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This collection explores the boundaries between Brahms' professional identity and his lifelong engagement with private and amateur music-making.
List of contents
Foreword Michael Musgrave; 1. Brahms in the home: an introduction Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges; 2. The Joachim quartet concerts at the Berlin Sing-Akademie: Mendelssohnian Geselligkeit in Wilhelmine Germany Robert Eshbach; 3. Domesticity in Brahms's string sextets, Opp. 18 and 36 Marie Sumner Lott; 4. Where was the home of Brahms's piano works? Katrin Eich; 5. Main and shadowy existence(s): works and arrangements in the oeuvre of Johannes Brahms Michael Struck; 6. Brahms arranges his symphonies Robert Pascall; 7. At the piano with Joseph and Johannes: Joachim's overtures in Brahms's circle Valerie Woodring Goertzen; 8. Brahms and his arrangers Helen Paskins, Katy Hamilton and Natasha Loges; 9. Brahms in the Wittgenstein homes: a memoir and letters Styra Avins; 10. The construction of gender and mores in Brahms's Mädchenlieder Heather Platt; 11. Music inside the home and outside the box: Brahms's vocal quartets in context Katy Hamilton; 12. The limits of the Lied: Brahms's Magelone-Romanzen Op. 33 Natasha Loges; 13. Being (like) Brahms: emulation and ideology in late nineteenth-century Hausmusik Markus Böggemann; 14. The cultural dialectics of chamber music: Adorno and the visual-acoustic imaginary of Bildung Richard Leppert.
About the author
Katy Hamilton holds the post of Junior Research Fellow in Performance History at the Royal College of Music, specialising in the vocal music of Johannes Brahms and his contemporaries. She is the author of William Hurlstone: A Catalogue of Works and was assistant to pianist Graham Johnson for his three-volume encyclopaedia Franz Schubert: The Complete Songs. In addition, she is an active chamber accompanist and repetiteur, having worked with instrumentalists, singers and choirs in England, Ireland, Spain and Germany. From 2008 to 2013 she was the course organiser and Music Director of the International Summer School of Music at Shrewsbury (ISSMUS), a specialist summer school for singers, composers, conductors and pianists.Natasha Loges is Assistant Head of Programmes at the Royal College of Music, where she teaches on Brahms, the history of opera and the German lied. She has published various articles on Brahms's songs in journals such as Music and Letters and Nineteenth-Century Music Review. Supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council award, she is currently completing a monograph called Brahms and his Poets. She is also active as a song accompanist and has broadcast live on BBC Radio 3. As a speaker, she has a long-standing association with the Oxford Lieder Festival, the UK's largest festival of art song.
Summary
Johannes Brahms remains a figure of perennial appeal and significance to performers, scholars and music-lovers alike. This richly illustrated collection of essays, including a hitherto unpublished memoir of Brahms, explores the boundaries between the composer's public, professional identity and his lifelong engagement with private and amateur music-making.
