‘Lieben Sie Brahms?’

The Brahms-Institut site can be roughly divided into three sections: Digital Archive, Research Projects, and information for visitors online and in person. ‘Lieben Sie Brahms?’, visitors are asked as they open the website. ‘Then you’re in just the right place. The Brahms-Institut seeks to appeal to all those interested in this great composer: music lovers, musicians, and musicologists’.Footnote ⁹ For visitors and non-professional music lovers, the site provides a brief Brahms biography, an overview of the Institut and its history, detailed descriptions of current and past exhibitions and events, an online shop and contact information. Again, the site design provides some problems here: the Brahms biography, by Sandberger, is supplemented by several pop-out images containing text, which cannot be magnified sufficiently to a point of legibility. But the events listings and exhibition texts are impressive both in terms of their variety and the imaginative approaches that have been taken to the collection. Brahms remains at the centre of exhibition planning of course, but Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Tchaikovsky and others have been drawn into displays and discussions, and the shop offers past exhibition catalogues (filled with thought-provoking articles as well as fine illustrations) in addition to manuscript facsimiles, and scholarly publications including the weighty Brahms-Handbuch, edited by Sandberger in 2009.Footnote ¹⁰ Elsewhere on the site, a full list of Institut publications is given: a telling reminder of the scholarly importance of catalogues and pamphlets, and the insights gained by archivists and librarians working closely with archive material.Footnote ¹¹ Press releases and newspaper articles are also available to read, as well as the fruits of the Musikhochschule’s new ‘TV Livestream’: a series of recorded discussions with musicians and scholars, ‘Zu Gast bei Brahms’.Footnote ¹² All in all, there is much of interest across these pages, even before investigating the Archive and Projects, although locating information is not always easy, and a few additional cross-references and links could greatly aid a first-time user.

Digital Archive

The Digital Archive, like the Institut’s Research Projects, runs as a mini-site within the main structure. This is allotted its own menu, split into ‘Brahmsiana’ and other collections, with the Brahms holdings further divided by material type. Given the basic design of the pages, each subcategory (autographs, engraving templates, first and early editions, photographs, letters, address book) leads to an overview of holdings and a gallery link of individual images.Footnote ¹³ The slightly cumbersome route to the images contains an impressive amount of detail. Autographs, engraving templates and edition links lead to what is, effectively, a central worklist (the only works shown are those for which digitized material is available). Clicking on a given work leads to a page containing information about composition dates, earliest known performances and performers and autograph sources, followed by extensive descriptions of digitized items and the opportunity to view these at high resolution. For a collection like the Fünf Lieder op. 47, for example, it is possible to view a working manuscript of ‘Liebesglut’ (no. 2), followed by its engraver’s copy; the engraver’s copies for ‘Sonntag’ (no. 3) and ‘Die Liebende schreibt’ (no. 5), and the first edition, first printing of the full opus. Names of copyists, incipits, page measurements, provenance information and bibliographic details are given per item. The images are all watermarked, sufficiently subtly not to interfere with visibility of the text below; and the pop-up digitized images are clearly labelled with a running header, as well as a dropdown menu to allow individual page selection. Song and movement titles are included as part of this menu, which is tremendously helpful to speedy navigation of a score. Although it is not mentioned on the Brahms Institut site, a number of these scores have also been made available on IMSLP, with the institutional link ‘D-LÜbi’ in each case taking users straight to the relevant worklist page within the Digital Archive.Footnote ¹⁴

The photographic archive, consisting of over 600 images, is similarly well documented: catalogue numbers, dimensions, provenance and format are provided per image. There is a simple search facility to allow refinement by date, location, description, title or full text; a link is also provided to a .pdf catalogue of photographic holdings, dated May 2016. There is also one curious feature of this catalogue that I could not quite fathom. Each image listing, with thumbnail, contains links to ‘Recte’ [sic] and ‘Verso’ images, and once the image viewer is open, it is possible to click between the two. However, in all cases that I encountered, the images were both recto – no distinct verso was apparent. Even a photograph of Theodor Kirchner, with a catalogue record stating that there is a handwritten date on the back of the image, yielded two shots of the photograph itself, rather than the aforementioned handwriting.Footnote ¹⁵ In this respect, the image labelling is misleading, and there is no mention of this rather curious mislabelling within the introductory text.Footnote ¹⁶

Among the remaining categories of digitized material, there are many other fascinating documents. The manuscripts from Brahms’s circle include works by Robert and Clara Schumann, Donald Francis Tovey, Rheinberger, Mendelssohn, Joachim, Henschel and Hans von Bülow, as well as album leaves by poets Klaus Groth and (possibly) Goethe – and these vary from scores to letters and written fragments.Footnote ¹⁷ Full scores of 78 works dedicated to Brahms are also included in full, under ‘Brahms gewidmet …’;Footnote ¹⁸ and his address book has been scanned in full, and supplemented with a helpful explanation of its rather idiosyncratic ordering!Footnote ¹⁹ The Schumann-Erstdrucke and Kirchner-Nachlass collections are also very considerable, with the former including over 140 works (the vast majority of Schumann’s publications, from the early piano works to full and vocal scores of pieces such as Das Paradies und die Peri and all four Symphonies – including the early version of Symphony no. 4). The Kirchner-Nachlass is divided into sub-categories of manuscripts, sketches, printed music, letters, documents and so on (including his cigar case!), totalling around 9,000 images in all. Kirchner’s significance as a superbly well-connected composer, pianist, organist and conductor begins to emerge from this considerable collection, and it is hoped that there are plans to transcribe the letters and other written documents to supplement the photographs provided.Footnote ²⁰ It is also from Kirchner’s Nachlass that many of the Schumann-Erstdrucke images are drawn.Footnote ²¹ A tantalizing announcement on the Digital Archive landing page makes mention of plans to digitize part of the Joseph Joachim Nachlass, but there is no live link attached to the headline – and non-German speakers should be warned that the link to the Kirchner-Nachlass does not even appear in the menu on the English-language page of the Digital Archive, so the page must be viewed in German to follow the navigation link.Footnote ²²

