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Press, 2019). xv + 277 pp. £75.00.Johannes Brahms is enjoying a vogue right now in Anglo-American music studies, seemingly immune to ideological concerns about perpetuating the canonic status of dead white European men. In the past five years, at least eight English-language books on Brahms have appeared. 1 Why the popularity? Perhaps because the idea of Brahms is so malleable; his apparent intellectual interests and cultural milieu resonate in ways that allow us to mould him relatively easily into a figure who reflects our own values. Moreover, the composer's self-conscious habit of censoring his letters and other written material has left us with a somewhat sanitized selfimage. Therefore, it is possible to depict Brahms as standing conveniently apart from the ideological baggage of late nineteenth-century German thinking.In Brahms's Elegies, Nicole Grimes aims to situate Brahms in an intellectual tradition stretching from late eighteenth-century German Idealism to early twentiethcentury modernism. Her Brahms is a philosopher with modernist inclinations, grappling with weighty metaphysical questions in his music rather than public statements and published prose. Grimes selects three choral-orchestral pieces from the 1870s and 1880s as her prime examples, namely the Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), Op. 54, Nänie, Op. 82, and Gesang der Parzen (Song of the Fates), Op. 89, all of which address themes of fate and death in classical antiquity as mediated by poetry of Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe respectively (p. 2). Their further emphasis on loss and mourning leads Grimes to call this group 'Brahms's Elegies', which she argues offer a 'mechanism for contemplating the human condition without religion' (p. 3). Each subsequent chapter presents an in-depth analysis of each piece, taking into account the philosophical-aesthetic views of the poets as well as context drawn from Brahms's own time. In a similar vein, Chapter Four interprets Brahms's Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), Op. 121, as the composer's response to reading Nietzsche's The Antichrist. The final chapter takes us into the 1930s and the realm of reception studies; here we review Theodor Adorno's reception of Brahms, which inspires Grimes's 'analytical vignettes' of selected late chamber movement finales. Introducing critical theories
Press, 2019). xv + 277 pp. £75.00.Johannes Brahms is enjoying a vogue right now in Anglo-American music studies, seemingly immune to ideological concerns about perpetuating the canonic status of dead white European men. In the past five years, at least eight English-language books on Brahms have appeared. 1 Why the popularity? Perhaps because the idea of Brahms is so malleable; his apparent intellectual interests and cultural milieu resonate in ways that allow us to mould him relatively easily into a figure who reflects our own values. Moreover, the composer's self-conscious habit of censoring his letters and other written material has left us with a somewhat sanitized selfimage. Therefore, it is possible to depict Brahms as standing conveniently apart from the ideological baggage of late nineteenth-century German thinking.In Brahms's Elegies, Nicole Grimes aims to situate Brahms in an intellectual tradition stretching from late eighteenth-century German Idealism to early twentiethcentury modernism. Her Brahms is a philosopher with modernist inclinations, grappling with weighty metaphysical questions in his music rather than public statements and published prose. Grimes selects three choral-orchestral pieces from the 1870s and 1880s as her prime examples, namely the Schicksalslied (Song of Destiny), Op. 54, Nänie, Op. 82, and Gesang der Parzen (Song of the Fates), Op. 89, all of which address themes of fate and death in classical antiquity as mediated by poetry of Hölderlin, Schiller and Goethe respectively (p. 2). Their further emphasis on loss and mourning leads Grimes to call this group 'Brahms's Elegies', which she argues offer a 'mechanism for contemplating the human condition without religion' (p. 3). Each subsequent chapter presents an in-depth analysis of each piece, taking into account the philosophical-aesthetic views of the poets as well as context drawn from Brahms's own time. In a similar vein, Chapter Four interprets Brahms's Vier ernste Gesänge (Four Serious Songs), Op. 121, as the composer's response to reading Nietzsche's The Antichrist. The final chapter takes us into the 1930s and the realm of reception studies; here we review Theodor Adorno's reception of Brahms, which inspires Grimes's 'analytical vignettes' of selected late chamber movement finales. Introducing critical theories
For Karol Berger This article begins with an analysis of the ‘F.A.E. Sonata’ (fall 1853), a work for violin and piano composed jointly by Robert Schumann (movements 2 and 4), Albert Dietrich (first movement), and Johannes Brahms, for their returning friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim. The title of the work derives from the musical motto that Joachim had chosen as his own, representing the words ‘Frei aber einsam’ (free but alone). The analysis identifies the unifying elements of the movements; allusions play a role, especially regarding Beethoven. The study then proposes that Wagner's 1850 essay ‘The Artwork of the Future’ inspired this collegial effort as a rebuttal to several ideas, suggesting that Joachim took his personal motto as a contradiction of Wagner's statement: ‘The solitary individual is unfree’ (Der Einsame ist unfrei). One of the more intriguing sections for Schumann and his followers was likely the chapter entitled ‘The Artist of the Future’. There he asserts that individuality will never be as consequential as a collective effort, proclaiming that ‘the free artistic community is therefore the basic prerequisite for the artwork itself’. Schumann challenged his devoted disciples to take Wagner at his word and compose something as a collective. The stakes of the dispute between Schumann and Wagner were high: a path into the future that best continued the line connecting both of them to Beethoven. This sonata was composed at the same time as Schumann's article, ‘New Paths’ (Neue Bahnen), which also constitutes a response to Wagner's The Artwork of the Future.
Beethoven's String Quintet, Op. 29, has been described as a ‘wallflower’ work that, without enough suitors, remains on the sidelines of the string chamber music repertoire. But in the nineteenth century it had a prominent champion, Joseph Joachim, whose performances of the quintet must have attracted the attention of his close friend, Johannes Brahms. The opening theme of Brahms's String Sextet, Op. 18, is clearly reminiscent of the beginning of Beethoven's quintet. Evidence from Donald Francis Tovey's recollections of Joachim, Joachim's correspondence with the Brahms biographer Max Kalbeck, and the manuscript of Op. 18 shows that Joachim influenced an important revision that aligns the beginning of Brahms's sextet closely with the opening of Beethoven's Op. 29 also in terms of texture and formal design. The striking tremolo opening and virtuosic scale passages in the finale of Beethoven's quintet prefigure similar elements in the last movement of Brahms's Op. 36 sextet. But the deeper relationship between these movements lies in certain shared formal elements: a common emphasis on sound, texture and sharp contrasts between agitato and pastoral elements as defining features of the overall form – and several distinctive similarities of contrapuntal strategy, form and tonal design between the substantial fugatos that dominate the development sections of both movements. It is often observed that Brahms wrote chamber works in pairs. Scholars have often posited that his two string sextets form such a pair, but the separation of four years in their inceptions and his extensive use of Baroque-style materials composed in the 1850s in the later sextet have made this argument tenuous. It now emerges that an unusual pairing feature of Brahms's string sextets is that both works respond to Beethoven's ‘wallflower’ masterpiece.
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