The Cambridge Companion To Brahms
The Cambridge Companion To Brahms
The Cambridge Companion To Brahms
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Cambridge Companions to Music
Composers
The Cambridge Companion to Bach
Edited by John Butt
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The Cambridge Companion to Berg
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The Cambridge Companion to Brahms
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The Cambridge Companion to Chopin
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The Cambridge Companion to Handel
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The Cambridge Companion to Schubert
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The Cambridge Companion to
BRAHMS
edited by
Michael Musgrave
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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo
Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521481298
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
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Contents
Notes [288]
List of works [307]
Bibliography [312]
Index [318]
[vii]
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Illustrations
11.1 Concert programme for the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary of Herr and
Frau Schröder, 5 July 1851, showing the names of Brahms and Karl Würth
(Brahms-Institut, Lübeck) [19]
11.2 The programme at the Thalia-Theater, 9 September 1851, in which Brahms
participated as accompanist (Brahms-Institut, Lübeck) [20]
11.1 Autograph: from the finale of the First Symphony, bars 27–31 (Pierpont Morgan
Library, New York, Mary Flagler Cary Music Collection) [260]
11.2 a and b Copyist’s manuscript: from the finale of the First Symphony, bars 26–37
(Brahms-Institut Lübeck) [261]
11.3 First edition (Handexemplar): from the finale of the First Symphony, bars 28–34
(Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna) [262]
12.1 Brahms and Alice Barbi on the Ringstrasse (Negative from the Bildarchiv,
Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) [269]
12.2 Brahms reading in the library of Viktor Miller zu Aichholz (Gesellschaft der
Musikfreunde, Vienna) [279]
Acknowledgements
Music examples are reproduced by kind permission of the copyright owners. Ex.
8.1: Ludwig Doblinger (B. Herzmansky) KG, Vienna (c. 1984); Ex. 9.10b, G.
Schirmer Inc., New York; Exx. 8.4b, 8.6a, 8.7a, 8.7b, Peters Edition Limited, London
(Peters Editions Nos. 3672, 2082). All other examples in score are taken from the
Johannes Brahms Sämtliche Werke, 1926–8, published by Breitkopf & Härtel,
Wiesbaden. All newly engraved examples are by Brian Fairtile, New York City.
Illustrations and plates are by courtesy of and with thanks to the following
institutions: Plate 1.1 and 1.2, Brahms Institut, Lübeck; Plate 11.1, Pierpont
Morgan Library, New York; Plate 11.2, Brahms Institut, Lübeck; Plate 11.3,
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna; Plate 12.1, Bildarchiv, Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; Plate 12.2, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Vienna. The
jacket image is by courtesy of the Portrait Gallery of the Royal College of Music,
London, with thanks.
Particular thanks are expressed to Morna Flaum for assistance with typing and to
Daniel Grieco for assistance with translations; to Edward Roesner and Virginia
Hancock; and to Lucy Carolan for her most painstaking and helpful editing of the
text. Finally, I am indebted to my contributors for their patience during the
preparation of this book, and I thank Roger Norrington especially for his kind
hospitality during the preparation of his chapter.
Michael Musgrave
[viii]
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Contributors
Kurt Hofmann has assembled since the 1950s the largest private collection of
Brahms material, which has formed the main part of the Brahms-Institut at
Lübeck, of which he is Director with Renate Hofmann. His research has
resulted in publications, many of them standard works of reference, including
the editing of the reminiscences of Richard Heuberger and Richard Barth, a
study of the first editions (Die Erstdrucke der Werke von Johannes Brahms,
Tutzing, 1975), a detailed calendar of Brahms’s life (Johannes Brahms: Zeittafel
zu Leben und Werk, with Renate Hofmann, Tutzing, 1983), a revised listing of
Brahms’s library (Die Bibliothek von Johannes Brahms, Hamburg, 1974), and
studies of Brahms’s connections with Hamburg and Baden Baden. Professor
Hofmann is an editor of the Johannes Brahms Briefwechsel: Neue Folge, which
has continued the original, sixteen-volume, series of Briefwechsel.
