Brahms's Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture by Nicole Grimes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Brahms's Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture by Nicole Grimes Sara McClure Brahms's Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture. By Nicole Grimes. (Music in Context.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. [xv, 277 p. ISBN 9781108474498 (hardcover), $99.99; ISBN 9781108689762 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, facsimiles, tables, illustrations, appendix, bibliography, index. It is only in the last few decades that scholars have begun to move beyond celebrating Johannes Brahms's music for its universality—its purported ability to rise above political and cultural challenges of the German-speaking world of the late nineteenth century—and its role in a teleological view of music history, filling the gap between Beethoven and Schoenberg. Nicole Grimes's new book, Brahms's Elegies: The Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture, continues and reevaluates the work of musicologists like Daniel Beller-McKenna, David Lee Brodbeck, and Margaret Anne Notley, who have examined Brahms's music in its cultural and political context. Grimes considers four elegiac works: Schicksalslied, op. 54; Nänie, op. 82; Gesang der Parzen, op. 89; and Vier ernste Gesänge, op. 121, arguing that these works "speak to the poetics of loss in German culture, addressing themes including nostalgia, loss, and mourning, a thread that runs through German intellectual thought" (pp. 2–3). Brahms was a voracious reader with an extensive library (see Kurt Hofmann, Die Bibliothek von Johannes Brahms [Hamburg: Wagner, 1974]) that included many volumes on philosophy. Grimes considers Brahms's markings in his books alongside "documentary evidence from Brahms's letters, the recollections and memoirs of those who knew him, and the hermeneutic analysis of the compositions related to this literature" (p. 7). While earlier scholars have struggled to explain the unusual forms in Brahms's elegiac works as well as seeming incompatibilities between text and music, Grimes finds new answers in her thorough examination of the works' literary and philosophical contexts. In chapter 1, Grimes addresses the earliest of these four elegiac works, Schicksalslied. The piece presents two challenges: the perceived conflict between the despair of Friedrich Hölderlin's poem and Brahms's peaceful, comforting postlude, and the work's progressive tonality from E major to C major. Grimes broadens her perspective to evaluate the role of the poem within Hölderlin's novel Hyperion as well as "the literary and philosophical tradition to which it belonged, and Brahms's literary and intellectual preoccupations at the time of composition" (p. 30). Part of that broader context is the German idealism espoused by Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, which valued classical antiquity over the brokenness of modern civilization; Grimes explains tenets of this philosophy and includes thorough citations so that no preexisting knowledge of German philosophy is required of the reader. She evaluates the literary context of Hyperion and the poem's place within the novel as a parallel to Brahms's seemingly odd formal choices in Schicksalslied, arguing, "By limiting our field of vision to seeing the poem as a self-contained entity and interpreting the piece as a closed [sonata] form, we severely limit the scope of our hermeneutic reading" (p. 44). In her new analysis, Grimes rejects attempts to force Schicksalslied into sonata form and instead views it as a large binary form framed by an introduction [End Page 110] and coda. While Grimes includes tables that make clear the comparison between her analysis and that of others (Timothy Jackson and John Daverio), more music examples or a note to the reader to have a score nearby would be helpful. Still, her analysis and parallels to Brahms's and Hölderlin's literary world is convincing. Brahms composed Nänie, a setting of a poem by Friedrich Schiller, after the death of a friend, artist Anselm Friedrich Feuerbach, in 1880. In chapter 2, Grimes explores intertextual relationships between visual art, literature, and music. Grimes considers each area individually "before considering how Brahms's Nänie brings all three together in what I argue, with recourse to the theories of Reinhold Brinkmann, is a musical manifestation of a Schillerian idyll" (p. 69). In the first section, Grimes explores Brahms...