Academic Festival Overture in C Minor

Brahms was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Breslau in March 1879. The university suggested he write a “doctoral symphony” but what they received was something quite different: the comparatively lighthearted Academic Festival Overture, weaving together popular student songs—a “potpourri à la Suppé”, as Brahms described it. Franz von Suppé (1819-95) had indeed composed an overture, Flotte Bursche, that strings together a quartet of student songs, but Brahms goes far further in dovetailing his chosen melodies, combining and developing them in ingenious ways. The overture sets off with a determined minor-key introduction and builds to a triumphant climax on the beer-drinking song “Gaudeamus igitur” (“So let us rejoice”), bedecked with cascading string scales. The work raised eyebrows at Breslau as some of the songs Brahms had chosen poked fun at the university authorities. Nevertheless, making use of the largest orchestra he ever used—complete with piccolo, contrabassoon, bass drum, cymbals and triangle—the overture for once displays the sense of mischief that he strove to conceal in his other works.