Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall: Between Private and Pubic Performance is a compilation of essays that explore the practice of Hausmusik in connection with the composer’s life and oeuvre. The volume is a wonderful and very welcome addition to the literature on the subject – traditionally more abundant in German than in English scholarship. And, in its marked emphasis on Hausmusik as practice (rather than repertoire), it also offers a fresh perspective on the topic.

The volume contains 14 profusely-documented essays on a variety of perspectives that illustrate what Hamilton and Loges identify as two important characteristics of Hausmusik, the (simultaneous) ‘ubiquity’ and ‘impermanence’ of the practice and its materials (p. 1). The element of ubiquity is self-explanatory, and the sum of the chapters effectively attests to it. Evidence ranges from the ‘quantitative’ to a multitude of personal reflections, such as Hanslick’s commentary: ‘“Wer ist ihr Vierhändiger?”, a passionate amateur asked me recently. His bold formulation … did not seem so bad to me’. ‘Not everyone has a wife, a beloved, or a bosom friend to call his own, but every mortal should have a “four-handed” … for their musical lifetime’ (p. 114).Footnote ¹ Adding to the numerous references throughout the collection, Robert Eshbach’s ‘The Joachim Quartet Concerts at the Berlin Singakademie’, Styra Avins’s ‘Brahms in the Wittgenstein Homes’ and Richard Leppert’s ‘The Cultural Dialectics of Chamber Music’, are important contributions to an understanding of the prominence of the practice – socially and in relation to the notion of Bildung – in Joachim’s Berlin, Brahms’s Vienna and Adorno’s Frankfurt.Footnote ² Examining connections between domestic music making and contemporaneous ideas of nationalism, liberalism and modernism further, Markus Böggemann’s ‘Being (like) Brahms’ discusses Hausmusik as ideology. Böggemann proposes a new understanding for a number of domestic works by younger contemporaries that emulated Brahms (e.g., Max Reger, Carl Reinecke, August Reinhard and Walter Niemann), which were taken, by his critics, as proof of the artificiality and predictability of the composer’s style. Drawing from analytical insight and theoretical and cultural knowledge, Böggemann recasts the stylistic imitations in question as tributes and re-articulates the overall phenomenon as an expression of ‘reverence for Brahms that posthumously evokes the figure of the composer and transfers him into the private sphere’ much like the ‘pictures, busts, and silhouettes through which he was immortalised in middle-class homes’ (p. 332). His view of the ready-to-use musical elements imitated by his contemporaries as a dispositif (in the Foucauldian sense) extricates the phenomenon from its traditional musico-political context to place it within a fresh, well-argued socio-ideological one.

It is not clear whether the second attribute of Hausmusik that Hamilton and Loges highlight, its ‘impermanence’, refers to the difficulties in preserving sources relating to it or to the inherently unstable character of the practice. But in identifying the difficulty of establishing what exactly constitutes Hausmusik as a central problem in the field, Hamilton and Loges bring the latter problem into focus. The volume offers myriad testimonies to the heterogeneity of Hausmusik venues, performers and materials, as well as of the functions and individuals it served, and the many ways in which it related to concert music. The picture emerging from the essays is one where professional and amateur musicians of all levels of accomplishment engaged in domestic music together and separately – although the extremes were unlikely to coincide in a single performance – to play repertoires of various natures, levels and genres in a variety of venues, and for a variety of purposes. Hausmusik presents itself as a multifaceted phenomenon to be reconstructed from traces left in sources which are not necessarily ‘event-specific and often concern themselves with broader categories and practices’ (p. 1). The relatively loose structure of the volume no doubt betrays its origins in a conference. But it also a true reflection of the editors’ claim that any fruitful understanding of Hausmusik arises, necessarily, through multi-fractured scenarios regarding venue, performers and repertory; available resources, publishing and technical limitations; experiences of music as education, entertainment and artistic manifestation; and interactions between amateurs, professional musicians, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie.

The variety of topics and approaches, the diversity of claims that the essays make in reconstructing Hausmusik as a broad and complex socio-cultural practice, and the significant amount of overlap at the periphery of many of the essays result in a volume whose essays are not easily grouped into sections. As in many edited collections, the individual essays are briefly contextualized – by way of introduction – in an initial chapter. But the task of incorporating the essays into an introductory narrative is not an easy one. The informative and substantial introduction to the collection weaves in the individual contributions in ways that seem, at times, a bit haphazard. The essay by Robert Eshbach, ‘The Joachim Quartet Concerts at the Berlin Singakademie’, for instance, is never introduced, while Styra Avins’s ‘Brahms in the Wittgenstein Homes’, is referred to only in footnotes (pp. 7 and 17). More disconcerting is the fact that a couple of the other chapters are woven in the introductory narrative in ways that reflect peripheral elements in them, rather than their focus, as is the case with Böggemann’s ‘Being (like) Brahms’. In the context of an argument about the boundaries between domestic and concert music, the editors state: ‘[the blurring of the boundaries] did not prevent commentators on Brahms’ own times, such as Hugo Riemann, from attempting to establish theoretical divisions between repertoire types, as discussed in Chapter 13’ (p. 12). The suggestion that the reference carries – that the chapter is essentially an attempt by Riemann and others to establish a distinction between public and private repertoires – does little justice to the merit and complexity of its main argument (as presented above). A subsequent reference to the same chapter, as evidence that ‘Brahms’s younger contemporaries sought actively to retain the essence of the world of private music making in their works’ (p. 21), speaks more to its main point. But it does not seem to capture the full significance of its argument – the re-conceptualization of the composer’s style as a ‘vehicle for an ideology of domestic music that combine[d] musical features with moral and political positions’ (p. 345).

