Johannes Brahms in the context of "Lieder"

Anton Webern (German: [ˈantoːn ˈveːbɐn] ; 3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer, conductor, and musicologist. His music was among the most radical of its milieu in its lyrical, poetic concision and use of then novel atonal and twelve-tone techniques. His approach was typically rigorous, inspired by his studies of the Franco-Flemish School under Guido Adler and by Arnold Schoenberg's emphasis on structure in teaching composition from the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the First Viennese School, and Johannes Brahms. Webern, Schoenberg, and their colleague Alban Berg were at the core of what became known as the Second Viennese School.

Webern was arguably the first and certainly the last of the three to write music in an aphoristic and expressionist style, reflecting his instincts and the idiosyncrasy of his compositional process. He treated themes of loss, love, nature, and spirituality, working from personal experiences. Unhappily peripatetic and often assigned light music or operetta in his early conducting career, he aspired to conduct what was seen as more respectable, serious music at home in Vienna. Following Schoenberg's guidance, Webern attempted to write music of greater length during and after their World War I service, relying on the structural support of texts in many Lieder.

The term string quartet is a type of musical composition or a group of four people who play them. Many composers from the mid-18th century onwards wrote string quartets. The associated musical ensemble consists of two violinists, a violist, and a cellist.

The string quartet was developed into its present form by the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, whose works in the 1750s established the ensemble as a group of four more-or-less equal partners. Since that time, the string quartet has been considered a prestigious form; writing for four instruments with broadly similar characteristics both constrains and tests a composer. String quartet composition flourished in the Classical era, and Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert each wrote a number of them. Many Romantic and early-twentieth-century composers composed string quartets, including Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, Dvořák, Janáček, and Debussy. There was a slight lull in string quartet composition later in the 19th century, but it received a resurgence in the 20th century, with the Second Viennese School, Bartók, Shostakovich, Babbitt, and Carter producing highly regarded examples of the genre, and it remains an important and refined musical form.

Germany claims some of the most renowned composers, singers, producers and performers of the world. Germany is the largest music market in Europe, and third largest in the world.

German classical music is one of the most performed in the world; German composers include some of the most accomplished, influential, and popular in history, among them Georg Friedrich Händel, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms and Richard Strauss, many of whom were among the composers who created the field of German opera.

In musical composition, developing variation is a formal technique in which the variations are produced through the development of existing material. The term was coined by Arnold Schoenberg, twentieth-century composer and inventor of the twelve-tone technique, who believed it was one of the most important compositional principles since around 1750:

The technique has also become associated with Johannes Brahms, whom Schoenberg believed to have used it in its "most advanced state".

Christian Albert Theodor Billroth (26 April 1829 – 6 February 1894) was a German surgeon and amateur musician.

As a surgeon, he is generally regarded as the founding father of modern abdominal surgery. As a musician, he was a close friend and confidant of Johannes Brahms, a leading patron of the Viennese musical scene, and one of the first to attempt a scientific analysis of musicality.

Freiherr Hans Guido von Bülow (German: [ˌhans fɔn ˈbyːlo] ; 8 January 1830 – 12 February 1894) was a German conductor, pianist, and composer of the Romantic era. As one of the most distinguished conductors of the 19th century, his activity was critical for establishing the successes of several major composers of the time, especially Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms. Alongside Carl Tausig, Bülow was perhaps the most prominent of the early students of the Hungarian composer, pianist and conductor Franz Liszt; he gave the first public performance of Liszt's Sonata in B minor in 1857. He became acquainted with, fell in love with and eventually married Liszt's daughter Cosima, who later left him for Wagner. Noted for his interpretation of the works of Ludwig van Beethoven, he was one of the earliest European musicians to tour the United States.

Johannes Kreisler is the name of a character in three novels by E.T.A. Hoffmann: Kreisleriana (1813), Johannes Kreisler, des Kapellmeisters Musikalische Leiden (1815), and The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr together with a fragmentary Biography of Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler on Random Sheets of Waste Paper (1822). He appears briefly in The Golden Pot (1814) and in some of Hoffmann's journalism as well.

The moody, asocial composer Kreisler, Hoffmann's alter ego, is a musical genius whose creativity is stymied by an excessive sensibility. The character inspired Robert Schumann's Kreisleriana for piano, op. 16 (1838), and the first movement of György Kurtág's Hommage à R. Sch. op. 15/d (merkwürdige Pirouetten des Kapellmeisters Johannes Kreisler), for clarinet, viola, and piano. In the manuscript of Brahms's Variations on a Theme by Schumann, Op. 9, he marked each variation with a B for Brahms or a Kr for Kreisler, modeling this practice on the two alter egos Schumann created for himself, "Florestan", which for Schumann represented the passionate and outgoing side of his nature and "Eusebius", the withdrawn, reflective side. Brahms's identification with his alter ego 'Johannes Kreisler Junior' would continue until at least 1860, with a number of manuscripts being dedicated to this alias and with the composer often being addressed as such by his friends Julius Otto Grimm and Joseph Joachim.