Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance ed. by Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges

Abstract

Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Public Performance. Edited by Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. [xxvii, 395 p. ISBN 9781107042704 (hardcover), $120; ISBN 9781316056585 (e-book), $96.] Music examples, illustrations, tables, bibliography, index.The constant presence of Johannes Brahms's works in concert halls over the past century easily obscure the very different ways in which early audiences might have engaged with the composer's music. This collection of essays makes such a point by focusing on domestic music making as an important context for both Brahms's creativity and the reception of his works. Offering a wide range of methodological perspectives, the contributors to this volume variously examine Brahms's output in genres associated with domestic performance, the production of piano arrangements, the composer's relationship with one notable music-loving family in Vienna, and the different social and aesthetic values that might be at stake in private and public performances.Four chapters on the subject of piano arrangements constitute the volume's most obviously important contribution to English-language Brahms studies. Essays by Robert Pascall and Michael Struck (the latter translated by Loges) focus on arrangements Brahms made of his own works for piano duet and two pianos, Valerie Woodring Goertzen describes Brahms's role as an arranger of three overtures by Joseph Joachim, while Helen Paskins, in a chapter collaboratively written with Loges and Hamilton, turns her attention to the arrangements of Brahms's works made by Theodor Kirchner, Robert Keller, and Paul Klengel.Collectively these essays remind us of the centrality of piano arrangements within European musical culture of the mid- and late nineteenth century. In 1866 Eduard Hanslick could remark: Nowadays there is no overture or symphony offered in our concerts that one cannot immediately sample in advance or relish afterwards in fourhand (p. 114). As both Struck and Pascall note, Brahms's publisher Simrock was keen to issue a duet arrangement of the Second Symphony ahead of the orchestral score and parts, and in 1884, after eventually getting her hands on an arrangement of the Third, Clara Schumann wrote to Brahms to bemoan her lack of earlier engagement with the work at the piano: got to know the symphony like that then, what a different pleasure would have had from the premiere (p. 115). Brahms regularly took responsibility for arranging his own compositions, though this did not deter other people from producing their own versions, as the chapter by Paskins, Loges, and Hamilton makes clear: during the composer's lifetime over 65 different arrangers produced at least 350 arrangements of his works (p. 178).The music examples across the four chapters are consistently illuminating, demonstrating Brahms's distinctive views on arrangement and providing evidence of his imaginative adaptation of orchestral music for the piano. Dissatisfied with Robert Keller's slavish attempts to reproduce orchestral textures on the keyboard, Brahms responded: I go about my piece more drastically and more boldly than you or anyone else can (p. 145). Similarly, in a letter to Theodor Kirchner he commanded: throw all unnecessary ballast overboard (p. 160). Struck helpfully characterizes Brahms's approach to arranging as translation (pp. 115-16), a process glossed by Pascall as the rendering of preexisting musical materials as idiomatic piano music (p. 146). Pascall's chapter closes with a particularly interesting illustration that compares versions of the opening of the Fourth Symphony for piano duet and two pianos, arrangements that jettison different amounts of the full orchestral score.The ubiquity of arrangements, made by both Brahms and others, inevitably forces the issue of their ontological status vis-a-vis the arranged composition, and this point brings into focus the shared aims of the four essays. …