and symphonies.

Brahms was acutely conscious of this loss, repudiated it, and set himself to compensate for it in order to keep alive a force he felt strongly was far from spent. But Brahms was desirous not of reproducing old styles but of infusing the language of his own time with constructive power. Thus his musical language actually bears little resemblance to Beethoven's or even Schubert's; harmonically it was much influenced by Schumann and even to some extent by Wagner. It is Brahms's supple and masterful control of rhythm and movement that distinguishes him from all his contemporaries. It is often supposed that his sense of movement was slower than that of his most admired predecessor, Beethoven, but Brahms was always able to vary the pace of his musical thought in a startling manner, often tightening and speeding it without a change of tempo. It is a question of subtlety in command of tonality, harmony, and rhythm, and no 19th-century composer after Beethoven is able to surpass him in this respect. At all periods in Brahms's work one finds a great variety of expression—from the subtly humorous to the tragic—but his larger works show an increasing mastery of movement and an ever-greater economy and concentration. Ultimately, Brahms's power of movement stems partly from a source that may seem paradoxical. He was the most deeply versed of Classical composers in the music of the distant past, and he took the lessons he learned from the polyphonic school of the 16th century and applied them to the forms and the instrumental and vocal resources of his own time. Thus it was by way of a new approach to texture, drawn from very old models, that he revitalized a 19th-century rhythmic language that had been in danger of expiring from textural and harmonic stagnation.

In his orchestral works Brahms displays an unmistakable and highly distinctive deployment of tone colour (timbre), especially in his use of woodwind and brass instruments and in his string writing, but the important thing about it is that colour is deployed, rather than laid on for its own sake. A close relationship between orchestration and architecture dominates these works, with the orchestration contributing as much to the tonal colouring as do the harmonies and tonalities and the changing nature of the themes. As in the concerti of Mozart and Beethoven, such an attitude to orchestration proves in Brahms to be peculiarly adapted to the more subtle aspects of the relation between orchestra and soloist. The Classical concerto had achieved in Mozart's mature works for piano and orchestra an unsurpassable degree of organization, and Beethoven had further extended the genre's scale of design and range of expression. The higher subtleties of such works inevitably escaped many subsequent composers; Felix Mendelssohn had “abolished” the opening orchestral tutti, or ritornello, and had been followed in this regard by many other lesser composers. Brahms saw that this was essentially debilitating and set himself to recover the depth and grandeur of the concerto idea. Like Mozart and Beethoven, he realized that the long introductory passage of the orchestra, far from being superfluous, was the means of sharpening and deepening the complex relationship of orchestra to solo, especially when the time came for recapitulation, where an entirely new and often revelatory distribution of themes, keys, instrumentation, and tensions was possible. Many of Brahms's contemporaries thought him reactionary on this account, but the result is that Brahms's concerti have withstood wear and tear far better than many works thought in their day to outshine them.

At the other end of the scale, Brahms was a masterly miniaturist, not only in many of his fine and varied songs but also in his terse, cunningly wrought, intensely personal late piano works. As a song composer, he ranged from the complex and highly organized to the extremely simple, strophic type; his melodic invention is always original and direct, while the accompaniments are deeply evocative without ever being merely picturesque. The late piano music, usually of small dimension but wide implication, is generally expressive of a profound isolation of mind and heart and is therefore not readily approachable, while its apparent overall tone and mood may seem to the superficial ear monotonous. But each individual piece has a quiet and intense quality of its own that renders the occasional outburst of angry passion the more potent; the internal economy and subtlety of these works is extraordinary.