Medium and meaning: new aspects of the chamber music

Brodbeck, David; Musgrave, Michael

doi:10.1017/ccol9780521481298.006

Cited by 5 publications

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“…A reliable source of ‘good milk’ while the milestone of opus numbers in triple digits drew close, F major became a bridge between the works of ‘high maturity’ and the ‘late works’. (For a parsing of the chamber music into periods, see Brodbeck , p. 99.…”

Section: New Pasturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Last Act of Brahms's Late Turn to F Major

Moseley¹

2018

Music Analysis

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The Second Cello Sonata, Op. 99, was the third multi‐movement composition that Brahms produced in F major during the mid‐1880s, when he turned to F major in that capacity for the first time. One of the works of summer 1886 that elevated Brahms's opus numbers to three digits and occasioned Simrock's first Thematisches Verzeichniss, the Sonata was written just as followers of his music were becoming equipped to chart connections between thematic incipits and as he became more attuned to presenting an oeuvre. It richly rewards an intertextual reading of its musical fabric, especially relative to the First String Quintet and the Third Symphony. This essay explores Op. 99's debt to its older F major kin – which previous scholarship has grasped incompletely – and argues that Brahms's ‘late turn’ to F major offers the most compelling illustration, in his music, of a key as a kind of resource. Three main observations about Op. 99 are developed here: (1) its first movement is modelled on the Quintet and Symphony as a repeat of their tonal structure but a reversal of their approach to the second group; (2) its last movement inflects major‐mode tonality with an emphasis on the diatonic mediant that is a salient characteristic of several of Brahms's F major compositions; and (3) it has musical ideas in common with various F‐centred pieces or passages before and after the multi‐movement works of the mid‐1880s, including the middle section of the third movement of the String Quartet Op. 51 No. 1 and the final chorus of Rinaldo.

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Section: New Pasturesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Last Act of Brahms's Late Turn to F Major

Moseley¹

2018

Music Analysis

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Brahms’s Ascending Circle: Hölderlin andSchicksalslied

Grimes

2019

Brahms's Elegies

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Brahms's Ascending Circle: Hölderlin,Schicksalsliedand the Process of Recollection

Grimes

2014

Nineteenth-Century Music Review

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The ending to Brahms's Schicksalslied confounds scholars for two reasons: his setting of Hölderlin's ostensibly despairing poem ends with an orchestral section that evokes comfort and reconciliation, and the postlude transposes the material of the introduction down to C major, ending in a key other than its opening. This represents ‘a rare instance of a composer not merely placing an arbitrary interpretation on words but explicitly contradicting a poet's statement’ (Petersen, 1983). Daverio (1993) and Reynolds (2012) hold similar views, seeing Hölderlin's poem as if divorced from the novel Hyperion.Although the poem marks the chronological endpoint of the novella, it is intricately bound up with levels of time, and it serves a continuous engendering function. The recollection of music in an altered key in Brahms's postlude is apposite to Abrams's notion of ‘the ascending circle, or spiral’. Drawing on musical and hermeneutic analysis, on evidence from Brahms's personal library, and on newly discovered correspondence from Hermann Levi, I argue that Brahms's ‘eccentric path’ – like Hölderlin's – leads us away from the original unity of the work in order to restore it in a heightened manner. The postlude prompts reflection and realization on the part of Brahms's listener akin to that of Hölderlin's reader.

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Medium and meaning: new aspects of the chamber music

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

The Last Act of Brahms's Late Turn to F Major

The Last Act of Brahms's Late Turn to F Major

Brahms’s Ascending Circle: Hölderlin andSchicksalslied

Brahms's Ascending Circle: Hölderlin,Schicksalsliedand the Process of Recollection

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