Brahms Beyond Mastery

His Sarabande and Gavotte, and its Recompositions

Robert Pascall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351573245
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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 alost work, of how a fully-formed master opens himself tothe in-flowing from afar (in Martin Heidegger's terms), and of the transformative reach and concomitant expressive richness of Brahms's creative thought.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures and Music Examples
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Sarabande and Gavotte
• 2 The Second String Sextet, Op. 36, and its Second Movement
• 3 The First String Quintet, Op. 88, and its Second Movement
• 4 The Clarinet Quintet, Op. 115
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index