Similarly off mark seems the introductory reference to Katy Hamilton’s own ‘Music Inside the Home and Outside the Box: Brahms’s Vocal Quartets in Context’ which describes it as one of two essays that show that ‘concert audiences who attended performances might then become performers of the same repertoire in arrangements at home’ (p. 8). Hamilton’s is a fascinating, thought-provoking essay that raises a number of interesting questions. She embarks on an investigation of the genre of the accompanied vocal quartet while simultaneously problematizing it, in light of the numerous instantiations (versions) of the Liebeslieder Op. 52, even at the composer’s own hands (i.e., a version for Piano four-hands and Gesang ad libitum; one for piano four-hands only; one for voices and piano solo; and one for voices and chamber orchestra, which was only published posthumously). Mediating the various instantiations, in her discussion, is the conception of genre as a contract, proposed by Jeffrey Kallberg.Footnote ³ But Hamilton’s detailed discussion of the Liebeslieder raises more questions than it answers. The case for an understanding of the work as belonging to the genre of vocal quartet – despite its calling for a soprano, alto, tenor and bass – is not entirely clear-cut. Hamilton rightly calls attention to the fact that the vocal quartet was short-lived and had a limited repertoire. But adding to this is the fact that some of the pieces in Brahms’s Op. 52 were written for one or two singers; that, in contrast to other opuses, the composer refrained from using the term in this one; and that the title Walzer might be thought of as establishing a competing – if not downright stronger – generic contract. It does not seem entirely implausible that a statement of the performing forces required for a work like Op. 52 – which was explicitly intended for domestic performance – may have been more of a pragmatic issue than a generic one. And even if taken as generic indication, the assumption that the various instantiations ought to display generic stability remains to be made.Footnote ⁴

The second set of issues that Hamilton raises regarding the arranging of Brahms’ orchestral and chamber works for piano, also lies at the centre of the remaining four chapters: Michael Struck’s ‘Main and Shadowy Existence(s): Works and Arrangements on the Oeuvre of Johannes Brahms’, Robert Pascall’s ‘Brahms Arranges his Symphonies’, Valerie Woodring Goertzen’s ‘At the Piano with Joseph and Johannes’ and Helen Paskin’s, Katy Hamilton’s and Natasha Loges’s ‘Brahms and his Arrangers’. This cohesive group of essays – often in dialogue with one another – draws a well-documented, interesting picture of the nature, purposes, processes and circumstances surrounding the preparation of piano arrangements of Brahms’s orchestral and chamber works. Several general, interrelated propositions stand out throughout the essays. A persuasive picture emerges of Brahms’s piano arrangements of his own orchestral and chamber music and of Joachim’s Overtures as acts of re-invention – rather than mere reduction (p. 160). The essays discuss the relationship between the original symphonic and chamber works and their piano arrangements – the latter of which represent, according to Struck, ‘surrogates’ or ‘translations’ of the former. They also discuss a significant number of variants – in register, voicing, doubling, texture, rhythm and harmonic progression – in the piano arrangements, which Brahms’s introduced and sometimes justified in an attempt to preserve a certain musical effect and render the arrangement idiomatic. Paskin’s exploration of the correspondence between Brahms and three of his arrangers (Kirchner, Keller and Klengel) highlights the importance he placed on re-creating the symphonic work in the new medium so that it remains ‘interesting and stimulating to play, and not just an accurate reduction of the work’ (p. 189). All in all, the essays attest to the complexity of the various levels at which a musical work existed for Brahms. Particularly interesting in this respect is Struck’s discussion of a syncopated passage that Brahms discarded when composing the first movement of his Symphony no. 3, which he himself restored when arranging it for piano (pp. 128–36), which raises further questions as to the nature of the work of art.

The remaining essays on the collection deal with two additional topics. Heather Platt’s ‘The Construction of Gender and Mores in Brahms’s Mädchenlieder’ argues for a distinct correlation between Lieder with a young female narrator (or subject matter) and ‘folkish’ texts and musical style in Brahms’s oeuvre. Her claim is effectively brought into focus by the comparison she offers between the Mädchenlieder from Op. 7, ‘Die Trauernde’ and ‘Heimkehr’, which are narrated by a young maiden and a male character and set to music in folkish and operatic styles, respectively. Offered as counterbalance to traditional characterizations of Brahms and his music as strongly ‘masculine’, Platt’s essay shows a composer in tune with the sensitivities of young women, who availed himself of the ‘purity and naturalness’ associated with German folk song and poetry, in order to portray their emotional world.

Katrin Eich’s ‘Where was the Home of Brahms’s Piano Works’, Marie Sumner Lott’s ‘Domesticity in Brahms’s String Sextets Opp. 18 and 36’ and Natasha Loges’s ‘The Limits of the Lied: Brahms’s Magelone-Romanzen Op. 33’ all address the fluid borders between private and public music making. They explore the confluence of a number of elements in the three repertoires (i.e., sextets, piano music and lied) to illustrate the difficulty in confining a work or genre to either the private or public realms. In general, these essays suggest a (perhaps natural) correlation between the evolution of the music within each genre and the gradual process of transition from the home to the public concert that was taking place during Brahms’s life.

Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall effectively challenges the view of Brahms, the ‘Classicist’ that prevailed for so long in the scholarship. Michael Musgrave’s promise of a ‘fresh perspective on Brahms’ output’ does not disappoint (p. xix). For not only is the collection largely devoted to pieces that have traditionally received little attention – and that, as Musgrave argues, constitute the majority of his output – it also goes beyond that to try to reconstruct a picture of Hausmusik – however fractured or discontinuous it might emerge from a simultaneity of perspectives – as a broad, pervasive and rich socio-musical phenomenon in its manifold dimensions and complexities.