Leon Botstein is editor of The Musical Quarterly, conductor of the American
Symphony Orchestra and President of Bard College, New York, where he has
pioneered annual festivals devoted to individual composers, including, in 1990,
Brahms. His Brahms writings include articles on concert life, science and
music in Brahms’s Vienna, and on Brahms and nineteenth-century painting.
He is editor of and contributor to The Compleat Brahms, forthcoming from
Schirmer in 1999. As a conductor he has performed little-known nineteenth-
and twentieth-century orchestral and choral works. His recordings include
performances of works by Joachim and Schubert, in orchestrations by
Joachim, Mottl and Webern, and Brahms’s Serenade in D, in both its published
version and a reconstructed version as a nonet.
John Rink is Reader in Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. His fields
of specialism are performance studies, theory and analysis, and nineteenth-
century studies. He is the author of Chopin: The Piano Concertos (1997), joint
editor, with Jim Samson, of Chopin Studies 2 (1994) and editor of The Practice
of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (1995), all published by
Cambridge University Press. Dr Rink is Project Director and one of three series
editors of The Complete Chopin – A New Critical Edition (Peters Edition).
David Brodbeck is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Music at
the University of Pittsburgh. He is former President of the American Brahms
Society and edits the series of Brahms Studies published by the University of
Nebraska Press. He has contributed essays to Brahms Studies: Analytical and
Historical Studies (Oxford University Press, 1990), Mendelssohn Studies
(Cambridge University Press, 1992), Brahms and His World and Mendelssohn
and His World (both Princeton University Press) and Schubert: Critical and
Analytical Studies (University of Nebraska Press), as well as to the periodicals
19th-Century Music and Journal of Musicology. He is author of Brahms:
Symphony No. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1997).
[ix]
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x Notes on contributors
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xi Notes on contributors
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Chronology
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xiii Chronology
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xiv Chronology
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xv Chronology
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xvi Chronology
and Munich, meets the Herzogenbergs Schmidt born. Cornelius dies; Holst,
and Philipp Spitta. Ives, Franz Schmidt, Schoenberg, Suk
born.
1875 Resigns from the Gesellschaft. Works Bizet: Carmen; Goldmark, Die Königin
to complete the First Symphony at von Saba; Tchaikovsky: Piano Concerto
Heidelberg and near Zurich. Becomes a No. 1. Sterndale Bennett, Bizet die;
member of the music committee for the Hahn, Ravel, Tovey born.
award of grants from the Austrian
Government. Approves an award to
Dvořák, whose music he is now coming
to know and admire.
1876 Visits to Holland, Mannheim, Coblenz; Bruckner: Symphony No. 5;
summer at Sassnitz, Isle of Rügen where Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake; first complete
completes First Symphony. First Ring cycle at Bayreuth; Goetz dies;
performance of First Symphony at Falla, Wolf-Ferrari, Ruggles born.
Karlsruhe (Dessoff). The beginning of his
estrangement from Hermann Levi.
1877 Summer in Pörtschach and Lichtenthal. Saint-Saëns: Samson et Dalila; Dvořák:
First performance of Second Symphony Symphonic Variations. Dohnányi,
in Vienna (Richter). Karg Elert born.
1878 First Italian holiday in April with Billroth. Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto,
Brahms finds a new supporter in Hans von Symphony No. 4; Dvořák: Slavonic
Bülow. Dances. Schreker born.
1879 Awarded an honorary doctorate by Breslau Bruckner: String Quintet; Franck:
University. Summer in Pörtschach. Piano Quintet. Jensen dies; Bridge,
Concert tour of Hungary, Transylvania Ireland, Respighi born.
and Poland with Joachim. First
performance of the Violin Concerto
(Joachim).
1880 Attends the unveiling of the Schumann Mahler: Das klagende Lied; Dvořák:
Monument in Bonn; concert tour of the Symphony No. 6. Bloch, Medtner born;
Rhine. First summer residence at Ischl, Offenbach dies.
where he meets Johann Strauss II. Serious
rift with Joachim over his suit for divorce
from his wife Amalie.
