Program Notes
by David M. Zajic Academic Festival Overture, op. 80
Johannes Brahms (1833-1896)
Composed: 1880
Premiered: January 4, 1881
Johannes Brahms received a thorough musical education in his youth, but his course of study never included a college experience. He studied composition and piano privately as a child-and it’s not every wunderkind who can claim to have played the bordellos of Hamburg by the age of thirteen. By 1850 Brahms had developed enough of a local reputation as a pianist to become the accompanist to the Hungarian violinist Eduard Reményi. In 1853, Brahms and Reményi embarked on a concert tour of Germany that eventually took them to Hanover, where Brahms attracted the attention of Joseph Joachim. At 21, Joachim was already established as a major violin virtuoso, and he was to become one of Brahms’s closest friends. When Brahms parted company from Reményi shortly thereafter, it was to Joachim that he turned. He spent two months with Joachim in Göttingen, auditing courses in philosophy and history at the University. This was Brahms’s closest approach to college life as a student.
Thus it is not so shocking that in 1877, when Cambridge University wished to offer him an honorary doctorate, Brahms’s desire for academic recognition was outweighed by his distaste for travel and publicity. Two years later, Brahms accepted an honorary doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Breslau, and expressed his gratitude by composing the Academic Festival Overture -from the students’ point of view! The overture is a medley of popular student drinking songs, but also functions as a mini-symphony. The overture opens with an accented eighth-note pattern and a bouncy melody, that will serve as a bridge between the sections. The first student song, “Wir hatten gebauet ein stattliches Haus,” is sung by the brass after a drum roll. We hear a vigorous presentation of the unifying melody again, but the texture lightens, and the strings begin a more flowing tune, “Der Landesvater.” Next, the bassoons introduce “Fuchsleid,” a silly hazing song. These elements are now developed and mixed together in what must be Brahms’s closest musical approach to the “New German” school, typified by Richard Wagner. Finally, the brass shout out “Gaudeamus igitur” over wild running scales in the strings.