PREFACE.

Like its predecessors in the series, this third volume of Brahms Studies includes essays covering a wide range of topics and methodological approaches. The collection opens with a documentary study, by Sandra McColl, of the diary kept by Brahms's friend and biographer Max Kalbeck during the final year of the composer's life. Especially noteworthy are those passages published here for the first time regarding Brahms's relationships with such figures as Eduard Hanslick, Eusebius Mandyczewski, and Max Klinger, passages that, for one reason or another, Kalbeck had suppressed from his own published excerpts of this revealing document.

Each of the next two essays draws lessons about Brahms's artistic development from a work that has tended to be undervalued in such accounts. James Webster raises the Alto Rhapsody (1869) to a pivotal status within the composer's career, arguing that it was in this composition, and not the First Symphony or any other work of the same middle period, that Brahms devised a personally viable way of realizing the familiar "through-composed" progression from minor-key opening movement to major-key finale, one that served him in good stead in the productive years after 1876. By the same token, from William Horne's rich case study of the Variations on a Hungarian Theme, op. 21, no. 2 (1856), comes an appreciation of the way in which this youthful work, generally understood as epitomizing the "fantasy-variation" style that Brahms linked to Schumann and from which he eventually set himself apart, can be counted as the first of the composer's variation sets in which key elements of his mature, "Beethovenian" approach to the genre can be identified.

Common to both Webster's and Horne's studies is careful consideration of the intertextual dimension that looms so large in Brahms's work. This element figures even more centrally in Raymond Knapp's essay on the composer's symphonic oeuvre. In Knapp's view, Brahms's symphonies give evidence of the composer's attempt to achieve two "utopian agendas" -- the creation of a body of "absolute music" and the revitalization of the German symphonic tradition. Using examples drawn from all four works in the genre, Knapp argues that Brahms employed the technique of thematic variation (broadly understood) not only to achieve a "pure" organic unity but also to allude to works by canonic composers and, in so doing, endeavored to realize both agendas at once.

As in previous volumes, one essay undertakes a detailed study of a particular music-analytical issue, in this case Peter ...