Brahms 2: Biographical, Documentary and Analytical Studies

This second volume of Brahms studies contains twelve contributions by leading international authorities on various music. Like the preceding volume of the same title (edited by Robert Pascall), Michael Musgrave’s volume aims to provide original scholarly material on different facets of a major composer still inadequately discussed in book form and employs more precise methods of analysis and more critical approaches to materials then generally available in writings on Brahms in English. Half of the volume takes the music itself as focus, though from very different vantage points. There are two studies of a single opus (the two String Quartets Op. 51 Nos, 1 and 2), discussions of the Fourth Symphony and the motet ‘Warum’, and a view of Brahms’s harmony. The underlying historical theme emerges more openly in an account of Brahms’s interest in German Renaissance music. The remaining essays give details of the state of Brahms’s unpublished compositions and arrangements at his death and the problematic disposal of his possessions (including musical ones), explore his own attitude to his historical position, and outline the reception of his music in Germany and, to begin with, in England.