Constantin Floros's recent book Johannes Brahms: ‘Free But Alone’: A Life for a Poetic Music was first published in German in 1997. The present translation by Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch is one of a series of recent translations into English of Floros's works, with Anton Bruckner: The Man and the Work having also appeared from the publishing house Peter Lang in 2011.Footnote ¹ In the preface, Floros outlines the genesis of his Brahms book, from his research in Brahms's aesthetics in the early 1980s, through many years of engagement with Brahms's music in his adopted city of Hamburg, where he had the good fortune and privilege to gain regular access to the extensive Brahms Archive of the Hamburg State and University Library.Footnote ² Such gems as those he found there fill the pages of this book in the great many letters, illustrations and copies of autograph scores (many previously unpublished) that amount here to an embarrassment of riches for lovers of Brahms's music.Footnote ³

It is clear throughout that this book stems from Floros's abundance of admiration and love for the music of Brahms, as well as the man. Citing Brahms's dissatisfaction with Wasielewski's Robert Schumann biography in 1854,Footnote ⁴ Floros takes heed of Brahms's counsel (as articulated in a letter to Clara Schumann) that a biography should only be written by either a ‘close friend or an admirer’, that it must be governed by ‘impartiality’, but not to the extent that it becomes ‘coldness’, and that it must be open-minded.Footnote ⁵

There are five central themes that the author promotes as underpinning this book:

1. 1) A belief that Joseph Joachim's motto Frei aber Einsam provides a key to unlocking Brahms's personality;

2. 2) An understanding that both as an artist and a character, Brahms was Janus-faced;

3. 3) A proposal that the study of Brahms's personality will lead to a deeper understanding of his music;

4. 4) The conviction that Brahms's creative process was often triggered by personal experiences, so that his works must be viewed against this background;

5. 5) The assertion that Brahms's music is intrinsically poetic.

Despite Floros's allusion to Brahms's thoughts on the merits of a well-written biography, this book is not a Brahms biography, although it certainly contains many biographical details and approaches. Neither is it a collection of essays in the conventional sense; whereas some of the 21 chapters take a scholarly approach, at times with astute music-analytical findings and a lively engagement with Brahms studies, more often they comprise a basic introduction to Brahms's music, aimed at giving its audience rudimentary points of access to the works of this great figure. As such, the books seems to be aimed at both Kenner and Liebhaber, with the attempt to serve both strands of this target audience leading to a number of weaknesses in the book.

Published at an interval of 13 years from the first edition of Johannes Brahms: ‘Frei aber Einsam’, this newly expanded text has four new chapters.Footnote ⁶ Not only this, but the preface states that the earlier material has ‘been bibliographically updated’. (p. 3) Any such revision must necessarily be selective; yet much remains unacknowledged in the significant advances that have been made in Brahms research since the initial publication of this book. ‘I am fully aware of the explosiveness of my thesis’, (p. 1) Floros declares in his preface, referring to the five points enumerated above. A readership of musicologists (presumably one of the main target audiences for the book) will nonetheless often be met by the feeling of being thrown back in time in these pages to various periods over the last forty years.

For instance, in Chapter 3, entitled ‘Between the Fronts’, in a laudable effort to draw attention to the expressive as well as the structural elements of Brahms's music, Floros states that ‘Brahms, now, is not only regarded as a master of absolute music, but beyond that is frequently said to be an opponent of program music. Much in this view, however, appears to be in need of revision’. (p. 71) Although Floros does not cite it, such revision regarding the programme/absolute music debate has been amply undertaken.Footnote ⁷ In addition, since the late 1980s – even before the initial publication of Floros's book in German – there has been an increasing move toward hermeneutic approaches to Brahms's music that combine investigations of the expressive motivations for his compositional process with structural analysis.Footnote ⁸ Likewise, the claim in Chapter 8 that research into ‘[Brahms's] Relation to Schumann’ is ‘still in its infancy’ p. (95) is decidedly behind the curve.Footnote ⁹ Moving from the general to the particular, the discussion of the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 in A major Op. 100 of Chapter 11 draws a thematic connection between the opening of the first movement of that work and Brahms's ‘Komm bald’, Op. 97 No. 5, a ‘connection’, as Floros has it, that ‘has hitherto remained overlooked’. (p. 138) Yet again this is a misrepresentation of scholarship hitherto undertaken.Footnote ¹⁰ Such claims to originality recur throughout the book with the tenacity of a cliché.

