Brahms and His World: Revised Edition (The Bard Music Festival)
Language: English
Pages: 480
ISBN: 0691143447
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Since its first publication in 1990, Brahms and His World has become a key text for listeners, performers, and scholars interested in the life, work, and times of one of the nineteenth century's most celebrated composers. In this substantially revised and enlarged edition, the editors remain close to the vision behind the original book while updating its contents to reflect new perspectives on Brahms that have developed over the past two decades. To this end, the original essays by leading experts are retained and revised, and supplemented by contributions from a new generation of Brahms scholars. Together, they consider such topics as Brahms's relationship with Clara and Robert Schumann, his musical interactions with the "New German School" of Wagner and Liszt, his influence upon Arnold Schoenberg and other young composers, his approach to performing his own music, and his productive interactions with visual artists.
The essays are complemented by a new selection of criticism and analyses of Brahms's works published by the composer's contemporaries, documenting the ways in which Brahms's music was understood by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century audiences in Europe and North America. A new selection of memoirs by Brahms's friends, students, and early admirers provides intimate glimpses into the composer's working methods and personality. And a catalog of the music, literature, and visual arts dedicated to Brahms documents the breadth of influence exerted by the composer upon his contemporaries.
traditional.44 As Heinrich Koestlin wrote about Brahms’s music shortly after the composer’s death, “The Romantic wealth of ideas is bordered by the discipline of Classical training, and contained by a hardnosed formal structure. The latter is unique, new, and not a simple repetition or recreation, but rather an organic progressive evolution and an entirely modern new formation.”45 In terms of the issues of internal time consciousness and its constitution, • 21 • TIME AND MEMORY IN BRAHMS’S
the heart that threatened to break; he uplifted my mind, brightened my spirits where he could. In short, he was my friend in the fullest sense of the word.15 In May 1856, Brahms asked Clara to safeguard their letters in some way so that they would not be read by others.16 By 1886 he had achieved international renown, and he guarded his privacy even more carefully. (His concern for privacy extended to his creative workshop as well: he regularly culled works and destroyed all sketches and drafts.
which he wrote so idiomatically. Yet in undertaking this endeavor, one would be well advised to remember that changes in Brahms’s musical style reflect the considerable evolution of the piano during his lifetime, and to the end, with respect to his “ideal” in pianos just as in the style of his piano music, Brahms remained “the progressive.” NOTES 1. Stewart Pollens, “The Schumann/Brahms Conrad Graf Piano,” American Brahms Society Newsletter 24/1 (2006): 1–2. Heretofore this piano was thought to
such an artwork constituted nothing less—and nothing other—than the one • 170 • Kevin C. Karnes true and only meaningful “religion of the future.” That is, it constituted a spiritually unifying alternative and antidote to Europe’s fractious array of Judeo-Christian faiths. “The religion of the future is a religion of commonality,” Wagner argued. “But we unhappy people, no matter how many among us feel ourselves driven toward [the creation of] the artwork of the future, will never experience
Herder and Lessing, long before Wagner had made it his own. It had found a seminal early treatment in Goethe’s “Prometheus” of 1774, where the young poet proffered an image of the Titan that resonates with Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s.37 Goethe’s ode celebrates Prometheus’s inner strength and unbounded creative gifts, and his nurturing of a race of men who would thumb their noses at gods and others who would limit the potential of humankind to reshape itself and the world: Here I sit, shaping men in