Brahms Beyond Mastery

In 1853 Robert Schumann identified fully-formed compositional mastery in the young Brahms who nevertheless in the years following embarked on a period of intensive further study producing among other works the neo-baroque Sarabande and Gavotte. These dances have not been properly recognized as constituting a distinct Brahms work before now but manuscript evidence and their performance history indicate that Brahms and his friends thought of them as such in the mid-1850s when they became the first music of his performed publicly in Gdansk Vienna Budapest and London. He later suppressed the dances using them instead as a thematic quarry for three chamber music masterpieces from different stages in his life and in distinctly different ways: the Second String Sextet the First String Quintet and the Clarinet Quintet. This book gives an account of the compositional and performance history stylistic features and re-uses of the dances setting these in the wider context of Brahms’s developing creative concerns and trajectory. It constitutes therefore a study of a ’lost’ work of how a fully-formed master opens himself to ’the in-flowing from afar’ (in Martin Heidegger’s terms) and of the transformative reach and concomitant expressive richness of Brahms’s creative thought.