How Brahms gave his music to the world

There are two compelling descriptions of Brahms composing: one by Brahms himself talking to his young friend the singer (and later conductor) Georg Henschel on 26 February 1876 during a train journey between Koblenz and Wiesbaden, the other by his biographer Max Kalbeck, who happened to meet him on one of his composing walks. Both in their different ways testify to intense mental activity away from manuscript paper: Brahms composed in the main, not at the piano or at his desk, but in his head. It is no surprise therefore to find his musical handwriting, when he came to write a piece down, characterised by a certain urgency. Of course he sketched and drafted (mostly destroying such material after it had served its purpose); but his writing out of the full form of a composition was usually as a working copy, which had running corrections as he changed his mind on details. The script is characteristically fluent, and all sorts of short-cuts are employed – including notational abbreviations, or ways of forming characters which are really economical (he used to combine leger-lines and note-stems into one stroke of the pen, and he developed a way of writing natural signs with one stroke too). His correction methods needed to be similarly efficient, and the two most common are surely also the two fastest – smearing the ink when still wet, then writing in the revised notation over the smear, or crossing something out in ink and replacing it alongside; on occasions he also used a knife to scrape out mistakes. The meaning of dynamic and articulation signs is usually clear as he wrote them, though the placement of crescendo and decrescendo hairpins can be approximate, increasingly so perhaps towards the bottom of pages.