Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the mid-Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, he spent much of his professional life in Vienna. He is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.
Brahms in 1889
Photograph from 1891 of the building in Hamburg where Brahms was born. It was destroyed by bombing in 1943.
Ede Reményi (l.) and Brahms in 1852
Brahms in 1853
Romantic music is a stylistic movement in Western Classical music associated with the period of the 19th century commonly referred to as the Romantic era. It is closely related to the broader concept of Romanticism—the intellectual, artistic, and literary movement that became prominent in Western culture from about 1798 until 1837.
Josef Danhauser's 1840 painting of Franz Liszt at the piano surrounded by (from left to right) Alexandre Dumas, Hector Berlioz, George Sand, Niccolò Paganini, Gioachino Rossini and Marie d'Agoult, with a bust of Ludwig van Beethoven on the piano
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, by Caspar David Friedrich, is an example of Romantic painting.
Ludwig van Beethoven, painted by Joseph Karl Stieler, 1820
Richard Wagner in Paris, 1861