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