This exceptionally fine collection brings together many of the best analysts of Brahms, and nineteenth-century music generally, in the English-speaking world today. That said, I was at first somewhat sceptical of the book's stated raison d’être. In the words of the editors, ‘A premise underlying each essay is not that Brahms's music is meaningful in spite of its organisational intricacy but rather that meaning and technical complexity form an intimate bond’ (p. 4). Fair enough, but should this come under the category of surprising or paradoxical? True, the context for this quote is their refutation of certain ‘potentially false dichotomies’, as personified in a fictional British composer with a suspicion of ‘being drawn into technical detail’ (p. 3).Footnote ¹ Even so, it is worth asking what would be the alternative. Surely few today would seriously argue that Brahms indulged in the exercise of meaningless complexity for its own sake. On the other hand, if technical complexity constitutes a ‘means to an end’, which seems unexceptionable, then it is part of the music's expressive meaning by definition. From another point of view, are Brahms's technical complexities in any sense more meaningful than those of other composers?

From a musicological/music-theoretical perspective, what the editors propose is a reconciliation between two scholarly avenues to musical understanding that have traditionally sat uneasily together (though far less so today than would have been the case a few decades ago): highly technical analysis of ‘purely musical’ domains of harmony, counterpoint, motive, rhythm, form and so forth, on the one hand and explications of expression or meaning (from any number of perspectives, but in any case ultimately transcending ‘the notes’) on the other. And Brahms might indeed be thought a particularly apposite subject for such a synthetic approach, in his music’s long-recognized combination of attributes of classicism, exceptional craftsmanship and tight constructive rigour, side by side with a deep vein of romantic subjectivity, from high-spirited extroversion to ‘autumnal’ introspection. The book builds on recent advances in both German- and English-language scholarship in Brahmsian historiography, together with a remarkable resurgence of interest, over the last two decades or so, in studies of various kinds of musical meaning.

It is organized in three parts, or rather two main parts prefaced by an introductory section, beginning with the generic editorial overview/preview, ‘“The Wondrous Transformation of Thought into Sound”: Some Preliminary Reflections on Musical Meaning in Brahms’, a wide-ranging survey of the scholarly state of play with respect to both Brahms and musical meaning broadly defined.

The other essay in part 1 is Steven Rings's ‘The Learned Self: Artifice in Brahms’s Late Intermezzi’, though why it appears in this introductory context and not together with other studies of instrumental works in Part 3 of the volume was not clear to me. It explores the correlation of compositional complexity and expressive affect (inwardness, subjectivity) from the premise that the most ‘expressive’ moments in these pieces also tend to be the densest technically, in terms of applied compositional craft. The analyses of Op. 116, No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 117, No. 1 in E-flat, Op. 117, No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 118, No. 2 in A, Op. 118, No. 4 in F minor and Op. 119, No. 1 in B Minor are motivic in orientation and make much of inversional symmetry. The broader argument receives historical corroboration from members of Brahms’s inner circle (including Clara Schumann, Elisabeth von Herzogenberg and Eduard Hanslick) and some comments from Brahms himself. Rings extends this complexity/expression correlation directly to its physical enactment in performance, with its dichotomy of in-the-present engagement and reflective distance (this is the only essay in the collection to concern itself with performance issues). Indeed, for the modern analyst it could further be extended to the ‘hedonism’ of the analytical pursuit itself (here he takes on Vladimir Jankélévitch, Carolyn Abbate and others who would ‘detect in analysis a desire to flee music’s pleasures’ [p. 50, n. 49]).

Part 2 presents three studies of vocal music. Yonatan Malin's ‘“Alte Liebe” and the Birds of Spring’ explores the question of musical meaning from the perspective of an artistic contemporary of Brahms, Max Klinger, whose Brahms Fantasy (1894) was a unique experiment in nineteenth-century multimedia – a self-published bound volume of visual artwork inspired by selected songs by Brahms, incorporating the scores themselves as an integral part of the work.Footnote ² Beyond mere visual illustration of the songs, Klinger aimed to ‘move outward from the judgments into which we are led – led blindly – by poetry and above all music; I wanted to cast a glance over the range of feeling, and from there look around, continue, connect, or complete’ (p. 54). Indeed the placement of the scores in the work is such that Klinger's visual images interact with specific passages from the songs, both in a general musical/textual sense and even with the abstract visual aspect of the musical notation. The subject matter presents an opportunity for creatively moving beyond the limitations of conventional book illustration, and the essay is to be read in conjunction with a splendid high-resolution online annotated reproduction of the Fantasy, developed collaboratively for the purpose.Footnote ³ Malin's analysis works at two levels: first, that of uncovering Brahms's meaning to Klinger, in the interactions of image with music and text, and the narrative implications of Klinger's selected song sequence (the songs are not connected in any obvious way, instead drawn individually from different published collections); secondly, Malin's own close reading of the songs in their own right, with many penetrating observations on subtleties of pitch motive and metric process.

