In the fall of 2016, the Center for Beethoven Research at Boston University invited Professor Jacquelyn Sholes to organize a mini conference on the subject of Beethoven's influence on Brahms. The conference was entitled ‘“Footsteps of a Giant”: Brahms and the Influence of Beethoven’ and was held on 30 November 2016 at Boston University's College of Fine Arts. The conference was a great success, and all of the papers were revelatory. This issue of Nineteenth-Century Music Review publishes those papers, as refined and amplified by their authors, or in some cases rewritten here entirely. Jacquelyn Sholes is the guest editor of this issue of the journal.
First a word about the Center for Beethoven Research at Boston University. The Center was founded seven years ago by Lewis Lockwood and me, and the two of us continue to serve as its co-directors. We maintain an active website (www.bu.edu/beethovencenter/), which features several important components, including a database of Beethoven autograph manuscripts available online, arranged by opus number and including works without opus numbers, as well as Beethoven's copies of works by other composers, such as Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Salieri and Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart. This resource is widely consulted, and we aim to keep it as up-to-date as possible. The website also features a database of first editions of Beethoven's works; a series of essays by Lewis Lockwood on ‘Beethoven's Sketches: The State of our Knowledge’; a listing of our extensive collection of facsimile editions; and links to other important resources, such as the Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, the Beethoven Gateway, hosted by the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San Jose State University, and the music library at Boston University. We also list all the known extant Beethoven autograph manuscripts. In addition to the website, the Center mounts conferences and symposia every year, as well as lectures, master classes, recitals and concerts.
The Center is the online publisher of all recent volumes of Robin Wallace's The Critical Reception of Beethoven's Compositions by His German Contemporaries, the immensely useful and carefully annotated translations of contemporary reviews of performances and publications of Beethoven's works during his lifetime and immediately thereafter, the print volumes of which appeared some twenty years ago in two volumes extending only to Opus 72. Publications also include some papers from the Center's symposia.
The essays represented here are by Christopher Reynolds, Jacquelyn Sholes, William Horne, Styra Avins and Daniel Beller-McKenna. They approach the Brahms–Beethoven axis from intriguingly diverse points of view.
Wagner was dismissive of any composer of his time who wrote instrumental music and especially dismissive of composers who thoughtlessly imitated Beethoven works. In ‘Schumann contra Wagner: Beethoven, the F.A.E. Sonata and “Artwork of the Future”', Christopher Reynolds shows that in the scherzo of the ‘F.A.E.’ Violin Sonata (a work whose other movements were written by Albert Dietrich and Schumann), Brahms weaves a complex of allusions, (among them, of course, famously, to the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven). At the same time Brahms is (with Schumann) expressing a powerful rebuke to Wagner.
In her remarkably original recent book, Allusion as Narrative Premise in Brahms's Instrumental Music, Jacquelyn Sholes has shown that allusion can be employed (and is employed by Brahms) in extremely sophisticated ways. Her article here (‘D-Minor Concertos and Symphonies of the Brahms-Schumann Circle in the 1850s: Cross-Relationships and the Influence of Beethoven') is equally sophisticated in its demonstration of the complex interrelationships among the D-minor works of Joseph Joachim, Julius Otto Grimm, Dietrich, Schumann and Brahms, a circle of friends whose compositions discussed here all originated in the 1850s.
William Horne's essay, ‘Beethoven’s String Quintet in C major, Op. 29, and Brahms's String Sextets: A Wallflower Blooms', addresses the oddly neglected Op. 29 String Quintet of Beethoven, its championing by Joseph Joachim, and the similarity between its opening measures and the beginning of Brahms's String Sextet, Op. 18. He also shows that the last movement of Op. 29 and the last movement of Brahms's second String Sextet, Op. 36, share qualities of formal planning and design.
In ‘Brahms, Beethoven, and a Reassessment of the Famous Footsteps’, Styra Avins considers Brahms's well-known delay in completing his First Symphony. Responding to the work of seminal Brahms biographer Max Kalbeck, Avins reconsiders the role of Beethoven's influence on this delay and considers what other factors may have accounted for the extended gestation of the work. She concludes that, ultimately, ‘the solution to the puzzle of “what took so long” is the answer to the question: “How many years before Brahms had his own orchestra to conduct?”'
Daniel Beller-McKenna (‘Imagination and Memory: Inter-movement Thematic Recall in Beethoven and Brahms') analyses instances of recall among movements in important works of Brahms and shows that, while leaning on Beethoven, Brahms infuses the technique with both narrative and emotional weight. Further, he demonstrates that Brahms's employment of thematic recall is modified over his lifetime, culminating in the sublime moment at the end of the Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115.
This collection of essays significantly advances our understanding not just of the Beethoven/Brahms axis, but also of the musical world of the mid nineteenth century – and indeed of the entire notion of allusion and its far-reaching meanings and consequences.
