Johannes Brahms (1833-1879) was a German Romantic composer. He was honored as one of “The Three Bs” of Germany by the German musician Hans von Bülow (1830-1894), while the other two achieved composers are Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Brahms’s work showed how he expertly applied solemn elements of the Classicism to Romanticism’s broad and emotional melody, the various way of how he used counterpoint, sequence, developing variation led to his own deep and complicated texture of melody. The melody of Brahms’s pieces was consistent, solid and rich on sound effect, and also liked folk songs. This features that Brahms not only was a conservative composer for the Classicism, but he stood for the spirit of the Classicism and the Romanticism. The combination of these two was the reason why Brahms’s style was special.

Brahms composed abundant piano pieces, symphonies, chamber music, and art songs. But there were only two orchestra overtures accomplished during his lifetime: Academic Festival Overture and Tragic Overture. These two were done in the same year, but the emotional contents were utterly different. Brahms used the contents of German campus songs to compose Academic Festival Overture, the scene of this music portraits a vivid atmosphere in the schoolyard. On the other hand, Tragic Overture was in d minor, presents a tragic character, and Brahms composed it in rigorous sonata form.

The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter explains the motivation, the range and the methods of the study. The second chapter describes the biography of the composer, the mode of the epoch, and the introduction of the overtures. The third and the fourth chapters separately discourse for Academic Festival Overture and Tragic Overture upon the historical background of the compositional processes, the analysis of the two overtures, the conducting interpretation, and the audio discussion of tempi and timbre. The fifth chapter is the conclusion. The main goal of this thesis is to comprehend the authentic and complete interpretation of these two orchestra pieces by researching the pieces themselves, and by rehearsing the orchestra.