1 Siegfried Kross, Johannes Brahms: Versuch einer kritischen Dokumentar-Biographie, 2 vols. (Bonn, 1997); Johannes Brahms: Neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke (Munich, 1996–).Google Scholar

2 Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters, ed. Styra Avins, trans. Avins and Josef Eisinger (Oxford, 1997).Google Scholar

3 Walter Frisch, Brahms: The Four Symphonies (New York, 1996), and Raymond Knapp, Brahms and the Challenge of the Symphony (Stuyvesant, 1997); Michael Musgrave, Brahms: A German Requiem (Cambridge, 1996), David Brodbeck, Brahms: Symphony No. 1 (Cambridge, 1997), and Colin Lawson, Brahms: Clarinet Quintet (Cambridge, 1998).Google Scholar

4 Schenker dedicated his analysis to ‘the memory of the last master of German composition, Johannes Brahms'. Originally published by Universal Edition in 1912, Schenker's analysis has appeared in English as Beethoven's Ninth Symphony: A Portrayal of its Musical Content, with Running Commentary on Performance and Literature as well, ed. and trans. John Rothgeb (New Haven and London, 1992); the dedication is on p. v.Google Scholar

5 Hugh Wood, ‘A Photograph of Brahms’, The Cambridge Companion to Brahms, ed. Michael Musgrave (Cambridge, 1999), 268–87 (p. 282); Styra Avins, ‘Performing Brahms's Music: Clues from his Letters’, Performing Brahms, 11–47 (p. 34).Google Scholar

6 Reinhold Brinkmann, Late Idyll: The Second Symphony of Johannes Brahms, trans. Peter Palmer (Cambridge, MA, 1995).Google Scholar

7 Brahms made this famous remark to the conductor Hermann Levi: ‘I will never compose a symphony! You have no idea how it feels to one of us when he continually hears behind him such a giant’ (quoted in Brodbeck, Brahms: Symphony No. 1, 15). A bust of Beethoven also peered over Brahms's shoulder when he was seated at the piano in his apartment.Google Scholar

8 Beller-McKenna argues that Brahms's busts, reliefs and paintings spoke to ‘Brahms's personal identification with … the historical figures represented’ (p. 99). Alternatively, they could be thought of as a constellation of historical figures whose qualities Brahms admired; he thus yoked them into a genealogy that both inspired and intimidated him.Google Scholar

9 Richard Taruskin draws a vivid sketch of the music historian Franz Brendel and the impact of his brand of historicism on musical thought in mid-nineteenth-century Germany in The Oxford History of Western Music, iii (Oxford, 2005), 411–16. See also John Deathridge, ‘Germany: The “Special Path”’, The Late Romantic Era: From the Mid-Nineteenth Century to World War I, ed. Jim Samson, Man and Music, 7 (London, 1991), 50–73.Google Scholar

10 Taruskin discusses Brahms's strategy in The Oxford History of Western Music, iii, 716–29.Google Scholar

11 Quoted in Alexander von Zemlinsky and Karl Weigl, ‘Brahms and the Newer Generation: Personal Reminiscences’, trans. Walter Frisch, Brahms and his World, ed. Frisch (Princeton, 1990), 205–7 (p. 206).Google Scholar

12 Brahms to Edmund Astor, 14 February 1894, Johannes Brahms in Briefwechsel mit Breitkopf & Härtel, Bartolf Senff, J. Rieter-Biedermann, C. F. Peters, E. W. Fritzsch und Robert Lienau, ed. Wilhelm Altmann (Berlin, 1921), 421.Google Scholar

13 Beller-McKenna's focus on the Kaiserreich and the Lutheran heritage that provided its spiritual framework is not intended to be all-encompassing; as he explains, his work complements the spate of recent scholarship on Brahms's engagement with Viennese politics (p. 6).Google Scholar

