The Great Composer Quiz – June 18, 2020
Father’s Day Week Edition
This Great Composer’s Dad was so intent on becoming a musician he ran away from home more than once after his parents refused to pay for music lessons. Eventually they relented. He made his life – such as it was – as a street musician playing several instruments. Eventually he settled on two: double-bass and the natural horn. At age 24 he was living in squalor and courting a seventeen-year-old girl when he met and married a woman seventeen years older than he. She tended to dominate the marriage, managing the children and the family finances, as he at times grew morose, a trait he passed along to his second child, his blue-eyed son. So who was this depressed busker, this Great Composer’s Dad?
Time’s up, pencils down. the Great Composer’s Dad who married a woman old enough to be his mother. After three decades of marriage they separated, despite the best efforts of their three children to keep them together, especially their second child, Johannes Brahms. The answer is Jakob Brahms, who played played double bass in the Hamburg orchestra, and at home played the natural horn.