Regarding structure, there is much overlap of material in this book as a result of the organisation of the chapters. A number of themes of great interest to Brahms scholars might have been more constructively addressed in a less diffuse manner. An example is the newly written Chapter 12, ‘Tradition and Innovation in the First Symphony’ which is divided into a number of small sections. The first, ‘Genesis and Genre’ is entirely bound up with the Brahms/Wagner dichotomy and the mid-nineteenth century battles over so-called ‘absolute’ and ‘programme’ music. This somewhat overworked topic is given extensive and repeated coverage. The second and third sections, respectively called ‘Brahms's constructive Beethoven/Schumann reception’ seem superfluous given that these issues are covered in Chapter 8, ‘The Second Beethoven’ and Chapter 9, ‘The Relation to Schumann’.Footnote ¹¹ Chapter 5, ‘Relations: Biographical backgrounds in Brahms's music’, is concerned primarily with the German Requiem and, as such, raises questions about the need for a new chapter on that work, rather than a comprehensive revision of the old one. This new chapter, moreover, is cursory and rudimentary, in the style of a programme note, again raising the question of the audience for whom the book is intended.

Matters of large-scale structure aside, fresh insights are to be found in a number of the individual chapters. Chapter 1, ‘Frei aber einsam’ gives an objective presentation of much evidence pertaining to Brahms's youth. Chapter 4, ‘Tone ciphers’ provides a useful introductory overview of this aspect of Brahms's creative œuvre. The scale of what the author aims to cover Chapter 8, ‘The Second Beethoven’, is considerable: taking as its starting point a similarity between Beethoven and Brahms that was intuitively observed by the composer's contemporaries, Floros aims to ‘determine with precision’ the nature of this similarity (p. 80). This entails, he proposes, charting the relationship between the music of Brahms and Beethoven in a manner that not only looks ‘at formal techniques’ but also scrutinizes ‘idiom and mode of expression’, and ‘the salient peculiarities of … musical language’. (p. 91) Notwithstanding Floros's assessment that ‘there are as yet hardly any investigations of musical idiom’,Footnote ¹² (p. 91) this chapter falls short of its aims. Despite the assertion that ‘Brahms's orientation towards Beethoven is unmistakable’, there is not a methodology systematic or consistent enough to show us how this is the case.

The strongest parts of the book are concerned with poetic elements in Brahms's music. Yet, here too, questionable assertions are found, such as ‘[a]ccording to widespread current assumption, the “poetic” element plays a much smaller role in Brahms's music than it does in Schumann's’ (p. 112) and ‘in comparing the various compositions, however, one is struck by the fact that whereas Schumann wrote short pieces as well as longer ones, Brahms exhibits a clear preference for longer compositions’. (p. 111) It is in spite of such assertions that Floros makes his insightful observations, such as the connection he draws between the last movement of the Horn Trio, Op. 40 and the E-flat minor Intermezzo, Op. 118 No. 6. (In addition to the shared tonality and expressive markings, Floros points to a further connection relating to the death of Brahms's mother in 1865, p. 121), or the discussion of the B minor Intermezzo, Op. 119 No. 1 in the context of Clara Schumann's correspondence with Brahms (p. 123). His observation that by giving ‘the pieces of Op. 116 [the title] Fantasies Brahms may have had Schumann's Kreisleriana in mind’ is well taken. However, it goes a step too far to attempt, as he does, to map the arrangement of the individual pieces in Kreisleriana onto Op. 116. (p. 110). Chapter 11, ‘Violin Sonatas from Songs: Secret dedications to Clara Schumann and Hermine Spies’ has an impressive frame of contemporary reference, and provides an in-depth exploration of the topic.

