Paul Berry’s thought-provoking study of musical allusion offers new ways of understanding how some very familiar – and unfamiliar – works by Johannes Brahms might have been understood by his most intimate circle of friends. Clara Schumann naturally appropriates the lion’s share of Berry’s attention, but several others are also considered in depth, chiefly the violinist Joseph Joachim, the baritone Julius Stockhausen and the Leipzig-based composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg. Berry aims to identify patterns of composition and listening in that circle, and he examines the rhetorical import of allusions in selected works that would have been read as private communications; performance is less of a feature, although he brings a very welcome haptic perspective to his observations. He also usefully separates the social and the psychological intent of allusion and self-borrowing, arguing that ‘the rhetorical potential latent in the mere act of conjuring up remembered music may have served the composer’s own private ends, regardless of its later reception’ (p. 35). This is a particularly apposite way of considering Brahms because of the composer’s tendency to ‘brew’ works over many years, during which meaning most certainly shifted and additional layers accrued.

As the book progresses, the allusions are buried ever deeper, giving the impression of plunging further down into a subconscious. Berry is rightly cautious about superimposing this subconscious onto Brahms’s, given the patchiness of the evidence, but his eloquent prose could hardly be more persuasive. No less impressive is his range of approaches; following his opening ‘historiography of allusion’, a richly argued background to the study, his case studies move freely between detailed investigation of the original source material (some of which is barely known), hermeneutics, kinaesthetic observation, structural/harmonic analysis and carefully grounded speculation. Furthermore, there is absolutely no doubt of the enormous private significance that shared music and poetry held in these circles, since their letters and diaries are littered with such references. Clara Schumann clearly cherished the music her friends played with and for her, as well as the books Brahms read to her, in 1854 (the writings of E.T.A. Hoffmann, for instance).Footnote ¹ Scattered through Julius Stockhausen’s diaries from the 1860s are scraps from poems that he was singing at the time, for instance Winterreise, Die schöne Müllerin and Goethe’s Harper poems; and he used those scraps to reflect upon his own life and emotions.Footnote ²

The book is divided into four parts: ‘Occasional Lullabies’, ‘Themes and Variations’, ‘Clara at the Keyboard’ and ‘Rhetorics of Closure’, between which ten case studies are shared. The opening chapter (‘Old Melodies, New Identities’) explores the meanings that the ‘Geistliches Wiegenlied’ Op. 91, No. 2 may have held for Joseph Joachim and his wife, the alto Amalie (née Schneeweiss). This unusually instrumented song for alto, viola and piano, given to the recently married Joachims in 1864 upon the birth of their first child Johannes, clearly evokes their artistic identities. However, Berry argues that the song goes beyond this, embodying them not only as musicians but also encrypting their evolving identities as newlyweds and parents (Amalie in particular), and their place within the religious and social world around them. He offers a richly imagined vision of how Amalie and Joseph Joachim might have read themselves into Lope de Vega’s poem, especially given that the song was only published 20 years later, by which point the Joachims’ marriage had painfully foundered. Berry then considers the Wiegenlied Op. 49, No. 4. It is most welcome to be reminded not only of Brahms’s uniquely beautiful musical encodings of harmonious marriage and family life in music, but also the multiple identities of its recipients (Bertha Faber and Amalie Joachim as concert singers, Joseph Joachim as a composer and Jew). The affinity between Brahms’s Heine setting ‘Es liebt sich so lieblich im Lenze’ Op. 71, No.1 and the song ‘Die Wellen blinken’ by his friend the baritone Julius Stockhausen is the subject of the following section, ‘Lessons in Politics and Innuendo’. This discussion gives rise to a fascinating interplay of analytical observation and ensuing commentary. Berry digs deep into Brahms’s musical structures to unearth buried allusions, and reframes these as an unspoken (and not always welcome) lesson in composition, an invitation to scrutinize processes the composer normally hid.

Part 2 (‘Themes and Variations’) opens with a consideration of the set of four-hand piano variations by the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg, based on Brahms’s early song in a folk style ‘Die Trauernde’ Op. 7, No. 5. Berry’s thorough immersion in early reception and correspondence realigns our understanding of both Brahms’s and Herzogenberg’s work. ‘Consequences of Criticism’ takes this exploration further by scrutinizing Brahms’s sublime vocal quartet ‘O schöne Nacht’ Op. 92, No. 1 in the light of Herzogenberg’s ‘Nacht ist wie ein stilles Meer’ Op. 22, No. 2; this further leads to a discussion of von Herzogenberg’s String Quartets Op. 18 and 42, works which are barely known and which Berry rightly subjects to the same detailed scrutiny as he does Brahms’s own works. He then traces the relationship between Brahms’s String Quintet Op. 88 and von Herzogenberg’s String Trio Op. 27, No. 2. This instance of unacknowledged borrowing is particularly significant because of the public nature of the work. We are reminded of how sensitive such borrowing could be, and how binding the contract of ‘privacy’ in music was. Berry then identifies another affinity between Brahms’s Op. 87 Piano Trio and Herzogenberg’s Op. 23, a passing back and forth of musical material in which Brahms determined to show his superiority at each pass.

