| Contents |
The history of an obsession: "Neue Bahnen" and its legacy -- The symphonic challenge. Brahms and his contemporaries ; Reconciling style and genre ; Rethinking the symphony -- The problem of orchestration. The Serenades ; The F-minor Quintet and the Haydn variations ; The D-minor concerto and the Requiem -- Allusive webs, generic resonance, and the synthesis of traditions. Allusive webs ; Generic resonance ; The synthesis of traditions ; Musical context ; On the anxiety of allusion: Brahms and his audience -- Patterned variation and ostinato. Patterned variation. First Symphony, first movement ; First Symphony, second movement ; First Symphony, third movement ; Second Symphony, third movement ; Third Symphony, second movement ; Third Symphony, finale -- Ostinato. First Symphony, finale ; Third Symphony, first movement ; Second Symphony, finale -- Patterned variation and ostinato. Second Symphony, third movement ; The Haydn Variations ; Fourth Symphony, first movement ; Fourth Symphony, second movement ; Fourth Symphony, finale -- The quest for unity. Central ideas ; Synthesis, German nationalism, and the idea of unity ; Symphony no. 1. The orchestration ; The chromatic-harmonic complex ; Interpretations -- Symphony no. 2 ; Symphony no. 3. Brahms, absolute music, and the Third Symphony ; The central problem ; Meaning and gesture -- Symphony no. 4. Affective unity ; Synthetic unity -- On the significance of Brahms's symphonies -- Appendix. Pre-publication chronologies of the four symphonies. |
| Abstract |
Brahms's symphonies represent one of the most important bodies of work to come from the second half of the nineteenth century, when many of the difficult issues that have confronted composers and scholars in our own century were formulated. As the other arts at that time were turning away from romanticism, music was witnessing an extended confrontation between two attitudes that had been fundamental to musical romanticism in the preceding generations: that music was on the one hand profoundly expressive and, on the other, essentially self-sufficient. Wagner set the terms for the conflict at mid-century, proclaiming the inadequacy of "absolute" music and arguing that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony ended the symphonic tradition with its demonstration that musical expressivity ultimately stems from an innate dependency on "the word." Wagner's arguments were followed, in short order, by Liszt's appropriation of the symphonic genre to programmatic ends (with Wagner's eventual, if guarded, approval); Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch Schonen, with its influential argument for the self-sufficiency of music; and the appearance of Schumann's article "Neue Bahnen," which vested the future of music solely in the person of the young, virtually unknown Johannes Brahms, who was heralded as the awaited savior of a valued but languishing tradition. |
