# Johannes Brahms: Tragic Overture, Op. 81 Premiered Vienna, December 1880. Brahms spent the summer of 1880 writing two overtures: The Academic Festival Overture, and the Tragic Overture. "One weeps, the other laughs," he told a friend. The first was written for a university which had granted him an honorary degree, and it is filled with light-hearted student songs. Not a man much given to levity himself, perhaps composing the Tragic Overture was a way to find an inner balance. "I could not refuse my melancholy nature the satisfaction of composing an overture to a tragedy," he wrote. Which tragedy? He doesn't define it for us. At the time, programmatic music—music with an explicit story—was in vogue, but this bare suggestion of a narrative, "Tragic," is as close as conservative Brahms would go. The music begins in contrast: two decisive blasts like hammer-strokes are followed by a small, urgent, yearning theme that attempts a heroic tone before being swept away again into the blast. These themes wrestle throughout Brahms's ever-evolving development, a human voice against the inescapable.