Brahms and Freud

Available for over a year

Five Essays about the 19th-century German composer Johannes Brahms. Part 4 of 5. Recorded in front of an audience at St. Georges, Bristol, as part of BBC Radio 3's Brahms Experience - a week-long exploration of Brahms' life and music. Brahms and and Freud co-existed in Vienna, as psychoanalysis was being born. But they belong to two vastly different epochs: what can we learn by setting them side by side? Often at a loss for words, frequently gruff and spiky, Brahms was a man with complex personal traits. Devastated by his parents' disintegrating marriage, he found relationships exceptionally difficult. A question Freud once asked of us all might help us understand the hidden personality of Johannes Brahms: what is the sublimation of sexual desire, and how much unfulfilled libido can we bear? Writer Lesley Chamberlain takes us back to the Vienna of the 1890s, where Brahms was composing his late masterpieces and Freud was carrying out his groundbreaking early work. Producer: Melvin Rickarby.