1881 Tours in Holland and Hungary where he Bruckner: Symphony No. 6. Bartók,
meets Liszt again through Bülow. Spring Enescu, Miaskovsky born; Musorgsky
holiday in Italy with Billroth and dies.
Nottebohm. Summer in Pressbaum near
Vienna. Rehearses the Second Piano
Concerto at Meiningen.
1882 Tours Germany and Holland with the Wagner: Parsifal. Kodaly, Malipiero,
Second Piano Concerto. Summer in Ischl. Grainger, Stravinsky, Szymanowski
Late summer in Italy with Billroth, Brüll, born; Raff dies.
Simrock. Graz in November with the
dying Gustav Nottebohm.
1883 Summer in Wiesbaden, where he forms Dvořák: Scherzo Capriccioso, Casella,
a close attachment to Hermine Spies. Hauer, Varèse, Webern born; Wagner
dies.
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xvii Chronology
1884 Spring in Italy, summer in Mürzzuschlag. Mahler: Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen;
Winter tour as pianist and accompanist Debussy: L’Enfant Prodigue. Smetana
for Spies in Hamburg, Bremen and dies.
Oldenburg.
1885 Summer at Mürzzuschlag. Premieres Franck: Variations Symphoniques;
the Fourth Symphony at Meiningen, Dvořák, Symphony No. 7;
where he meets the young Richard Berg born; Hiller dies.
Strauss. Subsequently tours with the work
in Holland.
1886 Summer in Hofstetten near Thun. Elected Goldmark, Merlin; Franck: Violin
Honorary President of the Wiener Sonata. Liszt dies.
Tonkünstler-Verein. Visits Meiningen in
October.
1887 Spring holiday in Italy with Simrock and Goldmark: Ländliche Hochzeit
Theodor Kirchner, Summer at Thun. Symphony; Verdi: Otello; Bruckner:
Symphony No. 8. Borodin dies.
C. F. Pohl, archivist of the Gesellschaft
der Musikfreunde, dies; succeeded by
Eusebius Mandyczewski; Marxsen dies.
1888 Meets Tchaikovsky and Grieg in Leipzig. Franck: Symphony in D minor;
Spring in Italy with Widmann. Summer Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5. Alkan
in Thun. dies.
1889 Awarded the freedom of the city of Dvořák: Symphony No. 8; Mahler:
Hamburg. Order of Leopold conferred by Symphony No. 1; R. Strauss: Don
Franz Josef. Summer in Ischl. Juan; Tod und Verklärung; Henselt dies.
1890 Spring holiday in Italy with Widmann. Wolf: Spanisches Liederbuch; Fauré:
Summer in Ischl. Meets Alice Barbi. Requiem. Franck, Gade die; Martin
Plans his will. born.
1891 Hears Mühlfeld play at Meiningen. Wolf: Italienisches Liederbuch;
Visits Berlin in the Spring. Makes Will. Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 1.
Friendship with Adolf Menzel. Attends
Mahler’s performance of Don Giovanni in
Prague.
1892 Spring in Italy. Summer in Ischl. Nielsen: Symphony No. 1; Sibelius:
Death of Elisabet von Herzogenberg and Kullervo and En Saga; Dvořák: Te
of his sister Elise. Deum. Lalo dies; Honegger, Milhaud
born.
1893 Spring holiday in Italy and Sicily. Summer Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 6; Dvořák:
in Ischl. Work on the collected edition of Symphony No. 9; Verdi: Falstaff.
Schumann’s works. Hermine Spies dies. Gounod, Tchaikovsky die; Haba born.
Strauss: Guntram
1894 Summer in Ischl. Publishes the Deutsche Debussy: L’Après-midi d’un faune.
Volkslieder in seven volumes. Offered Bülow, Chabrier, Rubinstein, Spitta die.
but refuses conductorship of the Hamburg Fauré: La Bonne Chanson. Mahler:
Philharmonic. Accompanies Alice Barbi Symphony No. 2;
at her final concert. Billroth dies.