14 In her review of Brahms and the German Spirit, Virginia Hancock points out Brahms's offer to have the première of op. 109 take place at a trade fair in Hamburg, a gesture of thanks for the honorary citizenship the city conferred on him (Notes, 62 (2005), 120).Google Scholar

15 Beller-McKenna's reluctance to add to the bulging literature on Brahms's motivic economy is understandable, but it occasionally impoverishes his interpretations. While he gives a nice account of the ‘seemingly limitless extension’ of a three-note figure in the ‘fugue’ of the sixth movement (p. 93), he chooses not to mention the indebtedness of this figure to the fugue subject (in retrograde) and, beyond that, to the choir's initial entry in the first movement; one need not be a card-carrying Rétian to acknowledge that the relentless piling up of this motive upon itself in the sixth movement is better understood with these connections in mind.Google Scholar

16 Occasional minor lapses dot Beller-McKenna's text and music examples: the archangel Gabriel seems not to be the eponymous hunter of the poem ‘Der Jäger’, but rather his companion (pp. 14–15); the Deutsche Volkslieder mit ihren Original-Weisen were edited by August Kretzschmer and Anton Wilhelm von Zucca-lmaglio (p. 23); bar 148 of the excerpt from the Triumphlied on p. 112 has suffered an unintentional transposition, and there are other slight anomalies on pp. 88, 120, 199 and 206; the discussion of the tonal structure of op. 109 no. 2 is debatable (pp. 153–4); and some flats are missing from the discussion of the Intermezzo, op. 117 no. 2, on pp. 168–9. A bibliography would have been welcome.Google Scholar

17 See Petersen, Peter, ‘Über das Triumphlied von Johannes Brahms’, Die Musikforschung, 52 (1999), 462–6. The verse in question was not made public, but Brahms pencilled it into the autograph; see Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, iii, 708–13.Google Scholar

18 ‘Brahms als Componist, Joachim als Vortragender – das ist die neue deutsche Musik. Sie ist geistvoll und gelehrt, interessant und feinsinnig; doch wenn das Volk der Deutschen nie Anders in Tönen gehört und empfunden hätte, so hätte es in Ewigkeit niemals ein Sedan erleben dürfen.’ Hans Paumgartner, Wiener Abendpost, 13 February 1889, quoted and translated in Margaret Notley, ‘Brahms as Liberal’, 19th-Century Music, 17 (1993–4), 107–23 (p. 121).Google Scholar

19 ‘In my opinion, musically speaking, the Presto drops off from the highest inspiration just before. To me, the climax in the Presto lies more in outer than inner motion; the Presto appears not as an outgrowth of the whole, but as a brilliant finish added on.’ Clara Schumann to Johannes Brahms, quoted in Brodbeck, Brahms: Symphony No. 1, 78. Nicholas Cook recently echoed her judgment, characterizing Brahms's symphonies as ‘too noisily bombastic with their parade-ground rhythms’ (Music: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford, 1998, 51).Google Scholar

20 This is not to say that melancholy did not cast a shadow over the writing of Brahms's music, particularly his later works; see Brinkmann, Late Idyll, 125–44.Google Scholar

21 However, Smith's attention to matters involving texture and topic is selective; on occasion, they are ignored when they cut against the grain of his structural interpretation. The chord progression in the piano at bars 206–12 is described as a ‘point of extreme motivic liquidation … a thematic vacuum’ (p. 82), but its trombone-like sonority could be heard to foreshadow the ‘chorale’ theme in the finale.Google Scholar

22 Although Wagner barely features in Smith's book, to my ears Brahms's languorous iv–I cadence at the beginning of the Andante evokes the harmonic undergirding of Isolde's final ‘unbewußt höchste Lust!’ Smith hears the movement as love music that provides respite from the suicidal C minor that surrounds it, but Wagner's example might have joined Werther's in inspiring Brahms to bring love and death together.Google Scholar