The new Chapter 15 on Brahms's Nänie offers a very useful annotated translation of Schiller's poem ‘Auch das Schöne muß sterben!’, and a thoughtful exploration of Schiller's relationship to classical antiquity. The discussion of Brahms's musical setting is cursory. Much consideration is given to the artistic affinities between Brahms and the artist Anselm Feuerbach, on the occasion of the death of whom Brahms wrote this work. Floros's discussion of this relationship resonates with that of Eduard Hanslick, penned some 120 years earlier.

In that review, Hanslick drew attention to Feuerbach's love of music, as evidenced in his paintings Orpheus Footnote ¹³ and The Concert.Footnote ¹⁴ He alluded to Feuerbach's tendency to draw an analogy between his own art and that of music, noting that ‘it is less this love of music, than the similarity in the whole Kunstanschauung that connected Feuerbach and Brahms in friendship and affinity’.Footnote ¹⁵ They have in common an ‘imperturbable direction toward the great, the exalted and the ideal’, characteristics that for both artists lead to ‘sharp severity and seclusion’.Footnote ¹⁶

Although here and in many other places in the book there is a strong continuity between Hanslick's hermeneutic approach to Brahms's music and that of Floros, the latter not only fails to acknowledge the fact, but frequently reprimands the critic for missing the sense of Brahms's works, and for promoting him as a champion of ‘absolute’ music. In Chapter 10 on the ‘Poetic elements in Brahms's music’ he cites at length the now well-known passage on Opp. 118 and 119, where Hanslick considers Brahms's late piano pieces to be ‘monologues at the piano’, ‘monologues as Brahms utters them to himself at a late evening hour, in defiant-pessimistic rebellion, in brooding reflection, in romantic reminiscences, and at times in dreamy wistfulness’.Footnote ¹⁷ (p. 124) Floros deems Hanslick's opinion of these works as expressed here to be ‘untenable as a generalization’ because, as he sees it (apparently missing Hanslick's point) ‘Brahms's piano pieces’ present ‘many and varied kinds of expression’. (p. 124) A further example is Floros's admission that Hanslick was strongly impressed by the Sonata for Violin and Piano in G major, Op. 78. By discussing this work not only in relation to Brahms's settings of two Groth poems (‘Regenlied’ and ‘Nachklang’ of Brahms's Op. 59), and Goethe's ‘An den Mond’, a central theme of which is lost love and lost youth, Hanslick made clear that he understood this sonata to be bound up with the difficult biographical circumstances under which Brahms wrote the piece, noting it was composed more for the intimacy of ‘the private circle than produced for the effect of the concert hall,’ as a ‘secret piece requires a certain frame of mind from the players’.Footnote ¹⁸

This is at odds with the ‘rigorously autonomous’ approach to Brahms's works for which Floros would have Hanslick remembered. Moreover, it is entirely out of step with his description of the critic as one who ‘simply ignores the considerable share of the poetic and autobiographic in the work of this great composer’. (p. 202) One could make the case that Floros's hermeneutic approach to Brahms's music seems all the more striking and original when set against the background of Hanslick's alleged formalism.

A number of technical musical details have been lost in translation. Throughout the book, odd nomenclature is used for time signatures: ‘two-fourths’ time rather than $$\[-->$<>\raster=&#x0022;fx1&#x0022;$$$, for instance.Footnote ¹⁹ More seriously, pieces such as Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major are labelled as being in B Major (a mistranslation from B-Dur, here at page 25). Apart from such musical details, the book would have profited from one further round of proofreading.

The range of topics covered in this book is rich and impressive, spanning from biographical insights to formal observations, to explorations of the poetic in Brahms's music, and issues of reception. Newcomers to Brahms studies will find much of great interest in this volume, which is to be further valued for the abundance of illustrative material it contains. Those intimately familiar with Brahms's compositions will find the discussion of the music to be basic and cursory. And Brahms scholars, finally, will likely find some of the claims to originality to be out of touch with developments in the field in recent decades. Despite its many merits, this book betrays an identity crisis both in terms of the audience for whom it is intended, and the aims it sets out to achieve.