Brahms in Context offers a fresh perspective on the much-admired nineteenth-century German composer. Including thirty-nine chapters on historical, social and cultural contexts, the book brings together internationally renowned experts in music, law, science, art history and other areas, including many figures whose work is appearing in English for the first time. The essays are accessibly written, with short reading lists aimed at music students and educators. The book opens with personal topics including Brahms's Hamburg childhood, his move to Vienna, and his rich social life. It considers professional matters from finance to publishing and copyright; the musicians who shaped and transmitted his works; and the larger musical styles which influenced him. Casting the net wider, other essays embrace politics, religion, literature, philosophy, art, and science. The book closes with chapters on reception, including recordings, historical performance, his compositional legacy, and a reflection on the power of composer myths.

A unique insight into the relationship between Brahms's music and his philosophical and literary context from a modernist perspective.

Johannes Brahms was a consummate professional musician, and a successful pianist, conductor, music director, editor and composer. Yet he also faithfully championed the world of private music-making, creating many works and arrangements for enjoyment in the home by amateurs. This collection explores Brahms' public and private musical identities from various angles: the original works he wrote with amateurs in mind; his approach to creating piano arrangements of not only his own, but also other composers' works; his relationships with his arrangers; the deeper symbolism and lasting legacy of private music-making in his day; and a hitherto unpublished memoir which evokes his Viennese social world. Using Brahms as their focus point, the contributors trace the overlapping worlds of public and private music-making in the nineteenth century, discussing the boundaries between the composer's professional identity and his lifelong engagement with amateur music-making.

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was prominent not only as a composer but as a pianist, conductor, editor, scholar, collector, and friend of many notables. He was also, in private, an articulate critic, connoisseur of other arts, and traveler. In this enlightening book, the eminent Brahms scholar Michael Musgrave presents a comprehensive and original account of the composer's private and professional lives. Drawing on an array of documentary materials, Musgrave weaves together diverse strands to illuminate Brahms's character and personality; his outlook as a composer; his attitudes toward other composers; his activities as pianist and conductor; his scholarly and cultural interests; his friendships with Robert and Clara Schumann and others; his social life and travel; and critical attitudes toward his music from his own time to the present. The book quotes extensively from Brahms's own words and those of his circle. Musgrave mines the composer's letters, reminiscences of his contemporaries, early biographies, reviews, and commentary by friends, critics, and scholars to create an unparalleled source of information about Brahms. The author sets the materials in context, identifies sources in detail, includes a glossary of information on principal individuals, and notes recent research on the composer. This engaging biographical work, with a gallery of illustrations, will appeal to general music lovers as well as to scholars with a special interest in Brahms.

In an expansive study Johannes Brahms emerges from Jan Swafford's book is not a bearded eminence but rather an assemblage of contradictions. He grew up in grinding poverty and as a teenager was forced to play the piano in brothels. Recognized by his teachers as a stupendous talent, Robert Schumann proclaimed Brahms at only twenty-years-old to be the saviour of German music. Brahms spent the rest of his life living up to the that prophecy. He experienced triumphs few artists have enjoyed in their lifetime, yet lived with a relentless loneliness and a growing fatalism about the future of music and the world.

Covering Brahms's 32 song opuses published during four decades of song-writing, this book offers a way of understanding what Brahms believed to be the right poetic basis for his immortal music. Johannes Brahms's much-loved solo songs continue to be enjoyed in recordings and on recital stages all over the world. This book provides a wealth of information on the poets whose words he set, many of whom are still unfamiliar.A substantial introduction explores the multiple meanings song-poetry held for Brahms and challenges the widely held opinion that he responded only to the general mood of a poem. It is followed by alphabetically organised essays on the forty-six poets whose verses he set. Each summarises the settings, Brahms's links to the poet, interconnections between the poets, and offers further context situating the poet within a wider literary, cultural and political landscape. The poets are revealed to be part of a deeply collegial cultural community of which Brahms was an active part. Covering Brahms's 32 song opuses published during four decades of song-writing, this book offers a way of understanding what Brahms believed to be the right poetic basis for his immortal music. It is designed to be an essential reference tool for students and scholars of Johannes Brahms, as well as performers and lovers of his songs.

'There is no better book on Brahms in print, and all its succesors will be deeply in its debt ... inaugurates a new era in Brahms studies.' The Musical Times

In this elegant book, premier musicologist Reinhold Brinkmann guides us through Brahms's "Second Symphony," examining musical ideas in all their compositional facets and placing them in the context of major trends in the intellectual history of late nineteenth-century Europe.

This Companion gives a comprehensive view of the German composer Johannes Brahms (1833–97). Twelve specially-commissioned chapters by leading scholars and musicians provide systematic coverage of the composer's life and works. Their essays represent recent research and reflect changing attitudes towards a composer whose public image has long been out-of-date. The first part of the book contains three chapters on Brahms's early life in Hamburg and on the middle and later years in Vienna. The central section considers the musical works in all genres, while the last part of the book offers personal accounts and responses from a conductor (Roger Norrington), a composer (Hugh Wood), and an editor of Brahms's original manuscripts (Robert Pascall). The volume as a whole is an important addition to Brahms scholarship and provides indispensable information for all students and enthusiasts of Brahms's music.

On its first appearance in 1891, Brahms' Clarinet Quintet was immediately recognised as a remarkable achievement, and a century later it still has the power to claim the hearts and minds of players and audiences alike. Widely regarded as Brahms' supreme achievement in the field of chamber music, the Clarinet Quintet is here placed in the context of the history of the clarinet and its repertory, and of Brahms' own compositions before 1891. The influence of the Meiningen clarinet virtuoso Richard Mühlfeld unleashed a new vein of creativity in Brahms, and this forms a basis for discussion, together with questions of performance practice (in relation to both clarinet and string quartet) and the legacy of Brahms' clarinet music. These chapters are complemented by a comprehensive analysis of the music.