Despite the incredible diversity in Brahms's scherzo-type movements, there has been no comprehensive consideration of this aspect of his oeuvre. Professor Ryan McClelland provides an in-depth study of these movements that also contributes significantly to an understanding of Brahms's compositional language and his creative dialogue with musical traditions. McClelland especially highlights the role of rhythmic-metric design in Brahms's music and its relationship to expressive meaning. In Brahms's scherzo-type movements, McClelland traces transformations of primary thematic material, demonstrating how the relationship of the initial music to its subsequent versions creates a musical narrative that provides structural coherence and generates expressive meaning. McClelland's interpretations of the expressive implications of Brahms's fascinatingly intricate musical structures frequently engage issues directly relevant to performance. This illuminating book will appeal to music theorists, musicologists working on nineteenth-century instrumental music and performers.
The earliest surviving original composition of Johannes Brahms, Scherzo, Op. 4 in E-flat minor, was composed in 1851 when Brahms was only 18 years old. This brilliant scherzo, with its two trios and a coda, remains one of Brahms’s larger solo piano works. Internationally renowned concert pianist Joseph Banowetz edited this work with a special insight as one of his teachers, Carl Friedberg, studied with Clara Schumann, a close friend of Brahms.
The earliest surviving original composition of Johannes Brahms, Scherzo, Op. 4 in E-flat minor, was composed in 1851 when Brahms was only 18 years old. This brilliant scherzo, with its two trios and a coda, remains one of Brahms's larger solo piano works. Internationally renowned concert pianist Joseph Banowetz edited this work with a special insight as one of his teachers, Carl Friedberg, studied with Clara Schumann, a close friend of Brahms.
Michael Musgrave presents a contemporary view of Brahms 150 years after his birth, seeing him not simply as the "conservative" figure so often stressed in the past, but as one who creatively reinterpreted a wider range of historical elements than any composer of his time. Brahms absorbed his studies directly into his music making and composition and in so doing helped to evolve not merely a personal language which was regarded as progressive and sometimes difficult by a range of contemporaries and successors, but also helped to establish an ethos of historical reference which anticipates the twentieth century. The Music of Brahms concentrates on the music, with Brahms's life discussed briefly in the introduction. The works are considered in four phases according to genre, with an emphasis on connection and on the development and elaboration of a unified language. The list of works includes recent discoveries and a calendar outlines the pattern of his musical life, including relevant information concerning performances.
Book Size: 8 1/2" x 11" * * * * * * From the biographical introductory. SOME composers resemble certain people that we meet and dislike at first sight. For many, musicians as well as amateurs, Brahms is such a composer. At his best in his piano music he often repels. After the poetic tenderness and chivalric fire of Chopin, the overflowing romance of Schumann, the adorable melody of Schubert, and the proud pose of Weber, who prances by on gorgeously caparisoned arpeggios, Brahms may sound chilly and formal; but strip him of his harsh rind, taste the richness of the musical fruit, and your indifference will be transformed into admiration, perhaps love. It would be easy to map out three styles in the Brahms piano literature as De Lenz did with the sonatas of Beethoven, but it would be a futile effort; although Brahms gained in mastery as he grew older, he was more Brahms in his Op. 1 than was Chopin in his La Ci Darem variations. Take, for example, the E-flat minor Scherzo, Op. 4, which Brahms played for Schumann during the historical visit to Düsseldorf. It has in it a nuance of Chopin, rather in the color than the ideas, and it is so free, flowing, plastic, and so happily worked out, that it must have sounded to both Schumann and Liszt as something quite novel. They saluted the composer as a recruit to the ranks of romanticism. This welcome they repented as Brahms went his own way, steering clear of the Wagner, Liszt, Schumann tendencies. And yet they were fundamentally correct in their judgments. The very core of Brahms is romantic. He may have inherited the polyphony of Bach, the symphonic mantle of Beethoven, but he is, nevertheless, a Romantic, and nowhere more so than in his piano music. This E-flat Scherzo is formal when compared to his Op. 1 16, 1 17, 1 18, and 1 19; even the Rhapsodies strike a newer note. Let us, without attempting an arbitrary classification, divide his piano music into two groups. In the first we may include the three sonatas, the E-flat Scherzo, all the Variations, the four Ballades, and the Waltzes, Op. 39. Then we must skip to Op. 76 before we encounter solo music, and might begin the second group with the eight Capriccios and Intermezzi. Follow the two Rhapsodies, and until Op. 1 16 we encounter no piano solos. With Op. 119 the contributions of Brahms to piano music end. There are two books of technical studies, fifty-one in all, the arrangements of the Hungarian dances and some special études on the themes of Bach, Weber, and Chopin, which need not concern us here. But this grouping should not pin down the composer to any definite scheme; for instance, in the second, the F-sharp minor Sonata, we find material that is kin to his last works, and some of his new Fantasies are a reversion to the Brahms of the Ballades. In 1853 Schumann wrote his article "New Paths" and Brahms became famous. The composer-critic recognized the strangeness of the young man; in the first bar of Brahms you are conscious of a new note, much as the opening of the C major Sonata may stem from the Hammerklavier Sonata of Beethoven. It is not alone in the form, this newness, not in the idea, not in the modulation, rhythmic variety, melodic curve, or curve of harmonic line, but in all these there lurks something individual. This individuality caused Schumann to rub his eyes in astonishment when he heard the Op. 1, the Sonata in C, and made Liszt grow enthusiastic when he read the E-flat minor Scherzo.....
