Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall

Between Private and Public Performance

Katy Hamilton, Natasha Loges

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781107042704
• eBook ISBN: 9781316056585
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Johannes Brahms was a consummate professional musician, and a successful pianist, conductor, music director, editor and composer. Yet he also faithfully championed the world of private music-making, creating many works and arrangements for enjoyment in the home by amateurs. This collection explores Brahms' public and private musical identities from various angles: the original works he wrote with amateurs in mind; his approach to creating piano arrangements of not only his own, but also other composers' works; his relationships with his arrangers; the deeper symbolism and lasting legacy of private music-making in his day; and a hitherto unpublished memoir which evokes his Viennese social world. Using Brahms as their focus point, the contributors trace the overlapping worlds of public and private music-making in the nineteenth century, discussing the boundaries between the composer's professional identity and his lifelong engagement with amateur music-making.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of music examples
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword: A different Brahms? New perspectives on his output
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Brahms in the home: An introduction
• 2 The Joachim Quartet concerts at the Berlin Singakademie: Mendelssohnian Geselligkeit in Wilhelmine Germany
• 3 Domesticity in Brahms’s String Sextets, Opp. 18 and 36
• 4 Where was the home of Brahms’s piano works?
• 5 Main and shadowy existence(s): Works and arrangements in the oeuvre of Johannes Brahms
• 6 Brahms arranges his symphonies
• 7 At the piano with Joseph and Johannes: Joachim’s overtures in Brahms’s circle
• 8 Brahms and his arrangers
• 9 Brahms in the Wittgenstein homes: A memoir and letters
• 10 The construction of gender and mores in Brahms’s Mädchenlieder
• 11 Music inside the home and outside the box: Brahms’s vocal quartets in context
• 12 The limits of the lied: Brahms’s Magelone-Romanzen Op. 33
• 13 Being (like) Brahms: Emulation and ideology in late nineteenth-century Hausmusik
• 14 The cultural dialectics of chamber music: Adorno and the visual-acoustic imaginary of Bildung
• Bibliography
• Index