In ‘Brahms's Mädchenlieder and Their Cultural Context’, Heather Platt re-appraises an area of Brahms’s song output relatively neglected by previous scholars: songs with a young female narrative voice, generally associated with a folk-like style. Platt situates the songs in the context of the portrayal of similar characters in literature and the visual arts (the phenomenon of the Backfisch in nineteenth-century Germanic popular culture).Footnote ⁴ In the process she uncovers psychological subtleties hitherto overlooked: ‘this mixture of seemingly contradictory ideas – socially imposed expectations for women generally, on the one hand, and an appreciation of an individual female character's unique psychology, on the other’ (pp. 92–3). Platt considers three songs in detail: ‘Am jüngsten Tag’, Op. 95, No. 6, ‘Klage’, Op. 105, No. 3 and ‘Ach, und du mein kühles Wasser!’, Op. 85, No. 3. The analyses contain many astute character insights, tied in to Schenkerian readings of the songs, though these don't always completely convince – for example, Example 4.1 (‘Am jüngsten Tag’), where the V7 chord in the middle of bar 1 is read as initiating a large-scale dominant prolongation. This is contradicted, however, by its context in the midst of a harmonic sequence (bars 1–2) that (it seems to me) prolongs the surrounding tonic (chromatically transformed: from I6, upbeat to bar 1, to V7/II, downbeat of bar 3).

Margaret Notley's essay, ‘Ancient Tragedy and Anachronism: Form as Expression in Brahms’s Gesang der Parzen’, brings a wealth of new musicological research into the reception history of what is historically perhaps one of Brahms's most misunderstood works, engaging Greek tragedy through the eighteenth-century lens of Goethe.Footnote ⁵ A persistent critical problem has been the perception of an incongruity between the main part of the work, where Brahms memorably evokes the antique retribution of the gods toward their human victims in music of harsh, astringent grandeur, and the quiet epilogue's abrupt switch to the subjectivity of present suffering (‘anachronistic humanism’); here Notley draws on concepts of nineteenth-century harmonic dualism in extending the expressive and narrative dichotomy to one of authentic versus plagal harmonic systems. The analysis is unfailingly illuminating; I have only one small quibble with respect to a questionable key attribution: the ‘golden tablets’ music, bars 40–47, repeated 72–78, seems to me unambiguously in F, moving to a half cadence in that key, as opposed to (as Notley asserts) C, moving to an imperfect authentic cadence (p. 126).

Part 3 then deals with various instrumental genres, beginning with Ryan McClelland's ‘Sequence as Expressive Culmination in the Chamber Music of Brahms’. McClelland notes Brahms’s tendency (notably in chamber works more than other genres) to use sequence in codas in an expressively heightened context, prompting the exploration of an aspect of sequential writing – its expressive import – that has hitherto rarely been considered (surprisingly, given the foundational importance of the technique to tonal form across the centuries). These culminating sequences come in two kinds: ‘vigorous’ (typically involving the climactic treatment of a prominent motivic element, and usually taking the form of an intensified version of a sequence from earlier in the movement, with examples from the first movement and scherzo of the Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34, and the finales of the Piano Trio No. 2 in C, Op. 87, and Clarinet Trio in A Minor, Op. 114) and ‘transcendent’ (a ‘circularity or stasis, affording the listener a blissful reverie in which to reflect on the preceding musical arguments’ (p. 171), illustrated by the first movements of the Piano Quartet No. 2 in A, Op. 26, and Clarinet Sonata, Op. 120 No. 2, in E-flat). Unlike vigorous sequences, which exhibit the full range of basic sequence types, transcendent ones seem to be restricted to the descending second (circle-of-fifths) type only. Brahms’s idiosyncratic embellishments of the traditional sequence types are of great subtlety (for example, in the implicit rather than actual retention of notes over harmonic changes, or resolution of chordal sevenths), sometimes to the point where the prototype itself is obscured (as in Example 6.22, from the Clarinet Sonata in E-flat, with its ‘illusory’ alternative reading implicating a different root-succession). One of the great strengths of McClelland's approach is his emphasis not on reduction but rather on systematic generative reconstruction of Brahms's complex sequential surfaces from the unadorned prototypes. He makes much effective use of recomposition, the greater to appreciate Brahms's boldness and originality by comparison with more normative continuations not taken.

