Brahms Studies, Volume 1: Brahms Studies

This volume, comprising documentary studies, historical and critical essays, and case studies of individual works, reflects the broad range of current Brahms research. Three essays focus on the young Brahms. George S. Bozarth provides a transcription of a little known collection of German proverbs that Brahms made in 1855. David Brodbeck relates the counterpoint study undertaken with Joseph Joachim to Brahms’s troubled entanglements with Robert and Clara Schumann. Joseph Dubiel offers a sensitive analytical account of the greatest work to emerge from this early period of Sturm und Drang, the Piano Concerto in D Minor. The long and productive middle phase of Brahm's career is represented by two studies of the chamber music. John Daverio finds relevant precedents for one of Brahms’s most characteristic Mischformen in Mozart, who provided the models that Brahms could appropriate in a "romanticizing" gesture aimed at giving new life to the sonata form. In a wide-ranging critical study of the F-Major Cello Sonata, Margaret Notley ties certain peculiarities of style and structure to the unusual genesis of the work.
The volume concludes with two case studies concerning works from Brahms's last period. Ira Braus’s analysis of the Intermezzo in E Minor, op. 119, no. 2, has important implications for performance practice. Finally, Daniel Beller-McKenna reads the Vier ernste Gesänge, op. 121, against a larger cultural background shaped by the aging composer's continuing allegiance to Romantic idealism.