1895 Tours German cities with Mühlfeld, Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 1;
performing the Clarinet Sonatas. Summer Dvořák: Cello Concerto;
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xviii Chronology
1896 Last public appearance as conductor. Mahler: Symphony No. 3; Strauss: Also
Conducts both piano concertos with sprach Zarathustra; Puccini: La Bohème.
d’Albert in Berlin. Attends Clara Bruckner, Clara Schumann, Ambroise
Schumann’s funeral in Bonn. Summer in Thomas die.
Ischl. Deterioration of health. Goes to
Karslbad to take the waters. Attends
Bruckner’s funeral.
1897 Last public appearance at a concert. Cowell, Korngold born.
Revises his will. Rapid decline in health
and appearance. Death on 3 April of
cancer of the liver. Public funeral 6 April.
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Preface
Brahms in perspective
The last decades of the twentieth century have seen a striking increase in
scholarly interest in the music of the nineteenth century. As this era
moves yet further into the distance, it has been a fresh experience to find
its repertory – long better known to concert audiences than that of any
other period – viewed in a new setting, now that its social, political and
creative backgrounds have been more fully revealed. In this new perspec-
tive, few images of composers have changed as much as that of Brahms. It
has not been merely a matter of filling in the gaps of knowledge, or even of
exploding certain myths. New examinations of his music have revealed
just how much the received view of its significance was based on what it
was taken to represent in the historical picture of the nineteenth century,
rather than on its actual substance. With changing fashion after Brahms’s
death, an image full of stereotypes became even more firmly entrenched
by neglect. For example, that of Brahms ‘The Absolutist Composer’, the
implacable opponent of Wagner, whose own failure to write an opera
indicated a lack of interest in drama and literature. And, growing from
this, the all-encompassing view of Brahms ‘The Conservative’, in the light
of his preference for instrumental forms in an age of increasing program-
maticism. In few cases can the perception and evaluation of a composer’s
achievement have been so inadequate to the reality as with Brahms; in few
cases can such oversimplified epithets – first the ‘epigone’ of Schumann;
later, more durably, of Beethoven – have been so glibly applied.
There were of course good reasons for this failure to gain his measure.
Brahms cultivated a classical profile in a romantic era, systematically mas-
tering genre after genre in an age where specialism was the tendency. He
commands an extraordinary historical position in the sheer range of the
music he produced (though it does not extend to opera, it includes some
highly dramatic vocal music). Few composers can be represented as typi-
cally in such accessible pieces as the ‘Wiegenlied’, the Hungarian Dances
or the Liebeslieder waltzes, and yet also in complex fugues and variations,
types of works which generally appeal to completely different audiences.
And even to critics surveying the whole output, Brahms gives a different
message – appearing to some as a sonorous Romantic, to others, a musical
ascetic out of his historical time. Of course, Brahms sought to synthesise
[xix] the many dimensions of his music and did so magnificently. But that very
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xx Preface
integration, the richness arising from – for example – the fusion of lyri-
cism and complex counterpoint, has remained a problem for many listen-
ers. For all the revision in attitudes towards his contemporaries, Brahms
has continued to be difficult to categorise – hence the convenience of the
catch-all label ‘Conservative’, which avoids the issue. And as with the
music, so with the life: inherited images of a deprived childhood have
continued to colour our views of Brahms’s mature personality, to leave
him as something of a mystery as a social being.
The sense of distance is perhaps the more remarkable in the light of
Brahms’s actual closeness to us in historical time and personal circum-
stance. Had he lived just a few years longer into the twentieth century (he
was only sixty-three at his death), we would surely view him differently. As
it is, those who remember him personally were still broadcasting their
memories in the early years of the LP record after the Second World War.
As a self-made man in an age of bourgeois culture, with all his lack of sen-
timentality about music and his religious scepticism, he seems much
closer to our world than to those (only twenty years or so older) to whom
he is so often related: Wagner, Liszt, Schumann, Mendelssohn.