The analytical strategy of presenting hypothetical alternatives not pursued also features prominently in Frank Samarotto’s ‘“Phantasia subitanea”: Temporal Caprice in Brahms's Op. 116, Nos. 1 and 7’, a wide-ranging study pondering the paradox of a genre (capriccio) defined as much as anything by the very absence of a generic regulative principle. After tracing the genre’s historical connotations in Praetorius (1619, source of the essay’s title), Frescobaldi, Locatelli and Haydn (a very substantial analysis of the 1789 Capriccio [Fantasia] in C), Samarotto locates its essence in musical ‘changes of mind’ and reversals of course (melodic/harmonic/phrase-structural/metrical). In the ensuing Schenkerian studies of both D-minor framing pieces from Op. 116, the thoroughgoing hypermetrical interpretation is absolutely integral to the analytical conception (as opposed to the tacked-on afterthought it can sometimes seem in the hands of lesser practitioners), lending an audacious long-breathed sweep to these ‘hearings’ of the complete pieces. There is also the provocative suggestion of a Bloomian ‘misreading’ of Schütz's motet ‘Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich?’ (which Brahms had conducted earlier in his career, and may be circumstantially linked to the composition of Op. 116 through his re-acquaintance with the score around this time).

James Hepokoski explores ‘Monumentality and Formal Processes in the First Movement of Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1’ from the characteristic dialogic and hermeneutic perspectives of Sonata Theory.Footnote ⁶ By the 1850s, the Type 5 sonata (ritornello/sonata hybrid) was already something of an anachronism, and Brahms's choice of the form in itself constituted a declaration of self-conscious historical positioning in the tradition of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann. In this concerto movement of unprecedentedly high-minded ‘‘symphonic’’ ambitions, the expansive Type 5 formal framework becomes the site of an epic modal struggle (ultimately ending in failure, with the last-minute recapitulatory collapse of the redemptive tonic major), dramatized from the Sonata Theory perspective as a process of modular action and reaction within the form’s associated rotational scheme (some seeming anomalies in which Hepokoski relates to Brahms’s revision process in the work’s complicated genesis). Hepokoski's expressive narrative characteristically invokes flexible and historically sensitive metaphorical analogues rather than any programmatic meaning (though he does consider the possibility of the opening as a graphic response to Schumann’s then-recent suicide attempt). This rich, nuanced analysis should serve as a model for future studies of nineteenth-century concertos, an area of the repertoire with great, and still largely untapped potential for the Sonata Theory approach.

In ‘The Drama of Tonal Pairing in the Chamber Music of Schumann and Brahms’, Peter Smith explains the latter’s penchant for extended interactions of dual tonicity as solidly grounded in monotonality. In particular, he takes issue with other analysts’ (including his younger self!) positing of a directional tonal process in the central Grave ed appassionato of the String Quintet No. 1 in F, Op. 88, with its five-part C-sharp minor/A alternation before the surprise off-tonic ending on A (which Smith derives from a topical narrative he develops in association with the two keys). However ramified or nuanced in realization, ultimately there is nothing ambiguous about Brahms's tonal pairing practice. Smith further proposes that Schumann may have been influential here, relating specific features of tonal pairing in Brahms's hybrid (slow movement/scherzo) middle movements (from the Violin Sonata No. 2 in A, Op. 100 as well as the quintet) to the analogous movement in the older master’s late Violin Sonata No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 105; indeed the correspondences between the two composers’ approaches to tonal pairing extend further, to the higher level of inter-movement relations. Smith’s Schenkerian analyses impress (as usual) in their insights into Brahms's characteristically subtle overlaps of formal boundaries, key orientations and structural Stufen.

Although its primary emphasis is on analysis, the book consistently impresses by its breadth and depth of historical context for close readings of the music, the attention to cultural milieu and reception history bringing Brahms into sharper focus as a historical figure. The diverse analytical approaches display a shared concern for larger perspectives, regarding Brahms’s place in the Austro-Germanic tradition, the role in his music of historical compositional models and its constructive basis in traditional techniques, however radically transformed. One curious omission struck me, in the absence of any substantial representation of the ‘neo-Riemannian’ approach to chromatic harmony (pace the editors’ contention on p. 7, and with the exception of some passing comments on hexatonic poles in Hepokoski's essay), in view of its great influence in the music-theoretical world in recent years. On the other hand, on this evidence Schenkerian analysis continues to enjoy robust health, represented as the dominant analytical paradigm in no less than half of the contributions (counting McClelland's contrapuntal/prolongational orientation as implicitly Schenkerian). The topical approach too (after Robert Hatten) is proving resilient in its adaptability to a nineteenth-century interpretive context, the frequency of its invocation in several of the essays here (especially of the pastoral topos or ‘mode’) no doubt also a reflection of Brahms's innate classicism of outlook.

Despite my initial resistance to the book’s stated premise, what matters is the quality of its individual contributions. On this score it succeeds triumphantly. This deeply rewarding collection will be a treasure trove for years to come, for Brahms scholars of all persuasions.