If you ever saw the 1990s animated show Animaniacs, you may recognize the final tune of Brahms’s Academic Festival Overture, which sounded in that show with the lyrics, “Acme Looniversity, where we earn our toon degree!” Brahms probably would have approved of this cartoon appearance.
Following the success of Brahms’s first two symphonies, in March 1879 the University of Breslau (Wrocław) voted to award him an honorary doctoral degree. The local conductor, a friend of Brahms, hoped he might compose a grand “Doctor-symphony” for the occasion. Being somewhat of a contrarian and also someone uncomfortable with displays of pomp and circumstance, Brahms instead wrote a pair of ten-minute overtures, including this humorous piece that combines a bunch of popular college drinking songs. Moreover, Brahms’s entire college experience was limited to visiting a friend (the violinist Joseph Joachim) at some student clubs in the summer of 1853, which is when he probably encountered a few of these songs.
Brahms was criticized by some contemporaries as an “academic” composer, by which they meant that his music adhered too closely to formal structures and lacked sensuality and beauty. Indeed, while Brahms never attended college, he was self-taught, an almost-obsessive student of early music, ranging from sixteenth-century folk tunes to eighteenth-century educational treatises on composition. Like the most enthusiastic music-theory student, he gave himself exercises in counterpoint – the art of writing note against note while following the rules of musical tonality. So, the joke of the Academic Festival Overture is that he applied these “academic” principles of sonata form and complex counterpoint to popular student songs. It is certainly a masterclass in composition, but its tone is faux-serious at times, joyful at others. It provides a clear contrast from the other piece Brahms wrote for this occasion, the so-called Tragic Overture, op. 81, which is actually serious.
The faux-serious mood begins the piece with strings, bassoons, and horns, but you’ll also hear cymbals and bass drum, a nod to the military motif that would have been associated with nationalist student clubs. It’s not long before the atmosphere lightens with fun syncopations and whip-like gestures in winds and strings. Listen closely, around four minutes in, for the double bassoons introducing a tune that would have been sung by first-year fraternity initiates with smoking pipe in one hand, beer in the other; one historical commentator called this “The Great Bassoon Joke,” but how can we rank bassoon jokes? The oboe attempts to join them before the full orchestra interrupts, including some raucous triplets in the French horns. To return to the “Animaniacs tune,” which appears in triumphant orchestration in the finale (albeit with some zany violin runs), it is the Latin-language student song, Gaudeamus Igitur. Its opening lines translate, “While we’re young, let us rejoice, singing out in gleeful tones” – a fitting end to this jolly piece.