Research Projects

One of the smallest sections within the Digital Archive – that of Brahms’s letters – ties up with the most ambitious of the Brahms Institut’s Research Projects, namely the Brahms-Briefwechsel-Verzeichnis (BBV). This is a database of over 10,800 letters held by institutions and individuals all over the world – nearly 4,000 of which are to Brahms, and around 3,500 of which were previously unpublished – and it is an invaluable resource to scholars. It was made possible through the support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, the Lübeck Possehl-Stiftung, and the collaboration of countless international organizations and individuals, bringing together information on the major holdings of institutions such as the Archiv der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde and the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, alongside tiny clutches of letters that have found their way into private hands.Footnote ²³ Sandberger has provided a fine overview of ‘Brahms as a Letter Writer’, and the significance of both the correspondence itself and the implications that the BBV has for scholarship.Footnote ²⁴ He also provides a thought-provoking comparison in terms of the number of surviving letters by other composers: 6,825 by Brahms, around 5,000 by Schumann and Weber, 7,000 by Mendelssohn and 10,000 by Wagner and Liszt.Footnote ²⁵

The letter texts are not included in full within BBV: instead, the database is an index of names, dates, locations and incipits of the Brahms correspondence. The search facility provides the options to specify writer, addressee, locations, date by decade (all of these options are given as drop-down boxes), and to look for particular words within the full text of records. Although this last box is described as ‘Volltext’, the well-crafted usage instructions spell out that this ‘does not mean access to complete letter texts … BBV only allows users to research the opening lines of the letters. The full text search also provides information on library holdings, locations, and call numbers’, see Figure 1.Footnote ²⁶

Figure 1

Brahms Briefwechsel Verzeichnis, ‘Datenbank’ search page

Thus a search which specifies Fritz Simrock as the writer, a time period of 1881–1890 and the full text search term ‘Musik’ yields the three results, shown in Figure 2. Result are always listed in chronological order and cannot be further refined or reordered.

Figure 2

Brahms Briefwechsel Verzeichnis, ‘Datenbank’ results page

‘Musik’ is to be found in the incipit of the third letter – ‘Merkwürdig viel Musik hat der Mensch im Kopf’ – as well as the location of the remaining two, at the Archiv der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien. Whilst it might seem tantalizing and frustrating in equal measure to be granted only a small snippet of the full text, crucially two of these letters are unpublished, whilst the other is in print but the original source is lost. As a tool for tracing mention of specific subjects, the database’s power is limited; but it is a powerful tool for determining the availability and location of correspondence, and discovering some of the less obvious publications in which Brahms’s letters appear (including biographies of contemporaries and organization histories).Footnote ²⁷ The Siglenverzeichnis is a treasure trove of lesser-known correspondence sources – not to mention an indispensable tool for untangling the rather convoluted publishing history of Max Kalbeck’s early twentieth-century volumes of Johannes Brahms in Briefwechsel.Footnote ²⁸

The Project pages also provide a brief overview of the Brahms-Handbuch, further introductory material to the ‘Brahms gewidmet …’ digital collection, and an overview of current research being undertaken into the recently acquired partial estate of the singer, Julius Stockhausen.Footnote ²⁹ Details are also given of projects in progress, focusing on the digitzation of collections associated with violinist Joseph Joachim, composer and conductor Julius Spengel, the Basel-based musician August Walter, Stockhausen and the violinist Emanuel Wirth. The scope and scale of these projects is not only impressive in terms of the time and resources required to carry them out; the insights that such collections might afford into the public and private musical lives of the Brahms circle, and the towns and cities in which these performers and composers worked, are considerable. Brahms scholars – and indeed scholars of this period of Austro-German music in general – owe a considerable debt to Kurt and Renate Hofmann for their dedication in assembling the founding collection of the Institut. The digitization and public cataloguing of this and other collections is particularly valuable since Brahms’s own Nachlass is held by the Archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, for which no public access catalogue or images are available.Footnote ³⁰ The motto to which the Brahms Institut lays claim is ‘sammeln verpflichtet’ – ‘committed to collecting’. This is interpreted by the Institut not only as an obligation to amass and privately catalogue its holdings, but also to make material publicly accessible to researchers and interested parties through exhibitions and digitization.Footnote ³¹ It is a tribute to the dedication of Sandberger and his colleagues that they have succeeded in both securing so many considerable acquisitions, and identifying partners and funding bodies to research and digitise them.

Whilst there are a number of technical irritations with the Brahms Institut website – almost all of which could be solved by an updated web platform – the content of the site itself, and in particular its rigorous cataloguing of manuscripts and early printed editions of music by Brahms, Schumann and others, is both highly commendable and extremely valuable to researchers. An overarching search facility, both for the site content itself and, ideally (though this would be far more complex) across several of their considerable databases, would provide great benefits to users. It is striking that no mention is made anywhere on the site of similar organizations that visiting scholars might find of interest: for example, IMSLP, the Schumann Portal, Archiv der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, Johannes Brahms Gesamtausgabe, Joseph Joachim research site, or even library listings of relevant Nachlass holdings, such as that of Julius Stockhausen.Footnote ³² Finally, the partially translated nature of the Institut’s website is problematic in ensuring access and full listing of all available material. But none of these things should dissuade scholars from exploring these pages. After all, it is thanks to ambitious, generous and enthusiastic advocates such as the staff of the Brahms Institut and their partners, that national and international research into this field can progress.