The eight essays in Brahms Studies 2 provide a rich sampling of contemporary Brahms research. In his examination of editions of Brahms’s music, George Bozarth questions the popular notion that most of the composer’s music already exists in reliable critical editions. Daniel Beller-McKenna reconsiders the younger Brahms’s involvement in musical politics at midcentury. The cantata Rinaldo is the centerpiece of Carol Hess’s consideration of Brahms’s music as autobiographical statement. Heather Platt’s exploration of the twentieth-century reception of Brahms’s Lieder reveals that advocates of Hugo Wolf’s aesthetics have shaped the discourse concerning the composer’s songs and calls for an approach more clearly based on Brahms’s aesthetics.
In his examination of the rise of the “great symphony” as a critical category that carried with it a nearly impossible standard to meet, Walter Frisch provides a rich context in which to understand Brahms’s well-known early struggle with the genre. Kenneth Hull suggests that Brahms used ironic allusions to Bach and Beethoven in the tragic Fourth Symphony in order to subvert the enduring assumption that a minor-key symphony will end triumphantly in the major mode. Peter H. Smith examines Brahms’s late style by concentrating on Neapolitan tonal relations in the Clarinet Sonata in F Minor. Finally, David Brodbeck delineates the complex evolution of Brahms’s reception of Mendels-sohn’s music.