Of course, there was always a narrow line of professional knowledge
and admiration on the part of younger composers in the Austro-German
tradition that kept alive a respect for Brahms’s technical achievements as
a composer. This manifested itself most openly in Schoenberg’s famous
essay ‘Brahms the Progressive’ (first broadcast in the centenary year of
1933, then published in revised form in 1950), which did more than any
other text to place Brahms in a position of historical continuity. But
Schoenberg saw Brahms as a ‘progressive’ essentially because of the
Brahmsian principles he made his own: he was legitimising his often
problematic music in claiming Brahms as his mentor. From the technical
standpoint, Schoenberg’s was always a one-sided view of Brahms, as was
his view of the future. And Schoenberg’ s successors would essentially
grant Brahms’s greatness despite rather than because of the full character
of his musical personality: acknowledging the technical dimension,
whilst passing with reserve over the expressive substance.
The situation is very different now. It is Brahms’s place as a pioneer in
reclaiming the past – a past much more distant than that explored by any
other composer-contemporaries in this historicising era – that is now of
interest. Of all composers of the nineteenth century, he seems central to
modern outlooks in his lifelong concerns with the performance and
editing of earlier music and its absorption into his own. Historical refer-
ence has become a new index of ‘meaning’ in modern composition, just as
notions of abstract ‘unity’ and ‘structure’ were the shibboleths of
Modernism. In tracing the continuity, Brahms now seems the most tangi-
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xxi Preface
ble link between the musical past and present. No longer an ‘anti-Pope’ (as
he himself ruefully put it) to the great aesthetic innovator and ‘progres-
sive’ of the century, Wagner, he now stands on an equal footing, relevant
to late twentieth-century listeners as one of music’s most powerful intelli-
gences.
The aim of this book is to reflect changing attitudes in a range of essays
written partly by established Brahms specialists and partly (especially in
discussion of the music) by scholars coming to the music from different
backgrounds. The book’s three sections deal with his life, with his works
and finally with the personal views offered by musicians with some special
involvement with the music.
In Part I, Kurt Hofmann places Brahms’s difficult early years in
Hamburg in a completely fresh perspective with the help of new docu-
mentation. Here the familiar picture of the abused young prodigy forced
to work in a low-life setting is significantly revised in the light of his
family background and the life of the professional musician. Brahms’s
gradual estrangement from Hamburg and his earlier years of association
with Vienna are the subject of my own essay, which sees this as a period of
slow and difficult transition as he continued to attempt to establish
himself as an independent composer from 1862 to 1875. Once estab-
lished, however, Brahms became the most important musical figure in the
city and released the major orchestral works by which he is best known to
concert audiences. Viewing these compositions from a sociological rather
than a purely musical standpoint, Leon Botstein offers new views of both
Brahms’s motivation for composing them and the political dimension of
their performance and reception (so prominent a feature of Brahms’s
mature years in the city).
Part II covers the full range of Brahms’s output. John Rink explores the
three distinctive chronological and stylistic phases of Brahms’s piano
music in the light of the integrity of musical thought and technique which
characterises his output, to reveal the brilliant resolution of striking ten-
sions and dichotomies of style. Kofi Agawu shares an interest in the
dynamic process which interacts with the larger form, pursuing the cre-
ative tensions between ‘architectural’ and ‘logical’ form at the heart of
Brahms’s style through identifying strategic moments in the symphonies.
For all the familiarity of Brahms’s orchestral work in the concert hall, his
instrumental output was overwhelmingly devoted to chamber music,
which exercised great influence on the younger generation. Its deep rela-
tionship with the past on the one hand and its profound originality on the
other are explored in David Brodbeck’s discussion of representative
works from the entire output. A major additional theme, however, is their
extra-musical dimension: reflecting recent emphases of scholarship, he
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xxii Preface
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Cambridge Companions
available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. Online © Cambridge University Press, 2011
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521481298.001