The Compleat Brahms: A Guide to the Musical Works of Johannes [Hardcover]

Leon Botstein (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1999

The 1997 centennial of Brahms's death has intensified interest among concertgoers and music lovers in the composer's prodigious body of work.

For all those eager to delve more deeply into Brahms's music, The Compleat Brahms is an indispensable companion. In a single volume that covers every work written by Brahms, leading scholars from across the country provide details of each work's composition and discuss its important stylistic features. Interspersed are fascinating essays — such as "Brahms, Joachim, and the Schumanns" — that bring the composer and his contemporaries to life. Much more than a collection of program notes, The Compleat Brahms vividly portrays the work and world of one of the giants of Western music history.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Monumental is the first word that occurs to you when you begin exploring what has been put together by Leon Botstein and his 29 collaborators--and it's appropriate. Seen from a distance (and how else can we see him more than a century after his death?) there is also something monumental--almost forbidding--about the figure of Brahms himself. He was the great musical conservative in the creative ferment of the late 19th century. Haunted by the figure of Beethoven, he destroyed much of his own work--carefully tailoring his posthumous image--in fear of negative comparisons. At the same time, he preserved almost single-handedly the great classical tradition embodied in Beethoven's work, particularly the tradition of the symphony and other abstract works using sonata form, which was nearly engulfed in Brahms's lifetime by Lisztian tone poems, Wagnerian "music of the future," the rise of musical nationalism, and even the first stirrings of impressionism. In this context, Brahms becomes a lonely figure but a vital one.

Virtually every piece composed by Brahms and not sacrificed to his uncompromising critical standards is discussed in this compendium, lucidly, readably, in biographical and cultural context, and in fine detail. The writers are all scholars or professional performers--often both--but they have worked hard to make their discussions and analyses accessible to the interested general reader, and in their diversity of approaches they have made the book a compendium of the varied techniques for writing readably about music. You may not agree with every word (a fine seasoning of opinion has been allowed to flavor the masses of fact), and it is not the sort of book that anyone but a fanatic will gallop through from cover to cover. But you will find Brahms here in all his complexity, still monumental but more approachable than ever. --Joe McLellan

From Publishers Weekly

Botstein, president of Bard College and director of the American Symphony Orchestra, presents this helpful and user-friendly compendium as the "first and only annotated catalog of Brahms' music in English." Essays by such scholars as Walter Frisch and Michael Musgrave (whose Cambridge Companion to Brahms is forthcoming) are gathered into chapters on Orchestral Music, Chamber Music, Solo Piano Music, Solo Lieder and Vocal and Choral Music. Botstein himself, who writes on many vocal works, has a welcome tendency toward brevity, and never goes on too long about minor works or even major ones. All the essays are anchored in the composer's life, revealing such matters as his relations with Robert and Clara Schumann as well as other still-debated details of his love life. Some of the more outstanding essays in this vein are by Jan Swafford, author of Johannes Brahms: A Biography, who introduces the "Alto Rhapsody" in a way guaranteed to appeal even to those who consider Brahms to be merely "Gloomy Joe," as the EMI record producer Walter Legge used to sarcastically refer to him, adding: "The main problem with Brahms is that he never got syphilis." By contrast, the book's writers' are all Brahms enthusiasts, and their excitement is infectious, in good part because the essays are not permitted to go on to Brahmsian lengths. Botstein has compiled a valuable, welcome addition to the bibliography.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 350 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393047083
• ISBN-13: 978-0393047080
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #684,172 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #40 in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Theory, Composition & Performance > Sheet Music & Scores > Composers > Brahms

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 4.5 stars indeed, April 6, 2000

By 

Sen Peng Eu "ESP=Math+Music+Literature" (Kaohsiung, Taiwan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Compleat Brahms: A Guide to the Musical Works of Johannes (Hardcover)

This book contains introduction of EVERY Brahms' work. I use it accompanying with DG's Brahms complete edition, and the result is very informative and I totally enjoy it. The greatest merit,and at the same time the crucial flaw, of this book is that this is a collaboration. Yes, good enough, we can find different perspectives and different writing styles and different standard among these articles. But even in the same category pages seem not being equally distributed. For example, there are 4.5 enthusiastic pages dedicated to op.43,four lieder, with every lied in detail. But there are only 3 paragraphs for op.46, four lieder. (It seems rather "unfair",isn't it? for op.46 is no less distinct then the former.) I love this book, if regardless of this.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Uneven, June 24, 2000

By 

Stuart Bloom - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Compleat Brahms: A Guide to the Musical Works of Johannes (Hardcover)

The unevenness cited by a previous reviewer is this book's great weakness. Those works covered by writers other than the editor get reasonably detailed treatment. Those written by the editor get very short shrift. These are all solo lieder, vocal duets and quartets, and smaller-scale choral works, especially the earlier works in these genres. Some of the individual numbers in these sets get no more discussion than their names and key signatures.

Even the longer essays are not by any means detailed musical analyses. They are the equivalent of what you might expect from a well-done set of notes included with a recording.

The title "Compleat" is something of a misnomer. The book barely mentions most of the WoO and posthumous works and discusses almost none of the many alternate arrangements done by Brahms -- including some significant ones, such as the transcriptions of Op. 120 for viola and piano.

Even with its deficiencies, if you're a serious Brahmsian, this book will be a valuable addition to your library.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Superficial, May 15, 2000

By 

Stuart Bloom - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Compleat Brahms: A Guide to the Musical Works of Johannes (Hardcover)

The description says "Virtually every piece composed by Brahms and not sacrificed to his uncompromising critical standards is discussed in this compendium, lucidly, readably, in biographical and cultural context, and in fine detail." The claim "in fine detail" is blatantly untrue. The detail is about what you'd get on a typical CD insert booklet, nothing more. The C minor symphony gets a scant five pages; the E minor, just three; the four concertos get a total of 13 pages.