Part 3 (‘Clara at the Keyboard’) is dedicated to this most important of personal/musical relationships in Brahms’s life. This friendship of over 40 years suffered various points of extreme tension in which the bond between these two towering artists was stretched to breaking point. Berry, unusually, focuses not on those well-documented moments, pointing out that they have tended to dominate the discourse. Instead he turns his attention to the relatively placid 1870s in order to ‘explore the everyday functions of musical interchange’ (p. 175). The first part, ‘Family Resemblances’ explores Brahms’s well-loved setting of a poem by Clara Schumann’s youngest son Felix, ‘Meine Liebe ist grün’. Berry relates it not only to Schumann’s ‘Schöne Fremde’ Op. 39, No. 6, but also to the ‘Intermezzo’ from his Faschingsschwank aus Wien Op. 26, and – most interestingly – to Clara Schumann’s piano transcriptions of 30 of her husband’s songs for the French publisher Flaxland, work which preoccupied her during 1873. Berry’s reading positions ‘Meine Liebe ist grün’ as commentary (on Clara’s transcriptions), confirmation (of Felix Schumann’s talents) and finally, consolation (for the absence of Robert Schumann, who would normally have been the person to encourage his son). Indeed, Berry argues that the song encodes Brahms’s offering of himself as an ersatz Robert, a role he had occupied in the past. ‘Shared Nostalgia’ shows how an early incarnation of the Capriccio in F-sharp minor Op. 76, No. 1 from 1871 was most likely recalled to Clara Schumann through the song setting ‘Alte Liebe’ Op. 72, No. 1 completed on 6 May 1876. ‘Grief and Transformation’ turns to a more familiar example, the Violin Sonata Op. 78, examined in the light of Felix’s desire to learn this instrument, and Clara Schumann’s suffering over his illness and impending death. The piece is also linked to Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto WoO 1/ii and the Theme and Variations WoO24.

The book ends with ‘Rhetorics of Closure’. The allusions explored here are very subtle indeed, and would have required impressive feats of memory on the parts of Brahms’s possible receivers, but Berry constructs his cases carefully. In ‘Forests of the Heart’, Schubert’s wonderful ‘Greisen-Gesang’ D. 778 is linked to ‘O kühler Wald’ Op. 72, No. 3 through a shared musical gesture which was possibly aimed at Stockhausen (probably the motivation behind Brahms’s orchestrations of Schubert’s songs). In ‘Counterpoint and Catharsis’, Berry first explores the implications of the Bach allusion in ‘Auf dem Kirchhofe’ Op. 105, No. 4, but then also links it to an early and rarely heard Herder setting ‘Ein Sonnett’ Op. 14, No. 4, exploring its possible meanings for Brahms himself (in the light of his failed relationship with Agathe von Siebold), Stockhausen again, and a later crush on the contralto Hermine Spies. The final musical relationship Berry offers in ‘Concealment as Self-Restraint’ is between Brahms’s Intermezzo Op. 118, No. 6 and a little-known piano piece by Schumann, the ‘Stücklein’, Op. 99, No. 1.

A study like this provokes many tantalizing new questions. Berry does not claim completeness, and one longs to ask for more. For instance, what might have been the meaning of the shared material in the opening contour of ‘Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer’ Op. 105, No. 2, the cello solo in the second movement of the Piano Concerto no. 2, Op. 83, and a letter of 21 August 1886 suggesting that Brahms wrote the song at Eduard Hanslick’s request?Footnote ³ This is a dark corner that Berry’s detective work might illuminate. Additionally, I would love Berry to bring his critical eye to some less personal reasons for allusion. For example, the affinity between the closing cadence of ‘In Waldeinsamkeit’ Op. 85, No. 6 and the Heine setting ‘Es schauen die Blumen’ Op. 96, No. 3 might have arisen, even subconsciously, because this poem by Carl Lemcke recalls a characteristic poetic image of Heine, the image of the lover’s head buried in the beloved’s lap, weeping without explanation. There are also possible public associations in Brahms’s reference to the late medieval Catholic cantio ‘Resonet in laudibus’, associated with the text ‘Joseph lieber, Joseph mein’ as used in the ‘Geistliches Wiegenlied’. Brahms’s own likely sources (David Gregor Corner’s Groß-Catolisch Gesangbuch of 1631 and Karl Severin Meister’s Das katholische deutsche Kirchenlied in seinen Singweisen of 1862) were obscure, but ‘Joseph lieber, Joseph mein’ was not otherwise unknown (and Berry acknowledges this), especially in a choral context. For example, it was performed by the Breslau Singakademie on 19 December 1868 in a well-known arrangement by Erhard Bodenschatz.Footnote ⁴ In that sense, this work did not just bear the private associations that a completely obscure work might – but then, it is not Berry’s task to explore these.

Berry’s claims are argued in great depth; a reader would need, I believe, to have some familiarity with Brahms’s shifting social circle, and the changing landscape of music and politics, in order to be able to contextualise discussion of this sort. As an aside, it is worth pointing out two outstanding recent publications which bring much new knowledge to all scholars in this field: Johannes Behr’s Johannes Brahms, vom Ratgeber zum Kompositionslehrer: eine Untersuchung in Fallstudien and Antje Ruhbaum’s Elisabeth von Herzogenberg: Salon-Mäzenatentum-Musikförderung.Footnote ⁵ German scholarship has long considered the importance of private contexts of music, for instance the work of Gabriele Busch-Salmen and Beatrix Borchard, and Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger’s vast Der Berliner Salon im 19. Jahrhundert: 1780–1914.Footnote ⁶ Although not as Berry has done here. This area is also one that Katy Hamilton and I sought to address in Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall.Footnote ⁷

Altogether, Berry’s book is indispensable reading not only for those of us who love Brahms, but to anyone fascinated by the endlessly interwoven, constantly mutating networks of friendship that characterise this period in music history.