Brahms Among Friends

by Paul Berry
Brahms Among Friends
Author: Paul Berry
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2014-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0199982643
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Brahms Among Friends identifies patterns of listening, performance, and composition among close friends of Johannes Brahms and explores how those patterns informed the creation and reception of his music in the intimate genres of song, sonata, trio, and piano miniature. Among the tangled threads of counterpoint and circumstance that bound Brahms to his acquaintances was the technique of allusive musical borrowing, whereby a brief passage from a familiar work was drawn into the fabric of a new composition. For the specific listeners whose habits of mind and musicianship he knew best, allusive borrowings could become rhetorically charged gestures, persuasively revising the meanings his music conveyed and the interpretive strategies it invited. Primary documents, original manuscripts, music-analytic comparison, and kinesthetic parameters experienced in the act of performance all work in tandem to support ten case studies in the interplay between Brahms's small-scale works and the women and men who encountered them before publication. Central characters include violinist Joseph Joachim, singers Amalie Joachim, Julius Stockhausen, and Agathe von Siebold, composers Heinrich and Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, and pianists Emma Engelmann and Clara Schumann. For these musicians and for the composer himself, Brahms's allusive music served a broad variety of emotional needs and interpersonal ends. Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: Yet across diverse repertoire and interdisciplinary correlates ranging from ethnography to psychoanalysis, each case study furthers a single, underlying aim: to reconstruct the mutually dependent perspectives of historically situated agents and restore forgotten features of their communicative landscapes as bases for both musical and historical scrutiny.

Johannes Brahms

by Jan Swafford
Johannes Brahms
Author: Jan Swafford
Publisher:
Total Pages: 699
Release: 1999
Genre: Composers
ISBN: 9780333725894
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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.

A Brahms Reader

by Michael Musgrave
A Brahms Reader
Author: Michael Musgrave
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780300091991
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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.

Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music

by Jacquelyn Sholes
Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music
Author: Jacquelyn Sholes
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2018-05-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253033160
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Who inspired Johannes Brahms in his art of writing music? In this book, Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes provides a fresh look at the ways in which Brahms employed musical references to works of earlier composers in his own instrumental music. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, among others, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement of a work seems to resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. She highlights Brahms's ability to weave such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives, arguing that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated, sometimes conflicted, attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms's music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to emerge with his own artistic voice and to define and secure his unique position in music history.

The Brahms Deception

by Louise Marley
The Brahms Deception
Author: Louise Marley
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2011-01-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0758272545
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In her highly intriguing new novel, Louise Marley masterfully intertwines the past and present with a mystery surrounding one of the world's greatest composers. . . The Brahms Deception Music scholar Frederica Bannister is thrilled when she beats her bitter rival, Kristian North, for the chance to be transferred back to 1861 Tuscany to observe firsthand the brilliant Johannes Brahms. Frederica will not only get to see Brahms in his prime; she'll also try to solve a mystery that has baffled music experts for years. But once in Tuscany, Frederica's grip on reality quickly unravels. She instantly falls under Brahms' spell-and finds herself envious of his secret paramour, the beautiful, celebrated concert pianist Clara Schumann. In a single move, Frederica makes a bold and shocking decision that changes everything. . . When Frederica fails to return home, it is Kristian North who is sent back in time to Tuscany to find her. There, Kristian discovers that Frederica indeed holds the key to unraveling Brahms' greatest secret. But now, Frederica has a dark secret of her own-one that puts everyone around her in devastating peril. . . Praise for Mozart's Blood "Eerie, beautiful. . .has a poetic, haunting sense of time and place." -Stephanie Cowell, author of Marrying Mozart "Riveting, original. . .filled with the emotional power and intricate twists and turns of a Mozart opera." -Teresa Grant, author of Vienna Waltz

Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music

by Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes
Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music
Author: Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2018-05-24
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0253033179
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A musicologist offers a fresh look at how Brahms used the inspiration of earlier composers in his own instrumental works. As Jacquelyn E. C. Sholes reveals in this study, an essential aspect of Johannes Brahms’s art was the canny use of musical references to the works of others. By analyzing newly identified allusions alongside previously known musical references in works such as the B-Major Piano Trio, the D-Major Serenade, the First Piano Concerto, and the Fourth Symphony, Sholes demonstrates how a historical reference in one movement can resonate meaningfully, musically, and dramatically with material in other movements in ways not previously recognized. Brahms masterfully wove such references into broad, movement-spanning narratives. Sholes argues that these narratives served as expressive outlets for his complicated attitudes toward the material to which he alludes. Ultimately, Brahms’s music reveals both the inspiration and the burden that established masters such as Domenico Scarlatti, J. S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, and especially Beethoven represented for him as he struggled to establish his own artistic voice and place in musical history.

Rethinking Brahms

by Nicole Grimes
Rethinking Brahms
Author: Nicole Grimes
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 585
Release: 2022-10-28
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0197541755
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As one of the most significant and widely performed composers of the nineteenth century, Brahms continues to command our attention. Rethinking Brahms counterbalances prevailing scholarly assumptions that position him as a conservative composer (whether musically or politically) with a wide-ranging exploration and re-evaluation of his significance today. Drawing on German- and English-language scholarship, it deploys original approaches to his music and pursues innovative methodologies to interrogate the historical, cultural, and artistic contexts of his creativity. Empowered by recent theoretical work on form and tonality, it offers fresh analytical insights into his music, including a number of corpus studies that interrogate the relationships between Brahms and other composers, past and present. The book brings into sharp focus the productive tension that exists between the perceived fixedness of musical texts and the ephemerality of performance by considering how historical and modern performers shape established understandings of Brahms and his music. Rethinking Brahms invites the reader to hear familiar pieces anew as they are refracted through historical, artistic, and philosophical prisms. Bringing us up to the present day, it also gives sustained attention to the resounding impact of Brahms's compositions on new music by exploring works by recent composers who have engaged deeply with his oeuvre. Combining awareness of overarching contexts with perceptive insights into Brahms's music, this book enlivens our understanding of Brahms, providing a dynamic, multifaceted, complex, and invigoratingly fresh portrait of the composer.

The Songs of Johannes Brahms

by Eric Sams
The Songs of Johannes Brahms
Author: Eric Sams
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9780300079623
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"Essential to the composer's method of song-writing was a harmony between musical form and poetic text. Sams takes us right to the heart of that creative method and helps to explain how and why a particular part of the text matches a particular piece of music. He includes a list of the motifs employed by Brahms to help show how the mind of the composer worked when seeking apposite music for the imagery of the poem."--BOOK JACKET.

Brahms

by Karl Geiringer
Brahms
Author: Karl Geiringer
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 311
Release: 2024-11-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1040222587
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Originally published in 1936, as a second edition in 1948 and as an enlarged and third edition in 1982, Karl Geiringer’s biography of Brahms is generally regarded as one of the finest studies of the composer ever published in any language. It is based on the body of material in the archives of the Viennese Society of Friends, for which Karl Geiringer was curator from 1930-1938, and which contains more than a thousand letters written by and to Brahms. These letters, exchanged with family and with his famous contemporaries, reveal his loneliness, grim humour, loyalty, painful shyness and enthusiasm for the music of Beethoven and Schubert – moods that the self-effacing composer did not like to publicly display. Divided into sections on Brahms’s solitary, scholarly existence and his fruitful composing career – including examinations of rare first drafts – the biography relates how crises in Brahm’s personal life were translated into his music, and how he often managed to ignore or suppress them.