PREFACE.(Brief Article)(Editorial)

"Brahms as Liberal," "Brahms the Programmatic," "Desire, Repression & Brahms's First Symphony," "Identity and Difference in Brahms's Third Symphony" -- locutions such as these, culled from the titles of recent research on the composer, would have seemed strange indeed to most readers only fifteen years ago. But nowadays the viewpoints implied by such titles -- hermeneutic, contextual, sexual, sociological, political -- are taken for granted: the Brahms who died one hundred years ago is alive and well in the New Musicology. And not only there: Brahms's complex personality continues to fascinate biographers (at least four new biographies in English have appeared in the past decade, and more are scheduled to come), and his richly nuanced music continues to draw the attention of music theorists and analysts.

Taken as a whole, the eight studies that follow show something of all these approaches and concerns. The collection begins with George Bozarth's consideration of issues in the editing of Brahms's music. Even here a certain "revisionist" attitude prevails. Using several case studies, Bozarth debunks the widely held notion that most of Brahms's music already exists in reliable critical editions, while setting out a number of challenges for the editors of the newly inaugurated Johannes Brahms Gesamtausgabe.

The next three essays focus on Brahms's vocal music within the context of larger issues. Daniel Beller-McKenna reconsiders the younger Brahms's involvement in musical politics at midcentury in his essay on the little-known motet "Es ist das Heft uns kommen her," op.29, no.1, which he interprets as a kind of musical analogue to the ill-fated "Manifesto" against the aesthetics of the "Music of the Future" that Brahms and Joseph Joachim promulgated in the spring of 1860. The problematic cantata Rinaldo, with which Brahms was occupied sporadically throughout much of the ensuing decade, is the subject of Carol Hess's contribution to the growing number of studies in which Brahms's music is read as autobiographical statement. In particular, Hess holds that Brahms identified closely with the work's troubled protagonist, arguing this point not only on the basis of contemporaneous events in the composer's personal and professional lives but also on her interpretation of the work's most salient musical motives. Like Beller-McKenna, Heather Platt is concerned with musical politics, albeit of a different time and place. In her detailed study of the reception of Brahms's Lieder in the twentieth century, she argues that advocates of the aesthetics of Hugo Wolf have succeeded in setting the terms of discourse concerning the relation between word and tone in Brahms's songs, and she calls for a different approach that is more clearly based in Brahms's own aesthetics, with its emphasis on the Lied as a musical genre and one that is strongly rooted in folk song.

Three authors are concerned with instrumental music in the sonata style. From Walter Frisch's rich ...