23 Having said that, I take issue with the way Smith undercuts the ultimate triumph of C major in the Scherzo by relating it to the fantasy realm of the Andante rather than dealing with it on its own terms (pp. 210–14). He also overplays the inevitability of C minor at the outset of the Scherzo (p. 18). Rather than ‘inexplicably break[ing]’ the piano's scalar descent in octaves from G to C by pausing on E♭, Brahms was exploiting tonal ambiguity; for all the listener knows at that point, the movement might be in E♭. This would explain why the descent is completed via D at the reprise, by which time C minor has established itself as the unequivocal tonic.Google Scholar

24 For instance, Smith provides an interesting – if hardly radical – perspective on Brahms's formal indebtedness to his Viennese predecessors, suggesting that the recent emphasis on Schubert's influence should be complemented by a reassessment of the examples set by Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven. It is also worth mentioning that Smith's book is fastidiously presented, elegantly typeset and virtually error-free. I could find only two tiny flaws, which I enumerate only to set in relief the high standard of the whole: ‘incipient’ should be ‘incipit’ on p. 214, and ‘gate’ should be ‘gait’ on p. 255.Google Scholar

25 Karnes, Kevin C., ‘Another Look at Critical Partisanship in the Viennese Fin de siècle: Schenker's Reviews of Brahms's Vocal Music, 1891–2’, 19th-Century Music, 26 (2002–3), 73–93. See also William Pastille, ‘Heinrich Schenker, Anti-Organicist’, 19th-Century Music, 8 (1984–5), 29–36.Google Scholar

26 Brahms to Fritz Simrock, quoted in Johannes Brahms: Life and Letters, ed. Avins, 484. Brahms often made this kind of suggestion: the Second Symphony, op. 73, should be printed with black borders, he thought, and the cover of the Übungen for piano, WoO 6, would be best adorned with all manner of torture instruments. Of course, no such designs were ever carried out, although the recording of the C minor Piano Quartet by period-instrument group La Gaia Scienza (Winter & Winter 910 052-2) features the image of a revolver superimposed on Brahms's face, which looks predictably absurd.Google Scholar

27 On another track, Drexler interpolates the first movement of op. 60 into the Scherzo from the Piano Quintet, op. 34. Señor Juan Brahms (Songosaurus 724782) can be heard on Apple's iTunes Music Store at the following URL: <http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?id=30865738&s=143444>..' href=https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=On+another+track,+Drexler+interpolates+the+first+movement+of+op.+60+into+the+Scherzo+from+the+Piano+Quintet,+op.+34.+Señor+Juan+Brahms+(Songosaurus+724782)+can+be+heard+on+Apple's+iTunes+Music+Store+at+the+following+URL:+.>Google Scholar

28 Avins points out that Brahms, like most other Germans, looked to Goethe's aesthetic of musicianship as set forth in Faust: ‘Unless you feel it, vain will be your chase; / Unless it pour from the soul / And with powerful primeval joy / Compel the hearts of all who hearken’ (p. 25). The passage was so familiar that Brahms could refer to it in shorthand when writing to Otto Dessoff about tempos in the Second Symphony, which reveals the codification of Romantic inspiration into Sherman's ‘set of habits': Brahms renders Goethe's impassioned verse as ‘Unless you feel it, etc.’Google Scholar

29 In his review of Performing Brahms, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson responds differently: he hails Eibenschütz's performance of the E minor Intermezzo, op. 119 no. 2, as ‘the most provocative and fascinating performance from anyone whom Brahms admired’ (Early Music, 33 (2005), 336). He also points out several errors in the track listing for the CD.Google Scholar

30 Charles Villiers Stanford, Pages from an Unwritten Diary (London, 1914), 200.Google Scholar

31 See Buch, Esteban, ‘Ein deutsches Requiem: Between Borges and Furtwängler’, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 11 (2002), 29–38.Google Scholar

32

Trans. Stephen Kessler, in Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems, ed. Alexander Coleman (London, 2000), 378–9.Google Scholar